On our street at National Grocery Chain, a cashier is leaving.

His presence has been one more important seamless stitch holding together the social fabric of our everyday lives. When the stitches of presence work together, the fabric runs like silk and it’s too easy to overlook the fine job done by the staff.

National Grocery Chain is selling our store. The new mega-corporation might keep the store going, or might shut it down to consolidate sites. We don’t know. Meanwhile, that grocery is the heart of the neighborhood, not only for shopping but as a gathering place and for safety. Unlike most Americans, we have the great comfort of knowing there is food and a pharmacy right across the street, open 20 hours every day. After work, especially now on our dark rainy evenings, it’s a Godsend just to hop off the bus and to pass by those lighted windows with shoppers coming and going on the street and vigilant staff patrolling and maintaining the premises. Stopping by there for an item or two nearly every day, greeting the regular staff and hearing the news on the street, is always a source of uplift and cheer.

Our cashier is working night shift right now for the entire front end — a half dozen checkout aisles, and another dozen self-serve checkout machines that are constantly beeping and flashing for his immediate help. It’s managing machines, stocking the checkout areas, coordinating the customer service desk and locked cabinets of batteries and liquor, monitoring customers who sometimes behave in distraught or impaired or hostile ways and even run out the door with their coats stuffed with merchandise. On my shopping trip there tonight, our cashier was holding down the fort alone with no backup in sight. When I first walked in, busy as he was he gave me an enthusiastic hello wave from the other side of the store. It’s like I was the Cavalry showing up, when in fact it was the same older lady who comes in every night to buy kale and refill a gallon jug from the filtered water machine.

It was especially special to be recognized that way because he and I have never had an actual conversation. All this time I’ve just cruised through the self check, punching in item numbers for leafy foliage, and on the way out always gave him a smile. Until today I didn’t know his name. On the street I wouldn’t know him because at work he is always dutifully masked up. All this time I’ve kept my distance because he is busy and young and quiet and ultra-sensitive and fine-tuned in some higher indigo chakra manner. Our total interaction time was my noticing his lunch snack — some 100% sugar-free baking chocolate — and saying “Whoa. 100%. You’re the Man!”

Well tonight I punched in the numbers for my mustard greens and two potatoes and was heading out. He flagged me down and said “I just wanted you to know. Today is my last day. I’m only here until 10:00.” He is going to a nearby town, where National Grocery Chain is promoting him to management at a much larger busier store.

So I ran home and rummaged in the pantry and wrapped up all of my 100% sugar-free chocolate chips. Then I emptied all the cards out of my special card box of Catholic Saints for All Occasions, chose a saint card, and wrote him a little message. I put the card back in the box with the chocolate and ran back to the store. During a fleeting break in the customer action I handed him the card box. When I did he asked: Would I come and see his new store? He gave me directions on how to drive there. He clearly meant it. Think of that. Dealing with hundreds of people every day, and here he sounded serious about having one more person buying her kale at his new place. What an honor! Just then, some customers needed his help at their flashing blinking self-check stands, so we waved goodbye and I beelined out to the parking lot. That was just as well. I was getting too choked up to speak, just thinking about the staff at our store.

See, that card box was a treasured keepsake from a young cashier who worked the same shift at the same register a few years ago. She had a rapid-fire straight-faced sense of dry humor, and worked like lightning to get us through the line and out the door. She wasn’t one for chat, and never mentioned her personal life to me, except one brief detail before moving on to the next customer: “I’m your downstairs neighbor.”

She never told me her medical history, or how she was soldiering on just to stand at that register all day. Only later did we shoppers compare notes and piece together parts of her story — at her memorial service, held outside our apartment complex. National Grocery donated and delivered all the beverages and food. Over 60 neighbors got together and shared stories about her. Two of the women with a beautiful garden put in tribute ornaments and plants that still grow in her honor.

I should have done more to get to know her. She led a quiet life; it didn’t seem right to interrupt her leisure time off work. But one time she walked upstairs and knocked on my door, all busy and brisk on errands. Dropping a wrapped bundle in my arms she said “Here ya go. You should have these,” and off she went. I never saw her again. In that bundle there was the box of Catholic cards, and an armful of beautiful long jumper dresses, and an icon of the Virgin Theotokos. As it turned out, her beloved Orthodox Christian Grandma had left her that icon, and she left it to me. In fact, she went all around the building and neighborhood with arms full of gifts. She was one of many fine cashiers, one who for her end of life planning gave away all her nice things to the customers.

There’s a city bus to the nearby town of the new store of our cashier, now a manager; I just looked up the route. It’s a trip worth taking whether they have kale or not.

People who serve are simply everywhere, all the time. Cashiers, truck drivers, librarians, the phone operator who helped me today with a medical insurance question — there is no way to show enough appreciation, for all they do to hold together the lives that bless us.