Sightings, Dispatch #2

It was a stranger's grocery list, but I know this mom

When I first saw the handwritten grocery list on the ground, I tried to ignore it. I wanted to pick it up, but at that moment I was a beast of burden climbing an asphalt mountain. Once again, I had overestimated how many groceries I could easily carry in canvas bags looped over my shoulders. If I leaned over to reach down, I would topple like a fallen yak.

“Keep walking,” I told myself. Out loud, apparently.

“Do you need help?” a stranger asked.

“No!” I shouted.

Manners, Connie.

I stopped and slowly turned to look at him. “No,” I said again, more softly and with a smile. “I’m fine. But thank you for offering.” I waddled to my car and dropped the bags into the wayback of my Jeep.

I hesitated.

I am curious by nature and nosy by training. Also, I love reading other people’s handwritten grocery lists. They’re often so hopeful and full of purpose, like a journal entry at the beginning of the day, full of affirmations. I will buy these groceries and feed my grateful people. Most of the time I find the lists in empty carts, folded into squares, their job done. This one was wide open, flat on the ground and bearing the faint imprint of tire tracks. My journal entry at the end of the day.

I closed the hatch to my Jeep and surrendered. I wanted that list. I started to retrace my steps to the front of the parking lot, but the list had disappeared. I cursed the wind, this time silently. I got into the car and was about to pull away when I saw the list again. This time it was dancing across the pavement. Or was it waving? I flew out of the car and chased it down, smiling again at the kind man who had offered to rescue me.

“Still fine!” I yelled, waving the list in the air. He looked unconvinced.

As grocery lists go, this was a bounty of a find. It started out so optimistic. Its author had drawn boxes of various sizes to organize foods by category. Each item was bulleted with a tiny circle. Best laid plans which, I’m sorry to say, soon unraveled.

Salad bags were listed in two different boxes, as were salmon and chili starter. After I saw frozen lunches on repeat, I began to make assumptions. She was a busy mom, constantly interrupted. When she made this list, she was standing at the kitchen counter telling her kids to get their shoes on, maybe, or scribbling at stoplights during carpool. Could she just have a moment to herself, please, to complete a thought and finish the damn grocery list. Not really a question, as we already know the answer. Hence, no question mark.

Eggs appeared on the list once, but handy egg bites showed up twice. First, as a decision made, but when they popped up in the bottom center box, she was having her doubts: “egg bites?” Why must we second-guess ourselves? Easier is not neglect, I want to tell anonymous mom. It’s still protein! Serve it to the kids and you might have time to finish that coffee you’re buying. Couldn’t help but notice, by the way, that those coffee beans started out as decaf but by box #5 they were high-octane.

And who could blame you? How else are you going to keep up with this demanding family of yours?

I may be projecting.

I have shopped at this family-owned grocery store for 30 years, starting in the spring of 1994, weeks before my daughter and I moved into our new apartment. This was strategic on my part. The two of us would be moving to a different school district, and I wanted the neighborhood to feel familiar to Cait from the day we moved in. By the time we called our new apartment home, many of the grocery employees were already our friends.

We made our share of grocery lists. I wrote the first draft, and she would often add her requests, sometimes with illustrations. Why didn’t I save any of those? I think of that time in our life every time I enter this store. There is still that whoosh of the electric doors at the entrance. The line of drivers waiting for groceries to be loaded into their cars. The pots of fresh flowers sitting just beyond the bank of the checkout counters.

Throughout my daughter’s childhood, we had a steady supply of those flowers in a vase on our kitchen table. This was another part of the strategy for building our new life. A happy home has flowers, I used to tell her. Whenever Cait was with me, she picked them out; she loved freesia. She is grown now, and there is usually a vase of grocery store flowers in her kitchen, often picked out by her children. Five-year-old Ela always makes sure I see them.

Early in my single mother days, briefly, Cait and I often wore matching jean jackets and white Keds to the grocery store. This was our singular act of wardrobe twinning. She didn’t want to look like a 36-year-old second grader, and I had never forgotten the advice from my former mother-in-law. I loved that woman long after her son had decided that death was too long to wait for us to part. She once intervened after I was visibly delighted to overhear one of her friends say my daughter looked just like me.

“We never want our daughters to look too much like us,” she said, gently pushing whisks of hair from Caitlin’s face. “People look at her, then they look at you, and the contrast is, well….” No need to finish that sentence.

Our matching ensemble at the grocery store was our one exception, Cait and I agreed. A jean jacket is cool at any age and white sneakers are fair warning of an approaching optimist in the produce section. 

People had their opinions about those shoes.

“They’re machine washable,” I explained whenever someone looked at them as if Caitlin’s mother had gone mad. What a magical place, that grocery store.