[Guest writer Trevor Siegler offers a personal appreciation of literary giant John Updike, who died Tuesday. —Ed.]

John Updike passed away yesterday, leaving a huge gap in the literary genre known as the “grocery store short story.” As far as I know, his “A&P” is the only memorable short story set within the confines of a supermarket. Twain could have had a lost chapter in “Huck Finn” where Piggly Wiggly crops up at an important plot point, but Updike reigns supreme in the depiction of just how much it sucks to work at a food-dispensing hellhole.

For a long time, I blamed Mr. Updike for my decision to enter that seedy world of climate-controlled milk shelves and artificially-colored fruit displays. On the surface, my crippling student loan debt and the fact that my grandpa could help me get the job with a minimum of ass-kissing the boss on my behalf were more important reasons to seek employment with a certain grocery chain located primarily in the Southeast (Winn-Dixie). But I’m a voracious reader, and Mr. Updike’s story went a long way towards selling me on the notion that I could be a stud in the bagboy corps of my local store.

Let me take you back to a more innocent time, a more refined time, a time in history when nothing seemed like it would ever change from the peace and prosperity of the recent past: the summer of 1998, particularly memorable for me because of two factors.