Just about every Sat­ur­day morn­ing, early, I take Abra­ham to Dave’s to do the weekly gro­cery shop­ping. Just about every Sat­ur­day morn­ing, Dave him­self is there, and never fails to greet the kid and I with a nice word and a smile. It isn’t really Dave Saltz­man in the flesh [that would be gross]. The man­ager just hap­pens to be named Dave. I’m pretty sure he rec­og­nizes me, since not very many peo­ple are at the gro­cery store on a reg­u­lar basis before 9am on the week­end. I like the guy.

Though he’s not the Dave, I think he prob­a­bly feels as if the store is his, even more so than other man­agers because it car­ries his name. There’s no logic behind that kind of feel­ing, but I can tell that this Dave is proud to run his store well, and happy to be feed­ing fam­i­lies in this neck of the woods.

Cleve­land is a small-​town city.