As I passed them in the aisle, I heard her ask him, ‘Shall I stand in line for you?’. We were all in Trader Joe’s on Saturday afternoon, which is about as close to organized madness as one will find. The line for the checkout, which is actually a double line, stretches the length of the store, then bends and is half again as long as it stretches to the side wall. I am going to assume she was his mother, as the age difference was about right and they resembled each other. Her next words to him, before I moved away were, ‘Then I’ll take the flowers’. This she said as she picked up the plastic-wrapped-bouquet-of-fresh-cut-flowers that was sticking out of the shopping cart. I continued on past them and thought nothing more of it, other than a mother’s concern perhaps for a fragile bunch of flowers in an eventually over-fillled shopping cart. I finished shopping and didn’t remember the exchange until I joined the line and saw this same women, 60 feet ahead of me, holding her bouquet in a rather good impersonation of the Statue of Liberty. She was alone as the line moved slowly but steadily toward the bank of cashiers. All of a sudden, I saw the young man rounding the corner and she must have seen him as well for from the sea of look-alikes she gently waved the bouquet above the heads of the crowd. He worked his way to the front, joining her just as the next place at a cashier was called.