I grocery shop like a squirrel finds nuts
I went to the store to get milk and bread the other day. It cost me $102.13.
By the time I got to a checkout, I was wearing a hundred bucks’ worth of groceries because I hadn’t gotten a cart because I was only running in for milk and bread. A bag of milk was cutting into my left hand, and stacked in the crook of that arm were peppers, cheese, almonds, two packs of chicken, two bottles of shampoo and one conditioner (we only use it at that ratio), while my right hand painfully clutched a jug of orange juice and a keg of dishwasher detergent between two fingers. A mesh bag of avocados was looped over my left thumb. I’d found a few things on sale.
I forgot the bread.
I grocery shop like a squirrel finds nuts. If I make a list, I leave it on the counter. I usually go to one of two places (we call them the Yellow store and the Green store), and while I’ve purchased
basically the same things for 30 years, I still wander around wondering what I’m forgetting. I am easily fooled by things on sale, and especially that trick they do on Wednesdays when the things going on sale the next day are beautifully stacked on the ends of the aisles. At full price. I presume if it’s being waggled in front of me, it must be a deal.
I buy most things on sale in threes because my mother did.
My mother, who lived through a war and cooked from scratch every day. My mother, who was feeding a family of six. None of this applies to me, yet three it is. My lazy Susan weighs as much as a bus.
Even when I get a cart, my grocery shopping procedure is frazzled. One of my stores recently overhauled their entire layout and I almost sat in the corner of the produce section and cried. I
usually try to put heavy things in the cart first so I won’t mash tomatoes and bread with pickles and onions. I crashed through the automatic doors the first time and came to a comic halt. The aisles weren’t even running the same way anymore, let alone holding the things I needed. As the late father of a friend would have said, I stood there like I had my thumb up my bum and my brain in neutral. I shop on auto pilot.
Sometimes Ari offers to go shopping. Since he moved back home, he’s pretty good about splitting up the chores. The other day I handed him a list. There were four things on it. He just looked at me. Without saying a word, he turned over the list and drew a grid. He put the date at the top. I asked him what he was doing.
“I’m laying out the days, and planning dinners,” he said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “What else do we need?”
I shrugged. I tried to go up and down the aisles in my head, but now the aisles aren’t where they used to be. I thought about squirrels.
“Home Depot has this thing that tells you what aisle everything is in,” said Ari. “That would make this so much easier, I could just write everything down in order and check things off the list.”
I wondered who his real mother was.
As he pulled out of the driveway, I smiled to myself. I knew that list or no list, grid or no grid, there would be fishy crackers somewhere in the bounty.