Lists and labels are convenient.

They take the mystery out of life.

While Jacqueline Buie-Green was on a list, she inadvertently acquired a label at Big Kmart Store in Austin.

She was the woman sitting on a tall stool at a check-out counter in the Austin discount store.

Couldn’t miss her. “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” she asked customers. “Thank you for shopping Kmart,” she told them.

No wasted motion swiping bar codes on sales tickets. No wasted words.

If anyone thought it was rude for the clerk to remain seated as they emptied their shopping cards, Buie-Green ignored their stares.

She was there to do a job and that job she would do no matter how sick, how weak she became.

Even her boss, store manager Everett Hackensmith, saw the irony.

“People don’t wear labels or name-tags saying they’re disabled and can’t stand up or do everything we can, so nobody knew what she was going through,” Hackensmith said.

Buie-Green endured a lot during her nine years as a Big Kmart Store associate.

“We knew, of course, what she was going through,” Hackensmith said.

“She had been on the list for so long and then things fell through, and then she was off it. She went through quite an ordeal,” Hackensmith said.

She was used to it: a lifetime of missed opportunities.

Buie-Green grew up on the mean streets in the federal housing projects in Philadelphia, where surviving another day tested her to the max.

Fifteen years ago, she saved her money and boarded the train with a son and a daughter and three nieces and nephews, and they came to Austin to get away from it all and start over.

The kids said the blue collar, meatpacking town was “boring,” but Buie-Green liked it right away.

She got work first at the Social Security Administration office and then at Cedar Valley Services, Inc. and finally at the Big Kmart Store.

She liked that best of all.

It was a match made … literally in the Work Force Development Center at Riverland Community College, but figuratively in heaven.

She was good at it, liked her bosses and co-workers and liked the people she met coming through the store.

One of the health problems she suffered — but only one of many — was the failure of a kidney. She needed a transplant.

Her condition weakened her, and that was why she was the woman sitting down at the checkout counter at the Big Kmart Store in Austin.

Buie-Green’s health continued to deteriorate and she was admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital, Rochester.

A week before Christmas — Thursday, Dec. 18 — she rested in a bed. Waiting, hoping, praying for a kidney that could save her life.

Here is where she picks up the story.

Kmart, a kidney and an angel

“Kmart had been all I had. I walked a lot when I could, but my job was the most important thing to me at Kmart,” she said. “When I couldn’t stand or walk no more on my legs, I had to sit down.”

“They said I needed a kidney transplant,” she said. “They said I wouldn’t live without one.”

“All I could do was wait and hope. Have patience and pray and then one day, just like that, somebody came in off the street and they were a match, and I got my kidney.”

“It was a miracle,” she said.

The donor has remained anonymous, while Buie-Green recovers in a Rochester hospital.

Her husband died in 1994 and a sister, Gertrude Allen-Barron is wheelchair-ridden.

Her son, Brahein Buie, lives at the Twin Towers.

Nobody has come forwarded to tell her who donated the kidney.

“We were in surgery the same day. My operation lasted four hours, but I don’t know who gave me a kidney,” she said. “I was excited when I went in for the surgery. There were so many people around me that day. I wasn’t scared or anything because I felt the prayers of all my relatives and friends working for me.”

“Whoever done that — gave me one of their own kidneys — is my angel. She’s looking over me,” the transplant recipient said.

Buie-Green remembers the dialysis treatments. “Three days a week I would take dialysis, and three days a week I would work at Kmart. I only had one day a week off,” she said.

“No matter what happened to me, Kmart would work around that for me,” she said.

“I had breast cancer in January and February of 2007 and was off work before I could come back,” she said.

“My husband my father and my father-in-law all died within three months of each other,” she said. “And now this.”

When Buie-Green is well enough to be released from the hospital, she will go to a nursing home for further recovery.

When the recovery is complete, she will return to work.

There’s no doubt in her mind about the latter.

“Of course I will,” she said. “They have promised me my old job when I go back to work, and I’m looking forward to that already.”

“A lot has happened to me, but I’ve come through it every time,” she said. “It takes patience and prayer.”

Her boss is waiting.

“She has overcome so many obstacles in life it’s just amazing,” Kmart store manager Hackensmith said. “She’s very dependable at her work and we all wish her a speedy recovery.”

“I think her faith has a lot to do with it,” he said.

“You bet it does,” Buie-Green remarked after being told of her boss’ observation. “You’ve got to have faith all the time in life no matter what you do.”

Everyone at the Big Kmart Store in Austin is excited about Buie-Green’s kidney transplant, but no one more than Buie-Green.

“This is the best thing that has ever happened to me; It’s a miracle,” she said.

No picture is a shame indeed.

No way to recognize the woman who endured so much.

Who was on a list for so long and labeled … however incorrectly it was.

Close your eyes.

Picture a woman behind the counter at the Big Kmart store.

Can’t miss her. “Did you find everything you were looking for today?” she asks customers. “Thank you for shopping Kmart,” she tells them.

No wasted motion swiping bar codes on sales tickets. No wasted words.

If anyone thinks it’s rude for the clerk to remain seated as they empty their shopping cards, ignore their stares.

She is there to do a job and do that job no matter how sick, how weak she feels.

Not every blue light special is at the end of an aisle.

One of them smiles back today with life.