Grocery Shopping

I have always loved grocery shopping.  Even when I was a kid, I'd eagerly spend every other Thursday of my summers accompanying my mom and my grandmother in their grocery shopping.  Maybe it was that they made a whole day of it; they'd go to the butcher and the bakery, and they'd go out for lunch, and then they'd head over to the main grocery store.  I liked seeing all the food and thinking about what we were going to eat, and getting to have a say in it.

When I first lived in Philadelphia after graduating from college, I went to the grocery store after work way more often than was necessitated by my food consumption.  In retrospect, I think I was lonely in the way that many people are when they first graduate and begin living on their own.  I worked in a small office with just one other (horrible) woman most of the time, so I didn't have friends from work, and my church was half an hour away, so I didn't have church friends at first.  Some people start trawling happy hours; others join sports teams or health clubs; I just went to the grocery store to make friends with the food.  It was strangely comforting.

Now, happily married and with a baby for a constant companion, I still love grocery shopping.  I read the grocery circulars like the news or a horoscope, planning my week (our meals and my shopping excursions) around what they contain.  This all drives Sam crazy because I go to one grocery store, but I am not finished and must go the next day as well because different stores = different products x different specials.  

I even love grocery shopping in spite of the incredibly complex choreography now entailed in simply getting into the store, which is this: I pull into the parking lot and search for a spot near a cart return.  Parking there, I climb out of the car, hurry over to grab a cart, back the cart in alongside the car (out of the way of traffic, but not so far back as to block the door), and open the backdoor.  I toss into the cart my purse and a bag of reusable grocery bags, and then I place a cloth cover over the cart seat (because, as I have stated before, I am a germophobe, and my daughter has an disconcerting habit of leaning forward to run her tongue along the cart handle).  Then I lean/climb into the middle of the backseat, unbuckle Allison Clare from her carseat, ease her out, check that both of her shoes have managed to stay on, and place her into the cart.  I push her inside, take off her hat and coat and put them into the cart, and at last, we begin our shopping.  

In the meantime, other men and women have completed their weekly shopping and are departing the lot all around us, but AC and I are undeterred by our impossibly slow start, and wend our way through the aisles, happily matching up food with recipe plans (me) and accepting compliments (her).