Bob

Batz

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January 14, 2008

Storm Approaching, So Why Do I Have to Go Grocery Shopping?

It was 12, maybe 13 seconds into the first really big storm of this winter season when my first wife Sally gazed across the breakfast table at me and said, “You better go to the grocery store.”

I looked up from my crossword puzzle.

“Huh?” I asked.

“I said you better go to the grocery,” she replied. “The weather is going to be dreadful today. Snow . . . Wind . . . Bitter cold temps . . .”

“Whoa,” I said, cutting her off in mid-sentence. “I know all that, but why do I have to go to the grocery store?”

“Because I don’t want us to get stranded here by the storm without anything in the house to eat,” she said.

Then Sally handed me a slip of paper. The first thing I noticed about the note was that it was written neatly in longhand.

The second thing I noticed about the note was that it was approximately the same length as Margaret Mitchell’s classic novel “Gone With The Wind”.

“We need,” Sally declared, “bread, prune juice, milk, deodorant, trash bags . . .”

Why is it that whenever lousy weather is predicted, people immediately flock to their favorite grocery stores to buy bread and milk? Does having ample supplies of bread and milk on hand assure these people they won’t perish before the storm passes?

I mean, how many times have you been stranded by a ferocious winter storm when you suddenly found yourself craving bread and milk? Not often, I’ll bet.

I know for a fact that people always head for grocery stores for bread and milk as soon as a storm is forecast, because I’ve been at stores when bad weather is on its way and the scene is never a pretty one.

For some reason, people’s moods change drastically whenever foul weather is predicted.

Normally, the grocery is a place where friends and neighbors meet to exchange cheerful “hellos” and talk about how their children are doing in school.

But let the weather take even the slightest turn for the worse and those same people suddenly become an unruly mob of cutthroat shoppers with incredible survival-of-the-fittest instincts.

I always try to remain calm during such episodes.

As my fellow shoppers race wildly from aisle to aisle cramming their carts with items, I tend to meander aimlessly through the store slowly pushing the same cart I always get when I visit the grocery – the one with the broken right front wheel.

With this in mind, I decided not to give in to Sally when she suggested I head immediately for the grocery for bread and milk.

“Now just a darned minute,” I told her. “Husbands have rights, too, y’know. I will go to the store when I finish this crossword puzzle and not one second sooner. I have one six-letter word to go. Then I will be done with the puzzle. Then I will go to the store. So, hah!”

Two minutes later I was cruising the grocery store’s parking lot trying to find a spot for my car . . .

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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