Grandpa's Debit Card

On my way to the End of Time today I stopped at the grocery store to buy a few things. As I paid with my debit card, I thought of my grandpa, who is now 90 years old.

Grandma died five years earlier and Grandpa took awhile to figure out how to do his life without her. He was in pretty good health, but he had come to rely on her for all the day-to-day things of life. So his first experience buying some items at the store with something other than cash was a memorable experience for him.

Here’s how he told it to me:

“So, Maxie (he always calls me Maxie. He and Grandma were the only ones I permitted to do that), I went up to the checkstand and this nice young woman was running this little gun thing over everything. I couldn’t figure out how she was putting the prices into her cash register, but I didn’t say anything, because she had an honest face.

“When it came time to pay, I held up the little plastic card that we’re supposed to use instead of real money. She was very nice about it all.

“‘You can swipe your card, now, sir,’ she said. She was very pretty, Maxie. You would have liked her.

“I said, ‘Why would I swipe my card? I don’t have to do that; I already have it.’

“‘Well,’ she said, ‘If you have it, then you can swipe it.’

“‘I don’t understand. I wouldn’t swipe anything. It’s against the law to swipe things. If I swiped something you wouldn’t let me leave the store.’

“She just looked at me in a funny way, and said,

“‘Just let me see the card, sir.’ She took the card from me and slid it through a little machine on the counter in front of her. Then she said,

“‘Go ahead and put in your pin.’

“I said, ‘What pen?’

“‘Your pin. What is it?’

“I looked in my pocket. I said, ‘I think it’s a Bic.’

“She said, ‘What?’

“I said, ‘A Bic. I have a Parker at home.’

“Maxie, I think I made her unhappy because she called her manager and we went through this all over again. He was quite nice, although he was somewhat snobby in a managerial sort of way, but I couldn’t come up with whatever pen they needed. You would think a grocery store would have more pens than they need. Why they needed mine in order for me to buy some things is beyond me. I went home empty handed.”

I ended up helping Grandpa with this problem, and now he is proficient with ATM cards and pin numbers. He even flirts with the woman who works the checkstand at the grocery store, and I don’t think she minds at all. Grandpa survived the Great Depression and World War II, and I didn’t want a stupid plastic card to be his undoing. He is too great a man for that.