Date Night at the Grocery

/ Jeff Cann

Susan and I like to grocery shop together. Is that weird?

We sit in our family room, hot because our wall of windows faces south. Sun pours in at a steep angle, creating a swath of light, a two-foot-wide space heater where we don’t need one—not in August. Skylights let in three extra splashes of sun and heat, and when the wind blows just right during a winter nor’easter, a steady drip of rainwater as well. A ceiling fan stirs the air, but it doesn’t help. We’re both cooked.

“My head is throbbing.”

“Yeah, mine too, want a Tylenol?”

This is a typical Sunday, meaning we tried to cram too much in. To wit: my alarm rang at 4:50. I popped out of bed, brewed a pot of coffee on the stovetop, and watched the U.S. National Women’s Team play Sweden in the World Cup. After the game, jacked up from watching a bunch of twenty and thirty-year-olds run nonstop for two hours, I took a run of my own. After lunch, I cut the lawn and then poked around in my yard, spraying beehives and poison ivy with chemicals. I cleaned up Saturday’s mulching mess. Susan had a similar day, minus the soccer. We’re both completely dehydrated.

“Hey Susan, you want to go lie down?” She’s been sick; we both have, but I was first, so I had three extra days of healing time. Today is Susan’s first day as a (mostly) well-person. I’m fine, but I still sound sick. Like always, my cold settled in my lungs. At random intervals throughout the day, I let loose a guttural cough. Foul-tasting phlegm churns and tries to escape my esophagus. When I cough this cough, the word Coricidin pops into my mind. As a child, this is the drug my mother gave me for influenza. A Pavlovian response: I cough, I hear my mom say Coricidin. Plus, the cadence of the word sounds like the raspy crackle just below my larynx. Coricidin.

“No, I want to go shopping with you. It’s more fun when we both go.” She’s right. Grocery shopping seems to be a solitary task. People trudge the aisles like zombies, mechanically grabbing items and dropping them into their cart. No one has a good time. Especially those people leaning on their cart like a walker as they plod down the center of the aisle oblivious to the crowd bunching up behind them.

In contrast, Susan and I pop around the store. We discuss the produce, compare pasta, complain about meat prices and remind each other we left ice cream off our list. We tell old stories from previous visits. Like the time when the worker scolded me because I couldn’t see the box of muffins I wanted on the shelf right in front of me.

“Do you need to get yourself a lime?”

“Yes, I do.” I say this while stifling a smile. She looks in the cart, a lemon and lime sit atop a bed of bagged apples. See? Fun! On those occasion when I shop alone, I’m not such a zombie. The secret, hidden benefit of wearing hearing aids is I’ve always got Bluetooth headphones in my ears. I walk the aisles with music pounding loud enough to drown out the music the store is already playing.

Because I live in a small town, I invariably run into someone I know. They make eye contact, their lips moving. I have no idea what they are saying. I hold up a finger, a universal sign for hang on a sec, and I fumble around trying to dig my phone from my pocket and hit the pause button. Then I always say something stupid like “Sorry, I had The White Stripes blasting in my head.”

Leaving the store, we comment on another successful shopping date. I guess calling it a date is a joke, but there’s an element of truth as well. We’re out of the house, we’re interacting, we have a good time. Why not a date? As an old(er) married couple, empty nesters to some degree, we’ve doubled down on our commitment to do a better job communicating with each other. With others, I tend to sit in silence, panicked because I can never think of anything to say. I need to make the whole of my life more like our grocery adventures. In the baking aisle, I’m never at a loss for words.

~ ~ ~

On Sunday, I told Susan I was itching to sit down and write, but I couldn’t think of a topic. Since we were driving to the store, she suggested I write about grocery shopping. Challenge accepted. I hope I haven’t wasted your time.

Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

35 thoughts on “Date Night at the Grocery”

  3. Pingback: Date Night at the Grocery Store | Mitch Teemley

  5. My husband and I love to cook together. We went shopping once to do our own mystery box challenge—where we each bought ingredients the other had to use to prepare a dish. Great idea on cooking shows, but not so much for us. We ended up buying such weird items because they made us laugh, but we had no idea how to use them in a dish. So we ordered pizza and laughed the rest of the night.
    Date nights in this season of “open nesting” as I like to call it, are so enjoyable. Thanks for sharing your fun grocery date.

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    • Hi Debi, Thanks for reading & commenting. I haven’t watched any of those shows. Do they always include weird ingredients or were you just trying to stump each other? My son just graduated high school and while he’s still living at home, he moved to a basement bedroom, and he’ll be working bizarre shifts as an EMT. Empty nesting has me nervous but also excited.

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      • The show is Master Chef, and no they don’t do all weird ingredients. But for some reason that’s what we did. It was actually hilarious and makes for a fun memory.
        Your half-empty nesting then. Congrats on him choosing to be a first responder; that is a high-calling and he’s so young.
        I’m glad to have found your blog via Mitch Teemley.

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  8. Hey, anywhere we can have quality time with our spouse is a win. Why not the grocery store? I live in the same city I taught for 31 years, so practically every visit to the grocery store I run into former students or their parents. The shopping doesn’t do it for me, but the opportunity to catch up on past happenings and what they’re up to now is the allure.

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    • Ah, you’re more generous with your time than me. My wife gets into lengthy conversations at the store and I just get antsy. Hence, shopping with headphones when I’m alone. I DO NOT look approachable. But that all goes back to my inability to hold up my end of a conversation.

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  9. Pat yourself on the back, Jeff, because many food shoppers aren’t gleeful tandem shoppers. If my husband came with me to the grocery store, I’d arrive home with nothing. He gasps at the prices of everything and says he can do without most foods-except chips. Susan was right-your grocery store tales were totally relatable. You did not waste my time!

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    • A few years ago, I used to stress out about the price of many items. Somehow the rampant inflation during the pandemic has either inured me to it or completely worn me down. Now I just accept that the grocery store is a much larger part of our monthly budget. One thing I do balk at is chips. Man those are a rip off.

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  12. I got married last October. I asked my new husband how we, two people who had been married and had whole lives before we met, could achieve the level of intimacy enjoyed by the long married. He told me we would do it by cooking and eating together. As soon as we were married we began grocery shopping together. At first it was awkward and clumsy because we each had a different system for working our way around a grocery store. But now, in our tenth month of marriage, we have fun. We laugh. I think it’s a good practice.

    Please don’t ever think that you are wasting anyone’s time with your writing. I always find your writing interesting, well executed, and substantive.

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    • Oof. I can’t believe I never answered this comment. Mitch Teemly shared my post, and I got overwhelmed by too much traffic. I think it’s awesome you click so well with your husband. I agree it would be hard to create a lifetime of intimacy, but there’s something to be said for the excitement of newness as well. When it comes to writing, I struggle from imposter syndrome, and I do a lot of handwringing worrying that I haven’t written something worthwhile. My poor wife needs to prop me up constantly.

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      • Too much traffic? That’s great!
        Thanks for your reply. I’ve been without Internet for the last few days in the aftermath of the tornado, and we’re still without it. I’ve been avoiding doing things on my phone, but I wanted to respond.

        I’ve never had someone to prop me up as a writer, which may account somewhat for my lack of progress over the years. I gained some serious momentum over the summer, but I just got hit with a course overload for this semester, which begins Monday, so I’m probably going to lose that momentum.

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        • Tornado? Is that unusual in Michigan? It’s wonderful to have someone behind me when I get insecure. Do you teach senior level writing courses as well as intros?

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  13. We’re still quite a way from the empty nest, so for now, I prefer doing groceries alone. It’s usually cheaper that way…mostly because I compare prices online while I’m in the store…so I take way longer. (My wife has no patience for this, but since I’m paying and making the effort, she has no choice 😉

    But when we’re older, I can see it becoming a joint activity again.

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    • Sorry about answering this comment so late. Yes, having two people shopping can double the impulse buying. We shop in a little IGA so there really isn’t much to compare. I’m sure we grossly overspend compared to driving across town to one of the corporate stores. But the one we go to is employee owned, and…

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  14. I really enjoyed accompanying you and Susan on your tour around your supermarket, Jeff. It’s good to hear that there are still employee-owned supermarkets rather than those owned by the fat cats at the top. As for shopping with a partner, it’s been so long since I’ve done that, having chosen not to have a partner for over seven years now with no intention of being with anyone again. I’d find it incredibly hard to adjust to shopping with someone else, as I have my own routine and system. The only thing that would be beneficial is that I’d always have someone who could reach products on the top shelves (assuming they weren’t too short.) My sister and brother-in-law in Australia always go shopping together and are quite happy to do so. I wish you and Susan many more happy joint supermarket expeditions in the future. Glad it works for you. P.S. This piece definitely wasn’t a waste of my time or anyone else’s having read through the comments. You’re a good writer, Jeff, so never forget that X 😊.

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    • Ouch, sorry I missed this comment. Mitch Teemly shared my post and I got overwhelmed with the traffic. Susan and I like doing most things together, which is terribly inefficient, but rather nice too. She’s at the store alone now though because I jacked up my back earlier in the day. Grrr.

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      • Don’t worry, Jeff. It’s easily done. I noticed when Mitch shared my Writer’s Block poem a few months ago my traffic increased quite a lot. I was very grateful as my numbers were relatively low.

        It must be nice to have someone to do things with. I’m sorry to hear you’ve hurt your back, and it’s limiting what you can do. What a nuisance for you. I hope it gets better very soon and that you’re soon back shopping together again. X

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  15. I’ve been in Michigan for eleven years, and this is the first tornado I’ve been aware of.

    I teach at a very small university. We have an upper-level creative writing course (fiction and poetry) and an advanced writing course (creative nonfiction), both of which I teach. I also teach our upper-level American lit courses and literary theory.

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