A Strange Pineapple Occurrence At Kroger's

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​A Strange Pineapple Occurrence At Kroger's

​      A couple of days ago I was in the checkout lane at Kroger's, 

...ringing up my things.
​      Behind me was woman whom I'd pegged as a fellow Baby Boomer loading her groceries behind mine on the conveyor belt. As she was setting a tall plastic container of pineapple chunks on the belt the container slipped from her hand and hit the floor, scattering the pieces of pineapple. 
      The woman looked aghast and stood frozen. I gave her a sympathetic look - who among us hasn't found ourselves in an awkward public situation - but she continued to stand there with a deer-in-the-headlights expression.
        "It's okay, I'll help you," I said, and I got down on the floor and started scooping the pineapple back into the container. The woman then snapped out of her shock and began helping me gather the pineapple. 
         "This isn't where I shop," she said, as if that explained why the pineapple slipped from her hand. "I just didn't know where anything was." She sounded upset and slightly dazed.
           "Oh, I know," I said breezily. "I always shop here and half the time I don't where anything is."
             After we'd gotten all the pineapple off the floor and back into the container I said, "Don't worry about it, I'll give this to the cashier to throw away and she'll get you more pineapple."
             However by that time the cashier had arrived to dispose of the fallen pineapple and clean up the residual mess on the floor.
              The woman then held up her hands and said in a woeful voice, "It's all sticky."
              With my own sticky hands I reached into my purse and pulled out two wet wipes, one for her and one for myself.  The woman accepted the wipe and said,  "I usually carry some of these in my purse. I don't know why I didn't have any today."
And that was the end of our exchange. 
              Now, this would have been a pretty unremarkable episode except for one rather strange thing: The woman didn't thank me. At all. Not once. Not for helping her clean up the pineapple. Not for offering to bring the container to the cashier. Not for giving her a wet wipe. It wasn't  that I actually cared about being thanked or that it bothered me, except that it just felt...off. Incomplete. Like hearing a well-known song from which the last note is  left out so you keep listening for it in your brain. 
             "Thank you" is so much a part of our day. Seems we say it and hear it all day long: with family and friends, in every public place we go, in all the phone calls we make, in all the emails we write and receive. So many of our countless daily human interactions great and small involve thanking or being thanked that we don't even think of it, we're so programmed from childhood to thank and to be thanked that it's kind of an unconscious response. Like breathing. You say "thank you" without thinking and think nothing of it hearing it said to you.
        Until you don't. That is to say, until you don't hear "thank you" where it normally belongs. Then you find yourself - that is to say, I found myself - waiting for it. Only because it's the normal thing. And when this normal thing was missing from my interaction with the lady who dropped her pineapple at Kroger's, it made the whole interaction seem...strange. 
        I found myself wondering if a person could be so rattled or in so much distress - whether over a dropped container of pineapple or something of much greater import that had nothing to do with pineapple - that one's social wiring, or whatever it is that automatically makes us say "thank you," could short out?           
         (Or am I seriously thinking too much?)