Shopping

When My Prince and I got married, there were some adjustments. One thing became immediately clear: The grocery store was no longer on his list of places to go. (My not taking out the garbage seemed a fair trade.) So, for 26 years, I've been the one to go out and forage for food.

When my work gets hectic, supplies can get pretty low. My Prince will, when faced with imminent starvation, pick up some lunchmeat and tortillas--but never anything that could actually end up being a family meal.

In the past year, my ability to handle the grocery shopping has declined. I start out well enough, but the cart gets pretty heavy pretty quickly. Pushing it up and down the aisles becomes quite wearing. A few times, I've had to sit down and rest before I could continue. Several times I've need help to get things out of the store. When a complete stranger walked over one day to push my basket and help me unload things into the car, I realized that I had to do something.

I tried eating before the trip to the store, but I still seemed to run out of steam before I finished. I nibbled on the samples when they were being offered and still ran out of steam. For a while, when the grandson was living with us, I conned him into going to the store with me. He was a huge help, pushing the basket, loading and unloading the car. When he moved out to share an apartment with friends, I made one more trip to buy groceries alone. It didn't work well. I just ran out of available glucose before I could get the basket to the door much less to my car.

So I explained to My Prince that we needed to add the grocery store back to his itinerary. Today was our first try at shopping together.

Oy!

First, you have to understand that the old boy is darned near deaf as a post. Even with his super duper hearing aids, the background noise in a grocery store creates massive communication problems. Second, you have to understand that it is in the nature of our relationship that we will always have different ideas about how to get any given task done efficiently. And, third, you have to understand that he would rather be anywhere than shopping for anything.

So he likes to make lists. I make lists, too, but I generally lose them and have to go from memory. I make lists to get myself ready to shop, but the real shopping is done by going up and down the aisles and thinking about what we might need, what's a good deal, what will make a meal. I look at the things he puts on the grocery list that hangs on the refrigerator door as suggestions.

Today, however, we took the list. He only asked me three times if I had it and, remarkably, stopped asking after the third "yes." Of course, he then started asking about the coupons. Now I generally don't shop with coupons. Most coupons are for brands that we don't buy. Whenever possible, I buy generic or house brand. And coupons are as hard to keep up with as the darned grocery list. Me, I want to shop, not fiddle with paper.

Today, we took coupons. It did happen that there were a couple of coupons in the Sunday paper that actually fit our needs, so I clipped 'em. And My Prince collects Paw Points from the cat litter box. (Since the cat will only use one kind of litter, it's only fair that we get a free box now and then.) I had to keep them in my hand along with the grocery list throughout the entire shopping adventure so I wouldn't forget them at checkout. Only later did I realize that my ever faithful reminder system (i.e., My Prince) would surely have asked me for the umpteenth time if I had the blasted things.

So we started shopping. We start at the middle of the store, where the soft drinks are. We drink a lot of 'em. He's a Diet Dr. Pepper fan. I go for Diet Coke. But we buy the house brand of DDP in 3-liter jugs. Diet Coke has to be on sale before we buy it. Otherwise, I drink the DDP-taste-alike, unless I cheat and buy some 1.5 liters bottles of the real (diet) thing because I just want to. So I cheated today, big time. We cleared the shelf of the stuff. And tossed in some 3-liter jugs for My Prince. So the basket got pretty full and pretty heavy right off the bat.

Our route then led to the far end of the store where the non-edibles are kept. We went up and down several of those aisles, skipping the items on the list that are cheaper at the discount warehouse where we buy them in bulk quantities. Having the list and noting the antsiness of my cart driver, I skipped the aisles where I knew we didn't need anything. We had a full cart by the time we made it to the other end of the store, but we still had to buy perishables.

Parking cart#1 and getting cart #2, I turned him loose on the vegetables and fruits. He says he's going to eat more fruit. I let him pick up a whole bag of apples, but it's strictly "wait and see" on my part. I really want to see whether he will eat that many apples or whether we'll have to rely on the grandson being a bottomless pit (which he basically is). On through the meat department, where we had to discuss the merits of pre-cooked chicken breasts and the frozen-but-uncooked kind. The crisis was averted when I reminded him that I actually knew how to cook something from almost scratch and he could survive on the already cooked kind when I was elsewhere. Another small crisis came at the dairy section, when I started to pick up a gallon of milk. It was on the list. In his handwriting. I just didn't know that he had actually ventured out to a nearby convenience store and purchased a gallon (at a premium price) a couple of days ago. Oh well.

We finally made it through the entire store--and I guided him back to the cash registers while avoiding the ice cream aisle. Then came the issue of how to sack the groceries. After years of experience, I have a fairly quirky set of specs for the sacker. Put the perishables in plastic. Put everything else in paper. I actually hate plastic bags. They are awkward. Things spill out. There's not much in bag. But, if the perishables go in plastic, those are the bags that I unload first. I can pop the stuff that needs to be refrigerated into the fridge right away and, best of all, leave the rest for later unloading by whichever of the menfolk I can con into it.

The only problem is, you have to make it really simple for the sacker, or he/she will invariably put the cheese in with the cereal. It's definitely the pits to go out to unload the car a few hours later--or even the next day--and find that the cheese has been sitting there the whole time. So I unload all the cold stuff from the basket first. Then I put a divider between the cold stuff and the non-perishable items. The theory is that any idiot can then follow my instructions about sacking and not mix things up. Not that the theory always works. I usually have to check things pretty carefully before I leave anything in the car for later unloading.

So there's the semi-deaf Prince at his first major grocery haul in a quarter of a century. He doesn't know why I'm separating the groceries. It looks to him like I'm going to pay with two checks. And where are the coupons, he asks again. After some shouting and some gestures, he managed to act like I had things under control and waited to let me and the checker get things done.

Then there was a convoy of baskets to the car. Fill the car. Drive home. Start unloading. With the two of us, we managed to get everything out of the car, but once I got the perishables stored, I was too pooped to cook anything. (We ate sausage wraps, finishing off the sausage that I had picked up in Elgin on my way home on Sunday.) There are still several sacks that have not been unpacked--after the news, I took a four hour nap!

Happily, we won't have to do this again for two or more weeks. We'll have to go to the discount warehouse in the interim, of course. And, since we pick up things for various family members (including things to fill up the ever voracious grandson), it's bound to fill the car up again.

Equally happily, I think this will be fun. I do recall being somewhat disappointed all those long years ago that we wouldn't be grocery shopping together. I'm not too happy that it took a screwed up pancreas to get us together behind a shopping cart, but I'm glad we're there. Look for the short round woman shouting at the grumpy old fart the next time you go to the grocery store. We're having a blast.