The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Supermarkets, Seniors, Sort of Random Observation

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Supermarkets, Seniors, Sort of Random Observation

I spend a lot of time, at least three hours a week, inside supermarkets. It's the closest thing I have to a community: I know when the cashier's baby is due, say hello to the butcher, and know which days to avoid senior discount. I don't have anything against seniors, it's just that they take 47 minutes to pick out bananas because they confuse standing in a spot with having bought deeded real estate.

Anyway, it scares me a little that I know so much about the people in the supermarket. But I console myself with the fact that I cook a lot, and there are usually about half a dozen people at the dinner table. Plus, I need things like Milkbones and laundry detergent.

Usually, I go during the day with one or two of the kids. But last night, I decided to do night shopping. The kids had a ton of homework, and after plowing through a lot of it, everyone went to their separate corner of the universe and I had a free hour. Well, sort of free. I probably should have folded wash or dusted or done something normal, but that's just not me, so after I cleaned up my daughter's art project (fairy feathers and glitter glue) I decided to sneak out of the house and get the shopping done. Here are the random observations from this expedition:

1. Even though people claim my family is from Viking stock, I cannot navigate by the stars. In fact, I make a left by the "haunted house" off Route 9 to get to the store, and at night, you can't see an abandoned house because it has no electricity. I drove right past the turn off. (400 years ago my descendants wanted to reach the balmy shores of China and ended up ice farming in Greenland)

2. The day people are far less creepy than the night people in the grocery store. The night crew kept playing weird songs like Ruby Tuesday followed by the theme from Rocky which was jarring. It was like musical selections from the rehab center.

3. Really, really old people wearing a BlueTooth scare me. This lady was easily 88 - easily - sort of stooped over and she had a BlueTooth in her ear at 9:30 at night. Who would be calling her? She moved with the speed of sleep, so I can't imagine she was vital to the functioning of anything, especially at 9:30 pm on a Tuesday. So why couldn't I stop looking at her? I kept wondering if it was a Christmas present from a well meaning grandchild that she had confused with jewelry.

4. Meat looks alive after 8 pm. I couldn't go near the meat case. (This is partially due to the fact that my daughter won't eat food "that ever walked or swam" and that phrase came back to haunt). Also, the guy holding the large, sharp butcher knife reminded me of Charles Manson. Bad combination.

5. It didn't occur to me until I was almost home that other people in the store might be looking at me and wondering what I was doing in the store. That was particularly important as when I got home, I discovered I had shopped the entire time with a glittery fairy feather dangling from the back of my jacket.

6 comments:

Carrie Harris said...: I tend to hum when I'm in the grocery store, which always gets me odd looks. Well, that and the fact that one of my twins kept yelling, "Nookie! Nookie!" the last time we were there.

It's toddlerspeak for "milk."; Wednesday, 14 January, 2009
Marcia said...: Well, yeah, but it's also malespeak for . . . you know.

I used to forget and push the cart back and forth like a pram after the kids were past the age of sitting in it.

Now, mostly my DH goes to the store. So on the rare occasions I do go, I find they've changed the shelves all around and I'm lost.; Wednesday, 14 January, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Well, Carrie, if it rhymes with cookie, it's usually headed for their vocab receptors.

Of course, there are people like me who might think you and your husband run around the house yelling that word all day and that's where the tots picked it up, but I can't imagine there are too many people who think like me.

And Marcia, when my DH goes to the store, he comes back with WD40, a head of lettuce and Brillo. I kid you not: that's what he came out with last time. And he has this expression like he's walking on the surface of Mars when he's in there.

He does a lot better at Home Depot where I go into a trance.; Thursday, 15 January, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: All I have to say, Anne, is that you're my kind of people.; Thursday, 15 January, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Love that ending -- I do stuff like this all the time!

You are right that people shopping at night look weirder than daytime shoppers. Even normal people tend to look weird shopping at night; I think it's the lights. And yes, the meat looks particularly nausea-inducing.

I'm guessing that little old lady with bluetooth might have been given it by anxious family members. I feel a little sympathetic; I do that slow thing with bananas myself.; Monday, 19 January, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I know, I felt sort of sorry for her, but it was still such an incongruent sight. They probably told her to wear it whenever she went out (like a Life Alert thing), but to take it a step further, why was she shopping so l ate at night and by herself?; Tuesday, 20 January, 2009

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Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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