Just before Christmas, I ran to my neighborhood grocery store for a few last minute items. This was not the store I typically frequent, or even one of the crunchy-granola health food stores where I pick up specialty items and splurges; not even Trader Joe’s, where I get those TJ’s-specific things my household can’t live with out. Nope, this was Safeway, where I only go for (a) the pretzels my kids like that I can’t find anywhere else, and (b) last minute stuff we need for whatever we are already in the middle of cooking. My kingdom for a future in which I can buy everything I need and want at one store.
Pulling into the parking lot, I had a few things on my mind. One was the slings and arrows each of my adult sons is facing in his own life; small things that feel big when you’re grappling with them, but which hopefully build character over the whole story arc of a life. I’m the kind of mother who will always be thinking about how to support my children as they struggle, whether I want to be or not. Second was the fact that I and most of my household had been sick with some kind of cold. Not enough to keep us down, per se, but annoying enough to wake us up at night with congestion and headache. Also in the back of my mind were an ongoing problem at work and the vagaries of Christmas — what remained to be wrapped, which gathering might bring me into contact with someone who would have a gift for me but for whom, by virtue of bad planning, I did not have a reciprocal gift. None of these were individually the biggest problems, but collectively, and paired with a last minute need to run to the grocery store, they were enough to find me in a grouchy mindset as I exited my hastily parked vehicle to join the fray. It was me and a few desperados, grabbing for the ready made pies and the picked over holiday flower arrangements, all of us shifting impatiently from foot to foot in the single checkout lane, willing it all to happen faster, to be over sooner, wondering who this elderly lady writing a check really thinks she is. You know, just wishing our lives away, one five-minute stint at a time, which seems to be the harvest we’ve sown as a nation with an endless pursuit of faster, better, give it to us now.
From my vantage point behind an equally impatient woman with a bag of lemons and a box of raisins, I could see a section of the parking lot and the cart corral inside the…
