Frank Alpine, the assistant at the grocery store, shows us how to waste a life and lose a job, and then in the following act, how to save a business, restore love and restart the cycle.Sometimes in life, when faced with a crisis or extreme situations that make us suffer, one questions the meaning of what is happening, feels powerless against what one considers an unjust fate and resentful of the neighbor’s greener grass. However, life has many twists and turns and patience is recommended to deal with its hardships which, like everything else, will pass in time. China´s millenary wisdom understands as much and decrees the fact with the saying that advises to sit at your front door and wait to see the corpse of your enemy pass. This is a hard concept, distressing - but certainly not the lesser true for that – because it reveals our envy for other’s good fortunes and our wish for revenge, in most cases not by our own hand but by that of fate, the same hand that turns the enemy of those who know how to wait into a cadaver.
Feelings like these are common among shopkeepers who live comparing themselves to others in their vicinity and suffering on account of the success of his closest acquaintances. Such is the predicament of the Jew Morris Bober, owner of the grocery store who, as he gets older and embittered with life for the death of his son Ephraim and for his endless rotten luck, discovers himself not only envying the good fortunes of his fellow Julius Karp but even wishing him wrong: “For years the grocer had escaped resenting the man´s good luck, but lately he had caught himself wishing on him some small misfortune”. For Morris, however, life performs a turn and makes one thing change into another and still into other, leaving us wondering whether the body in the saying is that of our enemy or our own.
