BY LISE HALPERN
Copyright is held by the author.
Shopping with my father
WE LEAVE for the big weekly outing to Wegman’s around nine in the morning on Wednesdays when the private aide can stay with my mother. I pull up close to the entrance. Dad climbs out, gets himself a big cart to lean on, and walks into the store. I park the car and follow him in. By now I know there is no rush; he will go first to the produce section and will not have gotten far.
In fact, he is just inside the entrance perusing the berry display, carefully considering raspberries versus blackberries. He puts the blackberries in the basket as I walk up with my own small cart. “They last longer,” he explains, “I can have them in my cereal all week.” He moves on to the citrus display to contemplate oranges, grapefruit, tangerines, clementines, and tangelos.
“What’s on your list, Dad?” I ask, and we inspect his scrawl on the back of an envelope. I zero in on a few things — soda water, milk, coffee cream, napkins — and head off into the depths of the store. I come back with the items on the list. We fall into a rhythm, him working his way methodically through the produce, the prepared foods, the frozen foods, all the places of important decisions and interesting options. I venture out in search of the mundane items on his list and pick up my own groceries as I go.
I next find him standing in the bakery department deciding on a loaf of bread. He takes a deep breath. “I love the smell of the bread aisle. When I was a kid your grandma used to send me with a nickel down to the bakery to buy a day-old loaf. I could pick whatever I wanted, as long as it was no more than a nickel. I picked all sorts of breads: rye breads, white breads, breads covered in sesame seeds, whatever looked interesting. The only time she didn’t like my choice was when I brought home raisin bread. A few days of salami on raisin bread for lunch and I got a little smarter about my choices.” His eyes sparkle with the memory while I add this story to my memories of him.
He chooses a rye bread and then tosses in a loaf of raisin bread too. “In memory of my mother,” he says, winking at me, “and your mama likes it too.”
Shopping with my mother
Mom is not happy with Dad’s shopping. She wants to go to the grocery store and shop for herself. The store has motorized carts that look like miniature golf carts with a shopping basket on the front. A little lever controls forward and backward motion, and handlebars steer like a motorcycle. The motor is weight activated, so you have to sit in the seat to get it to move. I almost take out the store’s sliding door as I drive the cart out to the curb. How on earth is my mother going to manage this?
I extract her from the car and wrestle her into the cart. She waits while I park, and then we go through the sliding doors together. Mom has skills; after all she uses an electric wheelchair with a handle drive just like this one. She threads through the sliding doors no problem, but the speed control has a bit more zip than her wheelchair and she clips the nut display, which jiggles some bags to the floor. I brace for the cursing, but she doesn’t notice. I walk behind her as she moves through the produce section, picking up a grapefruit that rolls off the pile she bumps with her basket.
After a few minutes she masters the pace and the steering. She moves through the aisles telling me what to put in her basket. Bananas, cookies, mango juice, potato chips. She picks snacks rather than meals, although she does select a box of sticky chicken wings and a sushi roll. We add the ice cream she wants for the freezer. In the end she mostly chooses the same things Dad bought last week, but she sits tall and in control as she powers her cart up and down the aisles. She smiles when I ask her to buy the sparkly sugar cookies I had always wanted, and she had always denied, when I was a child. “Those are too sweet to be good for you dear.” We power on to the checkout line.
Shopping at the farm
Back in the days of raising my children, I mostly worked downtown with a hellish commute. Shopping was crammed into busy weekends, or on the way home from the office, and I would buy the first thing I thought everyone would eat. There was no time to fuss about brands, or preservatives, or corn syrup, or antibiotics. I bypassed the organic vegetables and grass-fed beef. Those were for people with too much money and not enough to worry about.
Now I am one of those people, shopping for one, with enough time on my hands to choose and enough money to indulge my choices. At the local farm cooperative I meander through the herb garden cutting dill and tarragon and Thai basil. My dinners are constructed around the week’s harvest, filled with kale, exotic squashes, and five different kinds of heirloom tomatoes. My carton of free-range organic eggs are multicoloured: white, brown, and even pale blue.
I always seem to buy more than one person can eat. I feel bad when I throw out a wilted head of lettuce or droopy cucumber, but each time I go to the farm I am enticed again by the bright colours and delicious possibilities. I fill my bag. I can always bring the extra to Mom and Dad.
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After decades of writing creative non-fiction in the form of strategic business plans and advertising copy, Lise Halpern has turned her 500-words-a-day writing habit to more literary pursuits. Her writing has appeared in CommuterLit, After Dinner Conversation, CaféLit Magazine and Bright Flash Literary Review. She resides with two crazy border collies in a river town in bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Find her on facebook.