Sometime in the wee hours Tuesday morning I floated into the threshold of consciousness, that place between asleep and awake, and felt the crushing weight of existence bearing down on me. I could barely breathe and then … the cat jumped off my chest.
I was relieved. I was thankful. I was wide awake. So, I got up, got dressed and looked at my list of things to do for the day. Other than checking emails and reading the news, not a single one of my tasks could be done at 3 a.m. other than food shopping. Gotta love 24-hour grocery stores. So off I went with a travel mug of coffee in one hand and half a dozen reusable bags in the other.
There are some advantages to shopping during “off” hours. There’s plenty of parking and hundreds of carts from which to choose. The one drawback which is really only a minor inconvenience is the store worker bees restocking shelves. But since you can get a cart with perfect wheels, it’s no biggie to swerve around them
The best part of shopping in the middle of the night however, is the live entertainment provided by the other shoppers and my own completely random musings.
I was in the produce section selecting some pears when it dawned on me that there are just some fruits like passionfruit, grapefruit and dragon fruit that don’t live up to their names. The first does not generate any feelings of desire after eating. The second doesn’t look or taste anymore like its namesake than sweetbreads (thymus gland or pancreas of a calf) look or taste like pan dulce. And the third looks nothing like the mythical creature whose name it bears and, truly disappointingly, it doesn’t breathe fire. Even blueberries are a letdown when it comes to the name game because they really are more purple than blue. Now oranges, on the other hand, they live up to their name.
I was thinking how I like a fruit with a straight-up name when I heard a small voice behind me ask, “What is that?” A little boy sitting in the child holder of a grocery cart being pushed by a woman I assumed was his mother was pointing to a white-bulb vegetable with stems topped by broad dark green leaves.
“It’s a Kohlrabi,” she said. “Only aliens eat them.”
Her answer was all I needed. Moving my cart a little closer to the pair, I began putting a few of the veggies in a plastic bag. The boy’s eyes got huge and his mouth opened and closed several times though he didn’t utter a sound. I gave him a wink and as I walk walked away, I leaned over, placed a finger on my lips and whispered, “Shhhh. I gotta get back to my space ship. Don’t tell.”
“Ohhhh, I won’t,” he whispered back.
As I cruised over to the meat department wondering what I was going to do with the alien veggies I had in my cart, a man wearing a combination of at least seven jackets and windbreakers in alternating layers with a case of marshmallow fluff in his cart walked past me. Well that’s not something you see every day, I thought grabbing a package of frozen, skinless, boneless chicken breasts.
As I set the package in my cart the label caught my attention. On it were the standard selling points you see on a lot of chicken: certified organic, organic vegetarian fed, free-range and pasture raised. I paused for a moment wondering if “free-range” and “pasture raised” were the same thing or mutually exclusive of one another. It seemed to me either was likely.
The label went on to tout the poultry as free from antibiotics, hormones and steroids but with Omega-3, and I wished for a minute I could say the same about my body. But the final pitch in the list of marketing gotchas was this: “Raised in stress-free environments.” And that’s when I realized that chickens, at least these chickens, were raised better than 99.9% of the people on the planet.
With this just slightly depressing and very disconcerting thought, I headed to checkout where two stands were open and staffed and the self-checkout stands were all closed.
At one stand were a group of three boisterous college-aged guys chugging Red Bull and buying a life-time supply of Top Ramen, beef jerky, apples, peanut butter, jelly, white bread and six gallons of milk.
I opted for the next stand over where I found myself behind a woman wearing 4-inch black stilettos and a trench coat who was purchasing three items: a cucumber, a jar of Vaseline and a bag of dinosaur gummies. I did not start up a conversation with her because well, I didn’t even want to know.
As I marveled at her ability to walk in those heels, I noticed the seven-layer, marshmallow-fluff man going from checkout stand to checkout stand loading 10s upon 10s of Snickers into his cart. He ended at the cashier just vacated by the undergrads where he unloaded the case of fluff and his hoard of candy bars onto the conveyor belt. The clerk looked at him skeptically but didn’t say a word just, started scanning his items. His total was $129.06.
He started to mumble and dig in the pockets of his many jackets from which he pulled all manner of flotsam and jetsam including a fork, several spoons, a toothbrush, a grubby plush Pikachu, a pocket knife and a fistful of what turned out to be $50 bills. The cashier took three bills as he one-armed shoveled his purchases and pocket contents into his cart and walked away. The cashier called and then ran after him with his change plus the bills he’d left sitting on the counter, but he waved her off and went out into the night.
“I think I just got tipped,” she said in stunned surprise.
I was pretty sure she’d just accidently “sold” a grocery cart but didn’t say anything as I loaded my food into bags.
Gotta love a 24-hour grocery store.
