I have been grocery shopping for Willie.
This started as a function of the pandemic. Willie does grocery pickup. Each week, there is an item or two or seven missing from her order. At the height of the pandemic – those terrible days in March and April – Willie would go into the store to get those missing items herself.
Willie. She’s seventy-seven. She almost died of pneumonia six years ago. And while hospitalized Willie gives me so much material to write about – and can be lots of fun – COVID would be the point of no return for her.
So I suggested Willie could let me get her missing items instead. After all, I was already in the grocery store shopping for my own family. She and Indy moved five minutes from my house for just such occasions.
“Why are you GROCERY SHOPPING?!” Willie demanded. “We’re in a pandemic! Why would you expose yourself like that?”
“Because I have children and a husband who, you know, eat and use toilet paper and Tide Pods and stuff,” I sighed, exasperated. Willie often forgets I have a family until it’s convenient for them to exist.
Like the time she abruptly went blind in one eye. She figured she’d be cool to Uber to the train station, take the train to Center City Philadelphia, then walk the several blocks to Wills Eye.
While blind in one eye.
Willie had no trouble falling down steps when she was thirty-seven and could see with both eyes. I was pretty sure losing half of her vision would not improve Willie’s stability.
I was happy to go with her. To assist. To facilitate.
But Willie is fiercely independent when it suits her, so she sputtered about how I couldn’t go with her. I had children to care for.
But my children aren’t infants. They’re not even grade schoolers. Also, the day in question was a Wednesday in January, pre-pandemic. I don’t have to do a single thing to care for my children when they’re in school.
“Oh,” Willie said, forced to acquiesce.
But when my kids were virtual schooling, and a tropical storm was swamping the area, she had me drive Indy to Labcorp for bloodwork.
She didn’t make an appointment, despite a raging pandemic causing people to flood Labcorp for antibody tests the same way the tropical storm was flooding each street laying between me and my children.
Indy and I could sit and wait. Indy’s retired. I “don’t work.” What did we have to do all day?
Well, I only had a neurology appointment for my daughter, two kids to guide through pandemic schooling, and a house with no power.
Nothing important.
So I’m used to uphill battles with Willie. But once I convinced her, the flood from the tropical storm looked like a dripping faucet compared to the flood of grocery requests I have received since that day.
And nothing on these grocery lists feels familiar to me. I expected shopping for Indy and Willie to harken me back to my childhood. After all, I spent twenty-five years and then some under their roof. I should recognize their groceries. Right?
Not so much. The lists are incredibly foreign. Did they always eat lunch meat? Were their vegetables always frozen and never fresh? When did they get so obsessed with Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches? Why do I need to buy four half-gallons of milk when I know Willie can polish off a gallon in a day or so?
“We can’t lift a full gallon!” Willie explained. “We’re not – what’s his name? The guy? The actor?”
“Stallone?” I suggested, because he and Willie went to high school together and she usually has attitude about Stallone.
“No! The other one! Married to what’s her name? Kennedy? But he’s a politician?”
“Schwarzenegger?”
“Yes! Schwarzenegger! We’re not Schwarzenegger!”
Well. OK then. Four half-gallons it is.
Then there’s Willie’s credit card, which she has permanently bequeathed to me to pay for her groceries and any other errand she sends me to complete. It works about 50% of the time I swipe it. Willie and Indy are financially solvent. So why does this card so rarely work?
I think Willie does it on purpose. Just for the chuckle. As in, “Look at that bitch trying to tell me what to do. Let her swipe my card. I haven’t paid it in months. Swipe away, bitch! Swipe away!”
The grocery drop off is no more successful than the credit card. It can take me upwards of twenty minutes to get in and out of the Temple of Doom. It’s much easier if I call Willie and Indy as I’m en route. They can meet me out front with a cart for their four half-gallons of milk and metric ton of frozen green beans.
But whenever I have groceries, Willie and Indy become incapable of answering the phone. It goes directly to voicemail. Or – my personal favorite – they hang up on me in the process of answering my call.
“It’s just that the phone has SO MANY buttons!” Willie laments. Because “On,” “Off,” *, #, and 0-9 are just so overwhelming, having never occupied a phone before 2020.
There’s also the stuff that winds up in my freezer. Willie complains about the grocery store never stocking her Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches.
So when I’m sent to purchase Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches, I’ll buy three or four boxes. If Willie can “never” find them in her grocery store, and mine has a surplus, let’s stock up, right?
Wrong. Willie doesn’t have room for three or four. So I store the ice cream sandwiches with the game meat.
It’s the closest Don and Willie will ever be – through their food stored in the freezer I bought for waffles. That rarely has room for waffles.
But then Willie won’t ask for Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches for months. When I offer up the ice cream sandwiches in my freezer, she turns me down. Her grocery store is really good about keeping them stocked, she’ll tell me.
Now that Willie is vaccinated, she has not resumed her pre-pandemic grocery routine. She still has me shop for her. I figure the less time Willie spends behind the wheel, the better it is for all humanity. I have not pointed out she can buy her own Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches.
And I don’t think I ever will. On the day everything shut down in 2020, I convinced Willie to let me shop for her. She had grocery shopped earlier in the week. She insisted she was fine.
But when I queried her, she was low on things she shouldn’t – and maybe wouldn’t – be able to get in the coming weeks. Nonperishables. Things she could freeze.
So she emailed me a list.
I mean….who needs just two pears to get them through a pandemic? Who needs snack bags and sponges for the apocalypse? Do I really need all the notations?
And how much material can I get out of grocery shopping for Willie?
That list, like Willie’s grocery list, seems to be never-ending.
Fortunately for us, am I right?