The result of this laziness was an empty pantry and a refrigerator that held only the desiccated remains of a couple of plums and a nearly empty bottle of ketchup, I knew I had no choice but to don my gladiator suit and fire up my steed, errr, van for the drive into town.
After circling the parking lot six times, a spotted a woman preparing to vacate one of the coveted van-accessible parking spaces - and the ramp access was on the correct side. I raced to that aisle, stared down a woman who may have been Holly Hobby - her car was a patchwork of different colored doors and bumpers, and attempted to leap over a tall building in a single bound. Thankfully, I remembered that I had forgotten to stitch a large letter 'S' to my shirt, which meant my powers were impotent, and instead I chose to activate my turn signal to notify all those who might have been thinking of taking that space that, if they did, they would face a swift and justified early death. As soon as the woman who had been keeping the space warm for me backed out, I slipped into the space, said a Hail Mary, blew a kiss to the grocery fairies, and headed into battle.
Grocery shopping alone must be done in carefully orchestrated steps. They go as follows:
1) Take a red hand basket by the doors leading into the store and place it on my lap.
2) Stop at coupon counter to get weekly ads and chat with random strangers about random things and get invited for coffee and quilting with a wonderful woman whose name I never got. I also don't drink coffee or quilt, but it was so sweet to be invited.
3) Head to produce section.
4) Find someone to help me acquire 10 produce bags, which are on rollers set too high for me to reach. Once I have obtained the bags, I move to step 5.
5) Fill produce bags with produce, chat with the store employees and other shoppers while shucking corn- on-the-cob at the shucking station.
6) Move on to condiment aisle. Now, I have enough condiments in the pantry to last my little family through a zombie apocalypse, an alien takeover, and an ape incursion, but I must go through this aisle to get to the front of the store for step 7.
7) Ask someone at checkout to set a buggy at the front of the store for me and label it so no one takes it or moves it or uses it to play out scenes from any number of teen romantic comedies where a boy runs through a store pushing a laughing girl in a buggy. I empty my handbasket into it and head back into battle.
8) Soup aisle. One must always have two cans of chicken noodle soup on hand for emergencies, like stomach bugs, broken hearts, and chicken noodle soup cravings.
9) International Foods aisle. Taco Bell and Ortega feel their taco kits are, apparently, international foods. I only need the seasoning, some refried beans (a.k.a. international vomit in a jar), and enchilada sauce (I buy the real stuff, which means, naturally, that it was imported from China).
10) Cracker aisle. I'm no longer going to eat crackers, even though that is the go-to food for when I take my medications. I'm going to keep plums on hand for that purpose instead. But I procured the plums during step 4. For some reason, my grocery store doesn't keep multi-packs of individual-sized bags of chips in the chip aisle. They keep them in the cracker aisle. So I acquire the individual-sized multi-pack of Doritos I want for tacos-in-a-bag, which my kids love, though I find the entire concept to be too foreign to even consider eating (which is, I suppose, a bit ironic). Then I get a box of Triscuits.
They only have 3 ingredients in them. Seriously, and I can pronounce all 3 ingredients.
So Triscuits make the cut and go in the basket. On to the next aisle.
11) I go to the next two aisles and then head back up to the front to empty the handbasket into the buggy, and then head back for more.
12) It takes 8 trips to complete my grocery list. I empty the last basketful of food into the buggy and wipe the sweat from my brow. Shopping is thirsty work.
13) I ask a girl overseeing the self-checkout lanes to help me get my full buggy behind the checkout lanes so I can get in line to pay like everyone else. She does.
14) I pay and the clerk asks if I would like some help bagging my groceries and getting them to my car. Why yes, that would be lovely, thank you.
15) A young, kind man comes to help me bag my groceries. I quickly determined he had never bagged groceries in his life. Chicken was thrown in with strawberries, ice cream with boxed cereal, milk with soup cans. But he pushed that heavy beast of a buggy out to my van and proceeded to help me load every bag into the back seat before wishing me a great evening. I tipped him a few dollars, and bid him farewell.
Now, you might think that I would be relieved that my grocery shopping was done. But you would be wrong.
Unloading and putting away is, by far, the hardest part of grocery shopping.
But perhaps I'll save that part for a future instructional video. I'm sure my readers will find it very amusing when I roll over the bananas while maneuvering to put the cheese in the fridge, and then fall out of my chair when I try to cram the ice cream into the very stuffed freezer, ice cream adorning the top of my head like a crown of caramel glory. On second thought, maybe I'll just keep the video camera tucked safely away. Far, far away.
