Dear Sir,

Despite what I write below, I sincerely hope this letter finds you well. I enjoyed my brief time in your store yesterday, and I was favorably impressed by the apparent quality of the products you had to sell.

However, I was a bit thrown off by certain comments you made to my wife. (In case you do not recall, I remained more or less silent while in your store.) For example, in helping us find the dill weed, I wondered why I felt like you sneered that the dill weed was with the herbs against the other wall but that my wife and I were standing by the dill seed, which was, of course, a spice. Later, I was disheartened that your response was a condescending “Who told you that?” after you asked my wife to describe the process whereby she has been making vanilla extract from vanilla beans for the past few years.

If this was all that had transpired yesterday, I would not be writing this letter. I am neither easily angered nor vindictive. Rather, if the above were all that I had noticed, I would have been inclined to think that you had been experiencing a difficult day or even a difficult year. I worked as a salesperson in a small business for two years, and I was an ineffective salesperson, to say the least. I know something of the desperation of spending hour after hour trying to convince wealthy people to purchase something that they absolutely do not need and that they could perhaps purchase more cheaply somewhere else.

But I do not think it was a bad day or even a bad year that has pressed you to the brink—or perhaps fully into the abyss—of an inappropriate relationship with your sixteen-year-old cashier. The obvious and precarious nature of that relationship is what has driven me to write you. As you read this, you may protest (and may even have deluded yourself into believing) that a customer could not have seen anything inappropriate because there was nothing inappropriate going on. In that case, you may consider me among those disagreeing with your protest. I would draw your attention to the fact that it took the two of you four or five minutes to come out of the storeroom after we entered your store. Until you emerged, putting on your “business” faces, we had assumed that the store’s proprietor must have stepped out for a moment.

I must also note that you and the sixteen-year-old behaved like you were lost in the heady rush of new flirtation. You exchanged too-frequent and too-persistent eye contact when you thought we were absorbed in your spices and herbs. You may have been too worried about your cashier to notice that I was not absorbed in your product but instead fascinated by your relationship: I observed you above—and through—the vials and transparent envelopes of cumin, paprika, and rosemary. I observed you fumbling with your iPod and you attempting to explain why “Karma Chamelon” was on there. (She laughed when you told her it was released around 1980. You seemed unaware that she herself was not conceived until almost a decade later.) Finally, after my wife had completed her purchase, I saw you and your sixteen-year-old cashier’s feigned tug-of-war over the stack of shopping bags on your counter. In short, your touches, words, and eyes were suggestive of an intimacy or almost-intimacy that worries me.

A forty-year-old man should not be in a romantic relationship with a sixteen-year-old woman. You should know this. I could see that you have lived forty-something years, and, according to you, you are the father of several children. You should know.

You, or eminent others, could offer several excuses on your behalf. Someone like Ernest Becker could say that you are engaging in death-denying behavior. Freud could say that you are satisfying urges of which we do not speak. Evolutionary theorists might say that you are having trouble resisting fecundity. I wonder if you and your sixteen-year-old cashier are not engaging in a form of role-playing? (No, I don’t mean dressing up like a French maid or a cowboy, although maybe you are doing that, too.) Maybe she is trying out what it is like to use her personality and body to fascinate someone she sees as an adult male? Maybe you are using your experience to see what it like to captivate the kind of sixteen-year-old woman you did not captivate when you were sixteen?

Whatever is going on between the two of you, it is not the fountain of youth nor anything else healthful to you that issues from between the legs of your sixteen-year-old cashier. You should know that. I work at a university, and I have seen and heard about my own colleagues and former colleagues who have lost careers and long-term relationships because they forgot what they must have sometime known.

Sincerely,

hermit chris

P.S. As a former salesperson, I thought you carried out your nutmeg-grating demonstration exceptionally well. My wife and I look forward to grating fresh nutmeg, and we will think of you when we do.

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