Grocery shopping can be an interesting experience. I always wonder about people who think the best frozen turkeys or the finest packages of bacon are way down in the bin and never at the top. They dig away in the cooler bins to find what?
At Easter there was a woman rooting around in the ham cooler. I stood by and watched to see if there happened to be a smaller ham. She was doing a good job moving the hams around. She glanced up at me and I told her if I saw a smaller size ham and she didn’t take it out, I might grab it. “I’m looking for a medium size ham,” she responded. “And they all look like they’re extra-large.”
“Yes,” I said. “It seems the stores all think that every family is big with 10 or 12 kids like they had a century ago. They seem to think one size ham fits everyone. And you can’t freeze leftover hams ‘cause they go watery.”
She agreed with that and told of a homourous incident of buying a ham that was too big for her pot. We chuckled. “Why couldn’t the stores cut these giant hams in half or in threes?” I said.
“It’s probably because of the big bone in them and they are big,” she said and puts her hands up to her mouth. We stood there and laughed and if that wasn’t funny enough a young woman over at the frozen turkey bin nearby comes over and says to the woman, “Excuse me, can I borrow your husband for a second. I can’t lift the turkey out of the bin and I need a pair of strong hands.”
It was hilarious. The woman thought we were a married couple. She in her 40s, me late 60s. Married couples conversing and laughing when checking out hams? I don’t think so.
“We’re not married,” says the ham woman with a laugh. “We just met,” I retorted, “here, at the hams.”
The turkey woman didn’t care. She just wanted the big turkey in her cart. She must have 10 or 12 kids by the size of the bird she bought. It was a heavy one.
I was in another grocery store, at the far end of the aisle where the bottled water is kept, when a petite middle age woman comes over to me and asked if I could help her with a case of bottled water. The brand of water she wanted was in behind and I had to move cases around to get the one she wanted. I put the heavy case in her cart and pictured her out in the parking lot finding a guy to load it into her vehicle and then at her house she’d have to get it out of car and put it wherever. Why lug such heavy things when you can get free water from a tap. It’s better too! And this woman didn’t look like she lived in a cabin in the woods with no indoor plumbing.
She thanked me for the help and I said, “Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you used tap water?”
“Oh no,” she retorted.
It sounded like she liked her bottled water no matter what.
