Grocery shopping shifted to Friday this week. An impending fierce winter storm has dominated the news for the last 24 hours, and Saturday sounds better spent not going outside. We are usually at the grocery store on Friday anyway. Mike stops on his way home from work to pick up groceries and supplies for his uncle.
Two birds with one stone.
I still have meals and ingredients left from last week’s shop that we didn’t get to. It tends to be the pattern - that we shop heavy one week and very light the next. So we didn’t need much: coffee, cilantro, tomatoes, carrots, garlic, bread, roasted red peppers, peanut butter, arugula, pizza cheese, jalapenos, tortilla chips, and some salad greens - $89.47.
The uncle’s grocery list is almost always the same: butter, cheese, an offering of canned meat (usually Holiday Corned Beef), a variety of crackers, peanut butter, a case of water, and two liters of milk. I can’t fathom how he’s stayed alive so long with a flood of chemical delivery and cholesterol producers invading his body daily. There’s not a free-radical fighting antioxidant in sight. But he must need a cargo load of them. Mike attempts to improve and enhance his diet with fresh fruits and vegetables or cooked meals, but it’s futile. Blueberries, tomatoes, bananas, whole grain bread, and easy-to-heat canned vegetables are gifted to neighbors before Mike even reaches the parking lot. The following week, his grocery list comes with a strict caveat not to pick up ‘any of that other stuff’ that isn’t on the list.
My heart aches, physically and figuratively, loading the conveyor at the cashier's stand - Spam, Philly, Ritz, Instant Minute-Rice, Puritan Beef Stew, a 12-pack of toilet paper, and a 6-pack of tissues - $60.52. It feels like we’re assisting his imminent demise.
We quip that he’ll probably defy the odds and outlive the rest of us who are busy appeasing medical advice and cardiologist recommendations. He'll be interviewed like one of those little old ladies on their 102nd birthday who claims the secret to longevity is a daily snort of Jim Beam and eight well-smoked Export-A cigarettes. Except he’ll say that Cheez-wiz is the secret to centenarian life.
Without even trying, I hope he lives forever while the rest of us fill our 'pill-a-day' calendars with statins and alpha-blockers.
Add $89.47 to the grocery tally this week.
The running total is now $265.52
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