On occasion, a friend of mine, Sonal, requires a little bit of help. Today was one of those days. Sonal had to take her mother for outpatient surgery and needed someone to cover her small Indian / British grocery store. Indo Euro Foods is located at Bell Road and 16th Street in Phoenix, Arizona, and opens at 11:00. It was me who was unlocking the door this morning as Sonal was running late. One aspect I love about watching her store is the people I meet there. As customers came in, there were a few faces I recognized from other times I’ve watched the store, and then there were some new faces. The first customer of the day was a man from Pakistan. We talked about his upcoming month-long vacation up near the Afghani / Pakistani border where he still has family. Strangely the next three customers were all from New Delhi. A man from Oakland, California who had picked up a taste for British chocolate stopped in, as did customers from Mumbai (Bombay) and the Punjab. You can guess from looking at the portraits above who was from Ireland – look for the clover. A regular and a funny guy I’ve gotten to know just a little came to America from Afghanistan, he loves Hindi films but rarely returns them on time. A real Native Arizonan stopped by; thirty years ago, when I arrived in the Valley, they were quite rare as it seemed most everyone in Phoenix was a transplant.

Maybe the most interesting customer of the day was 86-year-old Ronald Coach. Ronald is English, he left London in the ’50s after having survived being in Chiswick on September 8th, 1944 when the first German V2 rocket dropped on England. He told me of a friend who actually saw it falling from the sky thinking it was a telegraph pole. Ronald’s real claim to fame though is that he worked for Technicolor in the editing department back in England while they were doing work on John Huston’s version of Moby Dick with Gregory Peck. He lamented how alone he is these days with his wife now passed away and how infrequent it is that someone wants to hear the stories of an old man. Well, I loved listening to Ronald for the better part of an hour. At this little grocery, I have had many an opportunity to meet people from around the world. On any given hour I have filled in, I have listened to, learned from, and been amazed at the stories of people who have left Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Ghana, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, and all points in-between. Customers from across the Indian subcontinent come to Indo Euro for the flavors of home that our western groceries do not cater to, while many others visit the store because some time ago, somewhere on earth, they became familiar with English sweets or other Brit foods and are now desiring a taste that might bring back fond memories. Maybe most surprising has been the breadth of cultural backgrounds of people looking for Bollywood movies. It seems that even in the most remote corners of the globe people have grown up watching Amitabh Bachchan sing, dance, cry, laugh, kick butt, and grow older to become the most recognized actor alive. For more than a few hundred years, these lands first inhabited by Native Americans have become a land of transplants. I think we have lost sight on the whole about how great a nation can be when peoples from diverse backgrounds and lands come together to share and form new ways of seeing ourselves, creating a culture in which all these wonderful facets can mesh to influence, enhance, and enlarge a world view that is uniquely American.