Strawberry jam bottles and the hug !!

The first time and only time I remember I seeing her I remember wanting to badly, really badly hug her. I don’t remember her face or features anymore but I do not think she was particularly good looking or attractive. Of course I was focused on the hugging plan and therefore it is not all the fault of my memory that I cannot remember her looks. Just your normal super market cashier girl trying to deal with endless row of items that keep coming at her like the army in one of the Kurosawa classics (sans the war cry), that was her. She was checking out at Aisle number 2 (a greenish display announced that little bit of unimportant fact high over her right shoulder). I had placed my items on the checkout belt and was waiting for my turn to be checked out when I decided to take a look at her work. Vegetables of all sizes and colors in plastic bags beeped through and she deftly maneuvered them along and pushed them across to the corner of her work table to be bagged (what color were her finger nails, strawberry?, may be not - simply because strawberry is the color my memory uses a default when it cannot do a good job of remembering).

Items were piling up a bit as the man in front of me was struggling to keep up with her checkout speed.  She scanned, weighed, keyed in something on her screen, and pushed the plastic bags across in one sweep of her petite arms and fingers reminding me of a potato chips packing machine infomercial that I once saw on TV (google this out, there are some pretty cool machines out there that help with making and packing potato chips into their bright colored plastic bags). Then came the row of jam bottles, small 250 gm bottles of various types of jams, she had gotten to beeping through the third bottle (it was strawberry for sure) when I wanted to hug her. Something about the way she beeped the bottle - swirling it sideways twice to get the scanner to catch the barcode and pushed it across wanted me to hug her. As I mentioned before not one of those passing gentle breeze urges but a real desperate one.  I am not a hug person and in fact I am terrible at hugs. In the rare occasions I am hugging someone I end up messing it completely – sometimes too tight, sometimes too frontal, sometimes too loose and so on. It is not like I have hugged hundreds of times but I have noted these patterns from the handful of hugs I have cared to remember.

Anyways, I was still a good 10 meters from her and had all the time in the world to plan a great hug. The hug I wanted to have was a full frontal perfect (not regular, medium or special but perfekt) one. I would hug her just right. I could not quite gauge her height from where I was but since I am quite tall myself, I calculated I could adjust my position to work it out well. There was still a minor detail about smelling, that I could not decide on – I am always confused about smells and the process of smelling and I could not make up my mind whether I should be smelling her (shoulder, hair whatever that would be near my not so sensitive nose, as per the spatial orientation of the hug). But for that detail, I had the hug all sorted out pretty much like the potato chips packing machine. The algorithm read like below:

T – 0 Seconds: Stand close (very close) to the target supermarket cashier girl facing her

T – 0 to 85 seconds, hold her firm and hug her maximizing frontal body contact , her face over my right shoulder and mine over her right (To smell or not to, to be decided)

T - 90 to 170 seconds repeat above over left shoulder

T-170 to 180 seconds squeeze her back bringing her closer and release and walk away in one motion

Now, the supermarket cashier stalls are by design “cashier hug unfriendly”. Supermarket chains do not want anyone to hug the cashier and slow down the checkout process or emotionally affect the cashier or the customer. “Prevent the many different way hugs can affect balance sheets”, asked the cashier stall design manual. I of course had not planned ahead against this complexity and had to give up my well made plans as I approached her. I had only a frozen pizza and a cola bottle to check out and before I knew I had been checked out and bagged. She said something that sounded like a hello and I did not get time to register her face while I paid my bill.

 I still go to the same supermarket for my groceries and other stuff and I stick to aisle 2 hoping to identify her with the way she scans out 250 gm strawberry jam bottles and then somehow finding a way to put my perfect hug plan into practice. The trouble right now is with finding 250gm strawberry jam bottles.