Last week, week finally did it. Actually, I didn’t do it. My wife did it. We had been putting it off as long as we could, and I could have held out longer. My wife went grocery shopping. Since the Covid-19 alarm really went off- we stopped our weekly shopping. Truth be told, we were not the kind of people that went grocery shopping once a week. We went multiple times a week, usually picking up a few items we needed, and a few items that we didn’t need. Does this sound familiar?
My wife got her gloves and mask and was on her way to the local supermarket. When she returned with $300 in groceries it was an amazing feeling. First, I was grateful that I didn’t have to prepare ketchup for supper. My daughter and I watched as my hunting, gathering wife brought the groceries from the car, put the bags on the kitchen floor and then proceeded to take out each individual grocery item and wipe it down with a bleach swath.
In a strange way this brought me back to my youth. My parents didn’t obsess about pandemics and infected boxes of cereal. However, my parents went grocery shopping on payday. Do remember that? There was no direct deposit. A paycheck was paid once a week (Friday), and that money was supposed to last for a whole week. It rarely did. We weren’t poor (if we were, I didn’t know any better). But we were living like most American families. The parents shopped once a week, and the car was full of bags of groceries. We might help bring in the food stuff—but certainly we helped empty the contents of the multitude of paper bags.
Every Friday night was like Christmas morning. The colorful boxes and sweet smells of all the goodies that we could now partake. See, here’s the thing…We would gorge on the weekends. On the weekend, we ate like kings—but as the week progressed, we got a little more desperate, and by the time Friday came again we were scavengers looking for a stray cheez-it. And the whole process started all over again.
It was a simpler time. It was a time of delayed gratification. It was also a time when I didn’t have a driver’s license or an income, and I was totally reliant on the middle-agers. I was happy with what I got, and I couldn’t be too picky. I didn’t care that the flour they purchased was a generic paper bag that simply said the word, ‘flour’ on it. I didn’t care that they purchased the store brand soda- I was just happy that they let me drink that carbonated poison. If we were lucky, my parents, would buy a cereal that I liked, which was any cereal that had a cheap plastic toy somewhere beneath all the crunchy sugary breakfast nuggets. (I have two siblings, so things got very Darwinian with the cereal prize. Eventually rules had to be established about who would actually get the toy.)
We have choices. We can continue to shop until we drop, multiple times a week. We can delay the inevitable and shop as needed for only items that are needed. And if we are in the position of being able to be shop for whatever we want, whenever we want—then we should probably count ourselves as being in a very fortunate position.
The experience of watching grocery bags being unloaded in the kitchen brought me back. For me that was a good thing. Long before I was worried about paychecks, my children, marriage stuff, bills, stress and politics—there was a simplicity to life. I am grateful that I now have some say in dinner choices and how many vegetables end up on my plate—but there was a naïve joy in the mystery.
How many of us love to live in the tension and mystery of naïve joy?
