the thing about groceries

My first thought when I read this stuff about groceries was a childhood memory. I was five years old and we had recently moved to a new city, or rather a new suburb of the city where my dad had been offered a job. On the corner of our street, a small supermarket cum butcher shop was to be opened, run by a young couple with a toddler, a baby and two cats. We watched through the glass doors of the shop while they were stacking the shelves with the radio on inside at full blast and every so often, they would stop and dance. The Twist! We were floored and full of admiration. Back home, my sister tried to show me how to do the twist but I just hopped up and down.

The day the shop opened, my mother sent me there with a coin in my hand and the carefully practised sentence: one pound of mince meat but not too fat and a small sweet for me instead of change. This sentence has been my memory mantra for new and slightly scary situations ever since.

And then I remembered the endless hours we played shop at home and on the curb in front of the garden gate, selling stuff to neighbours walking past and buying it back with paper money, filling our grocery bags with tiny crumbly apples and flowers and stones and small toys and legos. My child often played shop and shopping for groceries, we, the assembled adults, would carefully select our goods from her wares and buy them and sometimes, she would watch us with alarm and asked for reassurance that we understood that it was only a game. And yes, we sent her to the corner shop, the bakery, the ice cream van with a handfull of coins or maybe a banknote and instructions or a shopping list we drew together. And this afternoon, as I walked down to the river, I passed a table on the sidewalk where two girls, maybe six or seven years old, were selling handmade stuff and I stopped and selected a set of handdrawn playing cards and one chatterbox folding game. When I asked how much I had to pay, they discussed options for a while and then decided I could have it all for free because it was a nice and sunny day.

 

That man who said the stuff about groceries probably, most likely, definitely never experienced the excitement of going to a shop for the first time, bringing home a pound of not too fat mince and feeling amazingly grown up and rewarded and loved. Somehow I don't feel sorry. As it turns out, he thinks that the poor old US has been "looted, pillaged, raped and plundered" by Cambodia, Lesotho and Madagascar, three of the poorest nations on earth, which must therefore pay the highest tarifs.