Chapter Nine: Shopping for Groceries (Giant Eagle Sells What Exactly?)​​​

 

      It seemed so easy for my mother. Every week mom would take us to the grocery store, always on Thursday mornings. Like the Post Office, Mom would change her routine only when Thursdays fell on Christmas, New Year’s, or another major holiday; otherwise, it was Thursday rain or shine.

 

     Packing herself in our family’s brown Ford station wagon, my mother drove my sister and me to the local Heinen’s and made us walk beside the cart as she cruised aisle after aisle, searching for whatever food items she decided to feed us that week. I never questioned Mom’s methods, how she knew what to buy, or what quantities. In my lifetime, I saw my Mom open a cookbook only twice – once when my father requested Mexican for dinner that week, and once when my sister, much to my Mom’s chagrin, signed her up for the grade school bake sale.

 

     While an excellent supper cook, baking was never my mother’s forte. My father once spoke in hushed tones of his first post-wedding birthday cake. Accidentally made with sour crème and chive icing, the cake resembled a lumpy white sheet covered with tiny flecks of kale. My dad ate all his cake, but the subject was still verboten in front of my mother. The one time I tested that prohibition, my mom’s scowl damaged my grade school intestines for a week.

 

     While Mom would barely recognize a cookbook, my wife had six for breakfast alone. Those books, along with her lunch and dinnertime guides, filled an entire bookshelf on their own.  The fact Alma regularly used only two of those cookbooks made no difference. They were hers, and they would stay right where they were. I brought the subject up exactly once and received the same glare I had once gotten from my mother. I stayed out of the kitchen for two weeks after that experience, with self-preservation my primary goal.

 

     A statistician with a devotion to numbers, Alma followed the recipes she used with an almost religious fidelity. My wife would no more think of substituting an ingredient or changing an amount than she would forgo a recommended oil change. Those instructions were there for a reason, and my slightly OCD spouse would be damned if she didn’t follow through.

 

     This wouldn’t have been a bad thing, except many of those meals required ingredients I had never heard of, ingredients that seemed to have been made by God just for that day’s dinner. For salt alone, we had Morton salt, Kosher salt, sea salt, grey salt, Hawaiian sea salt, and some unknown spice called Fleur de Sel, a substance I suspected the French developed just to look down on Americans a little more than they already did. Our pantry was overflowing with spices, all of which Alma stacked faithfully in alphabetical order, convinced the one-in-a-million odds she would ever need them again would make their purchase truly worthwhile.

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     “Why,” I asked Alma early on in our marriage, “do we need Kosher salt?  We’re not even Jewish.”

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     By way of answering, Alma simply pointed to her recipe book and the entry for Kosher salt. The fact the book was written by a woman named Dorothy Rabinowitz was apparently just a coincidence.

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     So there I was – raised by a “just wing it” mom and married to a hyper-detail-oriented wife.  Recognizing I couldn’t keep ordering pizza, I began my role as family cook by choosing the most basic of meals. Alma, not trusting me for a second, pushed for a weekly meal plan. My first such plan consisted of the following:

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Saturday – Bacon and eggs

Sunday – Spaghetti

Monday – Sloppy Joe’s

Tuesday – Pizza (frozen)

Wednesday – Hot dogs

Thursday – Hamburger Helper

Friday – Rotisserie chicken

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     Alma scanned my list, then she reviewed it again. It wasn’t until her fourth perusal that she dared herself to speak.

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     “Please tell me you’re not serious.”

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     “What’s the problem?  These are all legitimate dishes.”

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     “First – bacon and eggs are not for supper. Second - hot dogs and hamburgers are fast food. You are not feeding us fast food every week. Spaghetti is okay, but you have no other dish to go with it – you need side dishes, at least a salad, for every meal you make. Friday’s rotisserie chicken would be impressive if we owned a rotisserie. How the hell are you going to cook the chicken?”

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     I was proud of myself for that one. “They sell rotisserie chickens at the grocery store deli. I go in; I buy a chicken – problem solved.”

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     “So, your Friday dinner menu is the grocery equivalent of fast food. Nice try, but you need to do better. We are not feeding our kids what you used to eat in college.”

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     Alma then referred me to the great wall of cookbooks. Pulling out one on the middle shelf, she handed me “Fifty quick and easy meals.”  The meals included directions and lists of ingredients.

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     I read my new bible from cover to cover. Like many religious adherents, I gravitated to those commandments that seemed the easiest to keep.

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     Pasta was good - even I could manage to boil things. In a nod to practicality, I purchased ready-made sauces rather than making my own, making sure to toss the bottles before Alma returned from work. With some practice, I also became surprisingly good with meat dishes, particularly those that only required turning on the oven.

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     Side dishes were more of an art. At Alma’s direction, I included a carb and a vegetable with every meal, the combination fulfilling my wife’s culinary sense of balance.

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     A few months in, feeling like I had mastered Alma’s original recipe book, I recklessly pulled out a second. After determining I didn’t recognize a single menu item, I closed that book quickly, determined never to re-open it again.

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     I eventually developed my own system for vegetables and most other side dishes. I would throw green beans, corn, or whatever sacrificial vegetable I chose for that day’s meal into a microwave-safe bowl. Reaching blindly into Alma’s great big shelf of spices, I would pull out the day’s flavoring and throw some on whatever veggie we would be eating that evening. Placing the finished concoction into our microwave, I would move on to the next item on my hit list.

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     Sometimes this method worked; sometimes it did not. While I knew enough to avoid spices such as cinnamon or ginger, I once made the mistake of mixing ground cloves with my green beans. The result was a sweet concoction that, oddly enough, the kids seemed to like. Alma took one bite and looked at me questioningly, so I pulled out my all-purpose excuse and told her it was French.  A wise woman, she asked no further questions - she could see the kids eating as readily as I could.

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     My newfound kitchen mastery did not preclude any issues at the grocery store. Before my first attempt at shopping, Alma made an effort to make my life easier. Where other shoppers walked around with hand-written lists looking for the taco seasoning in aisle nine, my wife devised a computerized shopping list with a detailed aisle-by-aisle catalog of what I would find at each location.

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     Never content with the easy path, I still managed to screw things up. Just walking into the store, I realized there were details Alma hadn’t told me. For one, grocery stores had grown much larger since I was a kid. Even more frighteningly, they now included certain “convenience” items designed for those shopping with children, foods I had never noticed when in the store on my own.  

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     Walking into the store with Emily and Jack, I started by looking for a grocery cart. Certain those could not have changed, I was sadly deluded. While there were indeed standard grocery carts, there were also motorized carts along with two kiddie alternatives. The largest of those, a train engine with a large basket in front, appeared the result of some unholy union between Thomas the Tank Engine and Mrs. Gulch’s bicycle from the Wizard of Oz. Large as it was, the hybrid train was big enough to constitute a road hazard in any store aisle, not to mention several Cleveland freeways. My kids thought it was delightful.

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     After looking at her brother for confirmation, Emily pointed to Thomas the Grocery Cart, “We want that one.”

“Honey, the basket on this contraption is several times too small for the number of groceries we need. We would need to check out and come back at least three times before we finished.”

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     “Mom lets us use one of those things all the time.”

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     I looked at Jack, hoping for support from a fellow guy. All I got was, “Yeah, Momma lets us.”

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     I was stuck. Knowing I was being played, a fact Alma later confirmed when she came home that evening, I gave in anyway.

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     As things turned out, Thomas was the least of my problems. Holding my computerized list and pushing my oversized tank, I laughed inwardly as the other customers scattered in my wake. That laugh died when I realized Alma had forgotten one crucial item. My wife had mapped the name and locations of virtually all items in the store, including the wooden chopsticks in the ethnic food aisle. Unfortunately, she neglected to include brands. Canned green beans alone encompassed four separate food conglomerates, including the one with the jolly green giant I remembered from my youth.

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     With an increasing sense of desperation, I resorted to asking my children. Emily did her best to help while Jack simply pointed and said, “get that one.”  I went along with his choices the first four or five times until I realized he always pointed to items adorned in his favorite green.

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     Having filled my basket in the first three store aisles, I resorted to handing excess items to Jack and Emily, who placed them at their feet. The pile of groceries having grown large enough to obscure Jack’s view of the road in front, we finally made our way to the checkout line.  Jack and Emily both noticed the candy strategically placed by the counter, but this time I said no.

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     After paying the cashier, I pushed my kids and Thomas through the store parking lot while wondering if my grocer home-delivered. Having reached the end of our little trip, Thomas seemed to stare longingly at the trunk of our minivan, almost as if he wished to join us on the journey home.

 

     “I’m sorry, buddy. You’re way too big to fit in the trunk.”

 

     Emily looked at me quizzically, assuming I was talking to Jack. “If Jack gets to go in the trunk, I should get a chance.”

 

     “Neither of you can ride in the trunk. I was talking to our grocery cart - it’s an adult thing.”

 

     Emily and Jack helped me push Thomas back to the grocery cart dock. Finding he wasn’t remotely small enough to fit, we walked him back into the store, my sympathy level for our loyal but overly large friend declining with every step. Still, Thomas had held far more groceries than his designer ever intended, and he had done so without complaint. The kids and I gave him an affectionate pat on the side before walking back to our van.

 

     I debriefed with Alma later that evening. During our session, I learned that: a) Alma always used a standard grocery cart which Jack was far too large to ride in, and b) I should never trust anything Jack or Emily said Mommy agreed to.

 

     In fairness, Alma admitted Jack’s “choose green” method of brand shopping probably yielded the best results. In fact, most of the haul from that day’s trip managed to pass muster with the notable exception of “Johnny’s Marinara Sauce,” an item Alma placed in the back of our pantry in the section reserved for those items only to be used in case of absolute emergency.

 

     Subsequent grocery excursions taught me other rules. Most importantly, I learned to avoid Wednesday morning shopping trips and the herd of old ladies bussed from the nearby Green Cliffs Assisted Living Center. Most of the Green Cliffs’ women viewed the grocery store as their personal fiefdom, somewhat the same way many men saw hardware stores. Any languishing in an aisle, any signs of indecision were met with suspicion in their eyes. Fortunately, I was given a minor pass based on my cute and well-behaved children.

 

     A dozen shopping excursions behind me, I noticed one poor bastard, a rookie no doubt, make the newbie mistake of asking one of the Green Cliffs’ women about a specific cut of meat. The acidic stare he received made me pity the poor soul, but, to paraphrase Tom Hanks - there’s no crying in the grocery store.

 

     Besides, I wanted that meat myself.