Recreation, fear and gratitude, all in one trip to grocery store

There is an employee at our local Safeway who posts NextDoor updates to let the community know what hotticket items her store has and doesn’t have in stock. This seemingly small act saves our neighbors a potentially dangerous trip to the store for something that’s not available. It’s also a bright little light at this scary time. Kate at Safeway says yeast is back in stock. We might be able to bake our way out of this.

My husband is usually the one who braves the Safeway run. He’s got a mask and gloves. He wears a jacket he keeps in the trunk, only putting it on to venture in and out of public places. But I needed a break.

“Let me go to Safeway,” I begged. “I miss it.”

I donned the trunk jacket, mask and gloves in what has become our shared homemade hazmat suit. In my pocket, my husband had shoved a winning Safeway Monopoly piece. He is an avid Safeway Monopoly player, a game in which shoppers are rewarded with collectible game pieces for money spent on groceries. We frequently win things like “one can of Safeway brand beans.” The $1 million grand prize has eluded us for years.

I departed with clear instructions to redeem our winning game pieces for a tub of sour cream. “Really? Under these circumstances, you want me to try to play Safeway Monopoly?” I asked.

The fiveminute drive to Safeway was eerie. Few other cars braved the roads, and the handful of pedestrians I saw wore masks and had their heads down. Purple latex stretched over my knuckles as they gripped the wheel, and anxiety swelled in my belly.

Selfconsciously, I approached the store in my sad ensemble. A young Safeway employee with kind, confident eyes and no protective gear motioned to a rack of shopping carts. “They’re all freshly cleaned,” he offered.

I tried to make sure to smile with my exposed eyes. “Thank you so much!”

Half of my fellow shoppers wore masks of one kind or another and most of us kept a safe distance, but a few folks were playing fast and loose with the rules. They were the ones who stood out like sore thumbs, those shoppers going about their business as if our world wasn’t waistdeep in crisis. Some people need to act like nothing is wrong. It’s their only way to survive — even if it might kill them.

I do not act like nothing is wrong. I shopped Safeway in a fullbody panic, tossing “supplies” like Easter candy and Brie marked 50% off into my freshly cleaned cart. With each aisle, I grew more nervous. Maybe this is what agoraphobes feel like when they finally leave the house? I’ve spent weeks watching news and reading reports warning against going outside and here I was, buying milk and mild salsa. Everything on my long list, by the way, was in stock.

Laden with what seemed like an appropriate amount of groceries for the apocalypse, I made my way to the checkout stand. Red stickers rubbed onto linoleum advised us to stand 6 feet apart and not load our food onto the conveyor belt until verbally cleared to do so. It was like going through security at an airport.

I was nearly done with this errand that I’d begged to run, and now wanted so very badly to be over. My purplegloved hands transferred groceries one after the other, as fast as I could. And then, as I pulled a bag of oranges onto the conveyor belt, a glass jar of salsa fell from my cart and onto the floor.

Repeatedly saying a sincere “I’m so sorry!” offered through the checkout stand’s protective square of Plexiglas didn’t make me feel less like a jerk. Someone had to come and clean it up. I apologized more. As it turns out, no one stands out more than the 6foottall lady in a homemade hazmat suit who shatters glass. Ashamed, I was met only with pure kindness from people who go to work when the rest of us don’t, heroes who stand behind that acrylic plastic square so you and I can have cheese and toilet paper.

The only decent thing to do was to let that tub of sour cream ring up like everything else. That winning Safeway Monopoly game piece stayed in the pocket of the trunk jacket, where it will rightly die when we toss that doomed garment into the garbage just as soon as the world goes back to normal.