Kathleen is often bored with grocery shopping.
She's just as happy to send me with a list.
I come alive, whether it's a huge supermarket or a mom and
pop corner store.
I walk in and breathe easier.
I'm home.
Dad was a grocer. I spent many hours
sacking potatoes,
facing up shelves,
sweeping floors,
taking inventory,
learning to fill a sack,
carrying bags to cars,
learning that,
"If you don't put a price on that can, it's free"
(though Dad never said that to a customer).
I learned that the customer is right, even when he's not.
"No, John has that sale price
wrong.
But he spends a hundred dollars
here, every week.
If I quibble over ten cents and
John switches stores,
I'm out the profit on five thousand
bucks a year."
I learned American egalitarianism.
Dad hired a foreign student from a privileged family,
then set him to sweeping floors.
Shock and surprise! "I should be a checker, at
least."
But the explanation came:
If you're too good to do scutwork, you're too good for my
store.
But if you do that well, you might become assistant manager.
He did.
Most don't appreciate the mystical nature of grocery stores.
Dad did. He'd say,
"Come to work with me.
You never know, we might
open a keg of nails."
I was a teen before I realized that grocery stores didn't
sell nails
(some now do) and there would never be any keg.
But I always knew that magical things
occur where people make their connection to food.
Empty larders get replenished.
That gnawing feeling of
"there's nothing to eat in this house"
gets banished.
That millennia old, unconscious worry
is pushed back into the dark.
You become ready to face a new week.
The grocer who fills that need after hours is a hero.
We must never forget Houston's HEB and Hurricane Harvey.
At the store, we might bump into an old friend,
get caught up in getting caught up, forget the time.
In Dad's store, the big stacks of dog food,
back by the cooler,
were a social center of the town.
Good ol' boys would sit with Dad, on the bags,
chewing over whatever topic wanted chewing.
There's always something new in the store,
some food from halfway around the globe,
something I don't know how to eat.
That's both
mildly disturbing and
wildly provocative.
Groceries connect us to exotic locales.
Groceries connect past to future:
We remember favorite meals and plan coming ones.
Groceries connect us to family and friends,
unless we choose always to eat alone.
And groceries connect us to God,
the ultimate source of all provision.
I just love grocery shopping.
Copyright ©2018, Paul H. Harder II
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