UFOs, clerks and domestic discord

By Karen Spears Zacharias

Lorena, the store clerk at Wally World, looked normal. Pretty, even, with shoulder-length black hair that flipped up. Her dark eyes were shiny, like those chocolate-covered cocoa beans that Starbucks sells.

So there was no reason on the outset to be suspicious of her. Tim, my husband, unloaded our cart, while I caught up on the Eva Longoria-Tony Parker wedding in Us Weekly. Ohmygosh! Did you see that wedding cake? What was Eva thinking? Doesn’t she know red frosting stains everything?

Lorena reached for the beef jerky and ran it across the scanner. She turned to another clerk nearby and said, “Three more UFOs landed out on the farm this week.”

I looked up from the magazine at Tim. He raised his eyebrows.

She continued, “My friends were working in the fields south of town when they saw them — spaceships hovering over the fields.”

The other clerk, who was standing near Lorena with a cash tray on her hip like she was waiting to relieve her for lunch or break or a psychiatric appointment, yawned and said, “Oh, really.”

“Have you seen anything about it in the papers?” Lorena asked.

I closed the Us Weekly and noted that Lorena had only checked half our items. Tim was darting around the end of the cart like he had some urge he couldn’t explain. I was pretty sure that he was controlling his urge to bolt.

“Do you know anyone who does memory recovery?” Lorena asked.

The other clerk shook her head no, “Why?”

“They zapped our memory,” Lorena said, matter-of-factly. Her co-worker shook her head. The two acted as if they were discussing the rising price of toothpaste. “It would be really awesome if someone out there could help restore it.”

Oh, that explains it. All this time I’ve been blaming my memory lapses on menopause. Several years ago I was sent on assignment to report on a crop circle, not the kind used for irrigation but the spaceship variety. A farmer drove me in a white pickup out to the spot where the spaceship reportedly landed. Just about 50 yards off the dirt road was a perfectly round circle of mashed-down grain, surrounded by acres of harvest wheat. I wanted to ask Lorena if there was some latent effect on the brain for anyone who has ever walked where spaceships dare to tread, but Tim was sprinting for the door.

The Wally World clerk isn’t the first to see spaceships in Eastern Oregon.

Fifty years ago, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported to the East Oregonian newspaper (the very same paper that sent me out on assignment to the wheat field) that he was en route to Yakima, Wash., when he saw nine very-fast-moving pie-shaped objects flashing in the sun against the snows of Mount Rainer and Mount Adams. In an interview with a local radio station the next day, Arnold said he rolled down the window of his plane to get a better look at what he’d first believed to be some new fandangled military aircraft. “I was looking for tails. They didn’t have any tails.”

Arnold said that according to his calculations, the flashing saucers were traveling at a rate of over 800 miles per hour. “They sure must’ve had some tail wind,” Arnold said, chuckling.

Tim threw our bags into the back of the pickup.

“Did I hear her right?” I asked. “Did she say three UFOs were in town this week?”

“She’s not right in the head,” Tim said.

“How did they lose their memory? Who lost their memory? The field hands? Or the aliens?”

“The field hands,” Tim said.

“But how?”

“I don’t know,” Tim snapped. “Don’t ask me to rationalize something like that. I don’t know how it happens!”

And there we were, two normal-looking people, sitting in the parking lot at Wally World, arguing over how aliens zap our memory, as if we were debating the rising price of toothpaste.