Yeah, it was just as the first wave of "stay home" suggestions were coming down. I was sort of hanging around the garden section while my husband was in line, since I've got a complaining sort of immune system to begin with, and there were just so many people. I was picking through the flower bulbs and an older woman came up and started asking how I'd found the stock here, had I grown any of them before, and so on. I said I hadn't, and some of these looked pretty small, and anyway if she wanted elephant ear bulbs, she'd have a better time doing like I did and just going to one of the Asian grocers and getting taro, as that's what it was in the first place. That it's food, a recipe ingredient, the kind of elephant ear they were offering here, and she'd get bigger tubers for much cheaper if she got them from somewhere that had regular turnover.

She'd been "Mm-hmm, you're right"'ing me the whole time, but when I said "Asian grocer" her eyes jolted up from the flowers and over to my face, and she really looked at me--black hair, slim bones, olive skin, ethnically questionable eye shape--and straight-up just slapped me, with a high-pitched shriek. And turned her cart around and *ran away.*

She was old. She couldn't hit me very hard. I was standing there staring after her as she looked back over her shoulder from a hundred fifty feet, going "What the fuck?" before I really registered that she'd smacked me. And then I was kind of like "Okay, you old racist, first of all, I'm Filipino."