Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Today, while I was at the grocery store with my mom, picking up ingredients for cookies (my mother's chocolate chip cookies are the envy of the neighborhood), I came across a situation I'd rather not repeat.

As we were standing in the line, loading groceries onto the conveyor belt, somebody behind me said "Stephanie?" My name isn't Stephanie, but I turned around anyway, because the inquiry sounded like it was aimed at me.

The man behind me- a large guy with a dark goatee, was grinning at me in a way that indicated that he recognized me from somewhere. "Hey, you're Becky's friend, aren't you? I'm her dad!"

I stammered, not knowing who he was talking about. The only Becky I currently know is a friend of my sister's, and this man definitely was not related to her, though he did look familiar. I was trying to place where I had seen him before when he spoke again.

"You know... Becky Migasi?" The last name hit me with the collective force of several Acme rockets.

Last July, I was a member of the jury in a 10-day civil case regarding a certain banking company and a person injured in an elevator on those premises. The man standing in front of me just happened to be the husband of the woman concerned, and one of the plaintiffs.

After we submitted our verdict in that trial, he had looked terribly shaken, and afterwards asked me if our decision might have been swayed if they were allowed to talk about the problems in the other elevator. I told him it might have, but all the same, I wished him and his wife the best of luck. I also secretly hoped I wouldn't run into them again.

And now, like the ghost of Jacob Marley, he was back. He had obviously recognized me from when I had spoken with him, but instead of placing me with the jury who had rejected his lawsuit, he had mistaken me for one of his teenage daughter's friends.

When I had figured out what was going on, my survival instincts started screaming at me, "GET OUT! GET OUT NOW! RUN!"

Fighting the instinct to hide, I decided not to let Mr. Migasi know who I actually was, so I forced a friendly conversation while my mom was loading the shopping cart. I asked him how his wife, the person who was hurt in the elevator, was doing.

"Not too well," he told me. I felt guilty.

After a couple more minutes of this, we headed for the exit, leaving Mr. Migasi to check out his groceries. I whispered to Mom what had just happened, and she actually laughed.

"Well.... what do you know?"

Yeah.... no kidding.