k fed up

I leave work early in the afternoon so I can make a quick trip to the grocery store before picking up Lila from her after school care at Molly’s. I want to make the raw zucchini noodles with puttanesca sauce, but am out of capers and kalamata olives, and we need half and half for the morning, and I might as well pick up a few other things in case we do get the higher numbers in the forecast range.

It’s nearly 50º and raining, but the store is a giant beating heart with clogged arteries — everyone pulsating that pre-storm panic energy — filling their carts with bread, boxed snacks, gallons of milk. One woman has enough pudding cups for fifty people stacked on top of a pallet of Diet Coke. The capers and olives are on the other end of the aisle, and her cart is parked right in the middle while she stares at the wall of Hamburger Helper and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and Rice-a-Roni, filling the available space with her hands on her hips, her head thrown back, mouth agape, looking over the top of her glasses, which have slid down her nose. What little packet of chemicals and dehydrated bits of might-have-once-been-food will she buy?

There’s no path around her, so I wait. Excuse me, I think, but don’t say because interrupting her seems rude, and I’m fascinated by her intense concentration and I get lost for a moment wondering about her hunker down in a snow storm eating routine. I always make soup and cups of tea, sometimes bread, but less of that now that I can’t eat the wheat. I stop myself just this side of judgement. It’s a free country (sort of). We eat what we choose, or what we can. 

An older couple block the aisle just beyond her, their cart pulled up in front of the dry pasta, their bodies angled in such a way that the aisle now looks like a student driver course in a parking lot. I imagine racing my way through and all three heads whip around to stare at me, as if they all read my mind. They each break free of the grip of indecision and inch toward their carts, reluctantly roll them to the side so I can pass. This is the scene in every aisle. Slow-moving, indecisive panic that’s forecast driven. The weather reporters are so strung out from not having any real weather to report this winter. You’d think it was the blizzard of the century heading into northeast Ohio, not the 3-6” they’re calling for over a 36 hour period. 

I listened for the cancellation call at 6:30, but only got the alarm. There’s school and probably two inches on the ground. It’s snowing like mad, and blowing sideways, and I have to head out to the doctor. I think my gall bladder is revolting and I don’t dare let it go another day. No indecision there. Not at all.