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HOLLENBECK: Spouse is master shopper |
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Thursday, 10 January 2008 |
 Some families have a designated driver. Their lifestyle is such that they apparently need one. We don’t have one in ours. There’s no need when you don’t drink anything stronger than Dr Pepper.
We do have a designated shopper, however, and it would not be me. That would be my spouse.
Ed is Chief Shopper for a good reason: He’s good at it; I’m not.
First off, I don’t know where anything is in the store. I think items should be displayed in a way that makes sense and they aren’t. And the second mistake is that I assume store folks’ logic is the same as mine and it isn’t.
A perfect example involves canned fruits and canned juices. I say they ought to be in the same aisle. That seems sensible to me, but apparently I’m of an opinion not shared by marketing moguls.
Ed tried to explain the way it all works.
“You don’t put the canned fruit and the canned juice on the same aisle,” he said, “because then you might not go down both of those aisles and you might buy less. They want you to pass by more items so you’ll buy more.”
When I accompany him to the store, he sends me off to specified sections to get specific items. I do fine with that. It’s an assignment I agree to accept and I can handle.
It’s best not to give me a list and send me to the store on my own. All I get is bewilderment. Nothing is where I remember it from the time before and I waste a lot of time looking for things that aren’t where I think they should be. I go home without everything on the list and a lot of things that weren’t.
And lists themselves are a problem for me. Frequently, I don’t make it all the way from the house to the store with list in hand or in purse or in pocket. The errant list slips away from me and is never to be found, at least not before I’m back home. And not having a cook’s mind naturally, I can’t remember all of the necessities unless it’s something I had wanted before I got to the store and didn’t have.
On a recent day when Ed was sick and our cupboards were bare, I handled the shopping task on my own. It was a disaster. I didn’t buy all the things we needed; I walked up and down the same aisles over and over because I’d have to go back to get something I’d missed; my feet were hurting moderately to start with and I was ready to cut them off by the time I finally left; I spent twice as much as Ed normally spends because I buy more of everything when I finally find it; and it took me a lot longer to shop because I kept running into people I know and they wanted to stop and talk in the aisles.
Upon returning from this disastrous mission — a mission that should have been aborted, I might add — I told my shopper spouse that I wasn’t doing that again without him. “I don’t know where anything is and I walked several miles looking for the stuff on your list.” (I don’t exaggerate. I just tell things big to make a point.)
“I can tell you where everything is without even being there,” he bragged. “First, there’s the bread, then the produce, then the ice cream, then the frozen dinners ... .”
On and on, he droned.
I gave him a dirty look and walked away.
Occasionally people will tell me they’ve seen Ed at the store, but he apparently didn’t see them. He is severely hearing-impaired — and doesn’t see so well either — so he’s pretty oblivious to the folks he passes by in the store. If it’s someone he knows, he isn’t aware of it most of the time. He just plows forward to the task at hand.
“He can’t hear,” I’ll explain. “When he’s grocery-shopping, he’s a man on a mission and isn’t aware there’s anybody else around until he reaches the checkout stand.”
But he knows where everything is. If you don’t believe it’s so, just ask him.
•••••
Ed got up from a nap the other day and told me he had had a nightmare.
“What was it about?” I asked.
“Well, I dreamed that Houston Nutt was being introduced as the new coach at Ole Miss and the first thing he did was tell them that everyone had mispronounced his name.
“My name isn’t Houston (pronounced like the Texas city) Nutt,” he said. “It’s Houston (pronounced as if it were HOUSEton) Nutt. It’s about time somebody got it right.”
This incident — which, thankfully, occurred only in Ed’s nocturnal journey —has some connection to family trivia. On our first trip to New York City in 1977, Ed’s brother, a New Yorker at the time, was taking us on a tour of Manhattan. We turned onto a street named “Houston.”
“Well, I feel like I’m in Texas,” Ed told George. “Here we are in Houston.”
“That’s not the way you say it here,” George said. “It’s Houston (pronounced as if it were HOUSEton).”
I was suspicious. “Are you making that up?”
He swore he was telling the truth, but I’ve never been sure I could trust him.
After that incident, anytime we’d come across the name Sam Houston, Ed would pronounce it as if it were “HOUSEton.”
“You could change Texas history books with that,” Ed told George on that fateful day in NYC. “I wonder if it would have the same ring as ‘Sam HOUSEton’ instead of Sam Houston.”
We haven’t talked about this in a long time, but periodically it comes up when the city of Houston finds its way into conversation. George, ironically, now lives in Texas, not too far from Houston.
He probably says it wrong. Old habits die hard.
Lynda Hollenbeck is associate editor of the Courier.
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