Snow and iced in for a couple of days, I am finishing old posts. Here’s one from the week before Christmas.
The way I know Sophie has a new job at Insta-cart is one afternoon she comes down the stairs wearing an ID badge and announces she is going to work. I am insta-surpised and insta-worried at her choice of employment (You have to DRIVE the groceries to their HOUSE??), which like every little delivery this season (the nose piercing, the ski goggles Amazoned to our doorstep, the pleas for friend gatherings that stretch every guideline from the CDC) is abrupt. Huh. I always wondered how axe-murderers and sex traffickers got their groceries. Darn it! And I had just settled in for my long winter’s nap. There’s a pandemic on, for Pete’s sake. But no, there’s a lot of blue around here to be out of.
Because the days before Christmas were not packed, strained, complicated and called for enough (See “Quick Gift” – December 2020), I decided to accompany my little elf on her run. Thought I could be helpful in a way Sophie so rarely needs, wants, or asks for. This girl. Insta-grown up since she was a wee one, who’s been begrudgingly trying to find a place for me since she was seven. Heck. I have been grocery shopping more years than she’s been alive and most of it for the family table. I know what stuff is, where it is, how much it should cost. Finally! I know stuff that in this unpredictable instant is deemed useful: the difference between cold cuts and cubed meat, what prosciutto is, how much constitutes a pound of butter and what is a good sale price on whole bean coffee. Insta-happy, a little intrigued: I am not a mom used-up, after all! I am badge-less but indispensable as I throw on my shoes and bundle up for the adventure ahead.
I am insta-overwhelmed. Picture it: December 23rd, the last edge of the hole-iday before we all fall in: midweek, midafternoon, in rare fair weather at the 360 Kroger I haven’t been in for 10 years. While I was away, they raised the shelves about 10 feet and squeezed them together about the same distance, creating a tunnel effect that, with the crowds here on their last minute shopping is mildly alarming. Honestly, it felt like one of those “fun” houses where the walls are closing in and you better grab your organic rigatoni and get out. If you can find it. This is the part I thought I could help with, but she is shopping at a store I don’t frequent. Two, she is half a foot taller than me. Not only that, every item has to be “confirmed” on the App by scanning the barcode and getting a confirming little “beep” before placing it in the cart. I am insta-useless, as she and the software shopper are one. I can’t see her cell phone, so I can’t see the product, I can’t hear her through the mask, and when she gets stuck she just texts the customer who put the vegan butter in her online cart to begin with, and between the two of them they come up with a suitable substitution. Me, the willing side kick, is silent behind my mask, trying to breath out more than in as we squeeze past other shoppers also looking stressed, lost, overly hot and desperate, trying to quell my panic attack by admiring the improvements to the dairy section and remarking on the price of long grain rice. Resolve….resolve, hmmmm, now where did I just see that around here? Once again–not the ride I thought I was on, but I’ve got both hands on the cart. Insta-adapt.
Here is what I learn. There are a lot of meat eaters on Insta-cart. Number 1 request: “choice cuts,” a cubed stew beef, followed by different deli meats in varying categories, brands, and sliced thicknesses. Meat must often be the driving force behind “app shopping,” as a throwback to prehistoric times when you sent someone else out to hunt down your tender mammoth brisket, and at the least from more recent days when the one who eats the bacon is not the one who brings it home. Is it the pandemic driving this trend? Really? Today notwithstanding, which literally feels like an epidemiological party, how much Covid -19 do you suppose can be had at the dairy section of your local grocery? Or is this recent and popular trend more like what my sister and I have noted–are people taking a Covid-pass, a realization that the duties, responsibilities and day-fillers of 2019 are, let’s face it, less fun than a Netflix binge in your jammies.
Two: people who are willing to send other people to the store and pay for it, often eat pricier and more obscure food. So, forget coupons and specials, a hard lesson for me. Practically feels sacrilegious, as I have been driving down the cost of food in my getting-slower-by-the-day cart for years. Can barely get through the store without digging for a paper coupon, scrolling for an electronic one, searching out sales and promotions, and plundering the past rack. Who cares if no one likes, eats, or knows how to cook it. It was on sale, people! Not so, for these hip new screen shoppers: I want exactly what I want and I want it now. No, do not substitute jimcaya wedges for jimcaya cubes, thank you very much. That is NOT acceptable. Like, me as a consumer would be some employed-by-an-app teenager’s dream: bag of apples, box o’ mac n’ cheese, gallon o’ milk and a loaf of bread. Oh okay, live large: make that organic bread. But really. I kid you not. On the three trips I’ve accompanied her we have not put a single staple in the cart. Okay, bananas once. And that lady wanted to see the bananas to make sure they were just ripe enough, so Sophie had to stand there in produce taking and sending her cell phone pictures of bananas. Huh. How bout that. How much you making at this job, daughter? I got a perfect picture of going bananas right here in Aisle 11.
Perhaps the homebound shoppers asked Santa for a lot of kitchen gadgets that will enable them to prepare the weird stuff we’re procuring for them: Cassava root?? Chinese red meat radishes?? What the %$#@! is a meat radish?! Perhaps they just want to send a college kid on a wild goose liver pate chase (okay, so no one orders that but close.) I am insta-mom here–like, “What on the earth are you going to cook with that? It’s way too expensive, it’s not even in season. I see they have [other, more practical item] on sale; you know you can do better if you….” Sophie, ever serious and insistent on the details (really, she is perfect for this job), is instantly exasperated with me: “Maaa-um! You can’t just tell them what to buy! You have to get what they want!” Hmmm. How about that? Mom training cleverly described as a teenager’s paid job. Don’t get me wrong, parts of this is fun. This is the main part that is fun: imagining myself elsewhere. I, too, want to be locked inside a large chain grocery store filled to Fire Marshall limits two days before a major holiday in a raging pandemic hunting for gluten free bread crumbs. Insta-alarmed.
Also verboten for this foray: multi-tasking. As a 50-something household manager who has been shut in for months and always, always, always has a list, a return and an errand or two parked by the front door, it is impossible for me to walk through a grocery store two days before Christmas and not think of something we need, or see a good sale on something we will need. That’s what gives impulse shopping a good name. It’s not hoarding, people, it’s solving future emergencies. Confession: For a while I had to boycott Target because of all that red. I thought they must be personally marketing to me, knowing my weakness for all things clearance. It’s not whether you will wear, eat, or use the item with the red sticker on it, it’s how much you paid for it. At Target, with their overuse of my favorite color, it’s hard to tell the overpriced from the clearance priced and hence, my dilemma. Like a bull in a chop shop. So here is Sophie with a vice-grip focus on a single jar of organic almond paste while we pass by all kinds of specials and sales. I try to slip normal people food into the cart and she is insta-pissed. “But wait! We need tortilla wraps for tonight’s dinner–please??! Of course I’ll pay for this at check-out. But wait…Wait! That’s a really good price on tuna…” This is only my second trip and I’m about the be insta-fired.
The last thing I learn in my training session is that I am better from the sofa for Sophie girl. Now when she goes out on a run, I stay home and make sure my cell phone is charged and at the ready. I have set myself up as a home advisor to home delivery, yet another unpaid job for the mom. Tech support, so to speak, minus the tech and plus the canned olives, pimento spread and non-fat gluten free organic goatmilk. Insta-lifeline. She can text me nonstop and I will guide her the best I can to the correct aisle of a store I’ve never been in to a product I’ve never heard of. I can do this thing. I can and I will. I know a smarter mom who offered to pay her daughter not to do Insta-cart but I don’t think that would work for Soph. She needs to be this independent, even if while she is out there she feels as though she is flailing, and failing, and fighting her way to the top. I believe that, and not coasting or being comfortable in her skin, has become the norm: Thank you, 2020. We all just taking a rest here by sitting around jamming bamboo up our fingernails.
But she has learned (Where has she learned??) to lean into the pain, to embrace the chaos, the sadness and stress of life so not as it was meant to be. (Oh, you thought we were having orderly and predictable for lunch. Oops, well they were out of that so I fixed us disaster instead). It’s a good life lesson, packaged as a nightmare and way over-priced so I don’t know why anyone would buy it, but a good life lesson, after all. I reflect with some satisfaction on how much girl is learning as our awkward, fitful she-we circles the store. I’m not even sure she knows what bologna is. She may fill a cart with $200 of chips and cookies, products she never knew existed. She may have to read and study the ingredients of baby food. She will learn the million varieties of margarine, butter, and plant-based soy spreads. Information that I, in a million years could never have imparted, as the spirit of her cartwheeled through our days. But today, when she needs it…today. This day. All those synapses firing in that powerful brain of hers that is, for this occasion for this moment and in this way: willing. And this too: listening.
More even that that, it’s somehow comforting and affirming to me that she picked this as her part-time employ to begin with. Like, she chose this as the one thing that could call her out of her me-cave bedroom to earn money in a pandemic. Not retail or childcare or front-desking it or anything you or I might resort to, desperately bored and feeling broke, or arenas she might feel more comfortable in, but by bringing food (if you can call Thai coconut curry hummus “food”) to people’s doorstep. Provider-girl. For whatever reasons the home-bound (or hotel-bound; she has delivered to both) are on their devices rather than in their cars or behind a cart, Sophie is solving problems for other people. On the Insta-cart website they call her a “household hero.” A good feeling, to be sure, in our stuck, stranded and isolated days, to have reasons to put gas in your car, pants on your body and blow dry your hair again. A purpose in some tiny way connected to humanity and its most basic need to eat (ok, forget all that stuff I said about fancy obscure organics). She is bearing “gifts”–paid for three times their actual cost but gifts nonetheless. She has delivered to elderly, to shut-ins, to single moms home with sick children, and no doubt, to quarantining members of our community. And each one with a story. With each order that comes through she is providing food. Medicine. Pampers. Presence. Attention. And intention. There is none more serious or invested. She is making life a little easier for someone, somewhere. She cannot go through life without blessing. It is her nature.
So much for “bring your mom to work” day. I’m hiding out over in Bakery while Sophie tracks down a certain brand of chicken wings. There are so many people I can’t move or keep my six-feet distance, so I’ve parked myself near cakes and pies. I’m hot in winter outerwear and my mask is fogging up so I can’t see. The weight the moment and the mile-long to-do-before-Christmas list is as crushing as the frenzied crowds. No, they don’t have any fruit cake. Bill said he wanted a fruit cake for Christmas. Seriously? I am a fruit cake to make this run. What was I thinking? So, indulge me my nostalgia if I can’t buy anything while we are here. Christmas, the pandemic, and even this new employment aside, life has been a bit of “insta” for me all along. It dawns on me, I shopped this same store 15 years ago with this very same person, lovely insta-girl a morning time toddler stuffed into my cart along with the best food we could afford to buy at the time. Yes, that beautiful young woman over there (though she is fuming and frustrated about the wings at this particular moment) once fit inside the cart she is pushing. She and her sister, so wiggly and busy and chatty I could barely get down the aisles, never mind have a brain to shop with. But I had to keep them in the cart or they would both of them bolt like gophers. Like shopping with two small dogs, I once noted. In a cat store. So you blink and you are not there, but here. Pointless to muse how, or why, and yet luxurious to marvel if time grants you a moment to do so. So I do. And here is okay. I am grateful for the many, many gifts this hard-working, deep-digging, persevering girl has delivered to our doorstep every day. Grateful, even, for this harrowing grocery experience. After, all they have low-fat organic tofu. And it’s on sale!
Souvenirs 