I’ve heard it whispered among our forebears that once upon a time, before television sitcoms and Hollywood blockbusters and gormless paperback conspiracy novels — not long before my birth, I’m told — stories weren’t required to have punchlines.

Let that serve as a disclaimer to the Echo Boom: This story has no climax.

Today is Sunday, and Sunday is a day for ritual. One of my Sunday rituals is grocery shopping, which fits because my diet is so invariable it might as well be Circadian. Bricks of tofu, twelve-packs of Fresca, cartons of chocolate milk, and boxes of frozen broccoli. Every week.

You may have noticed that I purchase only foods packaged in block format. This is not a coincidence. But that’s another note altogether.

Anyway, here I am this afternoon standing in the check-out line at Publix unloading a basket full of angular groceries onto the conveyor belt when, immersed in Sunday monotony, I find myself at the periphery of a genuinely unusual — even profound — encounter.

There are four characters in the following dialog. Let’s profile them.

First, there’s me. I’m a pretty nondescript short guy dressed in gym clothes holding a tattered brown wallet I’ve had since I was ten years old, inside of which there’s a lonely dollar bill that’s been there for weeks because I never use cash to pay for anything. There’s also some business cards in there, and an auxiliary condom which, I regret to say, has been there longer than the dollar.

Then there’s the cashier, a middle-aged lady who looks like she should have been a librarian, but this is 2009 and no one has set foot inside a library since the 1970s, back when some stories didn’t have punchlines. So here she is at Publix, with the posture of a cashew and a gerbil-sized smile. She is my height.

Ahead of me in line is our third character, a balding olive-colored man, maybe forty, wearing cleats and high socks and grinning like a guinea baboon. I guess that he’s middle-eastern — Persian, maybe — but I’m not very cosmopolitan and my conjectures on nationality are typically less accurate than a Freddie Mac balance sheet. He is also my height.

Finally there’s the bag boy, a poster child of bygone-blue-jeans-American-youth: rigid, trim, impeccably shaven. I don’t remember the color of his eyes, but I can only assume they were red, white and blue. Couldn’t have been older than eighteen. Might have been a model except that — you guessed it — he is my height.

All four characters are quite garrulous, presumably because none of us have to crane our necks to achieve eye contact.

“You play soccer?” asks the bag boy to the high-socked Persian. Alabama-bred Americans don’t really ask questions, I’ve noticed. They just fasten question marks to the the end of declarative sentences.

“Yes! How did you know?” replies the Persian, who couldn’t be a more obvious soccer player if he’d had the FIFA logo tattooed on his forehead.

“Socks, cleats,” says the bag boy. “I used to play sweeper.”

“Ah, really? Well, I only play casually now. Just for the exercise, you know.” And he laughs a little.

“I feel ya. You get older…” says the bag boy. I find this hysterical.

“Right, exactly,” replies the Persian, who apparently does not find the adolescent’s perspective on aging at all preposterous.

“Where you from?” I guess the bag boy couldn’t find a way to ask this one without using the interrogative form.

The Persian hesitates like a bonefish second-guessing a lure. “Iraq,” he answers. So we’ll start calling him the Iraqi.

“Wow!” pipes up the cashier, who, I imagine, has probably read all kinds of H. Rider Haggard novels about faraway exotic locales but who, in this reality, anyway, hasn’t exited the Birmingham metro area. “I suppose it’s a good thing you’re not over there now!” she adds excitedly. I like her. I like straightforward people.

“Very true,” he agrees.

“You ever go back to visit?” asks the bag boy, reverting to the declarative.

“No. I have not been back since I came here ten years ago,” says the Iraqi. So we’ll start calling him the American.

At this point the cashier rattles off a total, the American/Iraqi/Persian hands over a credit card, everyone exchanges congenial farewells, and it’s just me, the cashier and the bag boy.

Smiling acutely (that’s how rodents and librarians smile, I suspect), the cashier begins to scan my purchases, careful not to cut herself on any edges.

“Arabs are so nice,” she remarks to the bag boy. Like they’re girl scouts. Or linens.

“I guess,” concedes the bag boy. “I don’t think they’ll be very nice when I get over there.”

I speak for the first time. “You’re shipping out?”

“Yep,” he says. “Signed my papers last week. Start tomorrow morning.”

There are all kinds of thoughts cascading across my frontal lobe at this point. Here are some examples:
– What the hell are you doing at Publix? Get your ass to a bar.
– What the hell are you doing at Publix? Go get laid.
– What the hell are you doing at Publix? Whole Foods is better.
– You’re going to die.
– Iraq? The real patriots are in Afghanistan.

Of course, I didn’t say any of these things. Instead I said something trite and tactful, like “That’s wild, man. Good for you, and my heartfelt thanks.”

At which point the cashier, true to the stereotype I’d already silently applied to her, asks the bag boy if he’s ever read any Rudyard Kipling.

He hasn’t, of course.

“Oh, he wrote all about war campaigns in that part of the world. I think you’d really enjoy him. Check out The Man Who Would Be King.”

“Also a great movie,” I added. “Sean Connery, Michael Caine. You can’t go wrong.”

He thanked me, I thanked him, I took my square groceries, and I went home.

I warned you: no payoff.

Still, there’s something uncanny about a chance encounter between a middle-aged Iraqi ten years removed from his homeland and a straightlaced American youth on his way there. And that a Publix check-out line served by an overliterary cashier should prove the accidental crossroads…

Well, it’s worth writing about, anyway.