Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.
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“Oh, you poor ol’ soul. Who let you out of the house alone and unsupervised?”
That was what the look conveyed, a tight-lipped smile of pity and eyes filled with warmheartedness, from a woman young enough to be my daughter upon seeing me standing in a stupor in the middle of Trader Joe’s.
Like Moses wandering the desert for 40 years, I had been roaming the aisles for the better part of 40 long minutes searching for a short shopping list of items still needed for a holiday dinner feast. Finally, my scavenger hunt was down to one thing: bottled Smartwater, which only made me feel dumber by the minute as I retraced my steps, lap after lap, through the store as hopelessly as someone looking for misplaced car keys in the same places again and again.
My befuddlement was largely my lovely wife’s fault. Because I really, really, really do not like to go shopping, a dislike bordering on phobia – bookshops and running shoe stores being exceptions – she has long enabled me by cheerfully handling this chore. As a result, on the rare occasions I pinch-hit grocery shopping, I am like a lab rat trying to navigate a difficult maze for the first time.
It is said that a blind squirrel can sometimes find an acorn, but when I finally located the cashews, hidden behind a tower of bread waiting to be shelved, I became paralyzed by the myriad choices: raw, roasted; unsalted, lightly salted, salted; whole, halved, diced. Not surprisingly, I chose the wrong ones. I do this routinely.
My aversion to grocery shopping is absolutely irrational, especially when I tell you that one of the funnest (not a widely accepted word, but should be) jobs I ever had was two summers in my teens as a box boy at the now long-defunct Noren’s Market.
An example of the fun: more than once after closing, and after the floors had been mopped and the shelves all restocked, a few of us – including the store owner’s adult son, whose idea it was – turned the cereal aisle into a bowling alley by using a sliding frozen turkey to knock down 10 metal canisters of whipped cream. Our ringleader laughingly confessed he once used quarts of milk as the pins, but that resulted in a “Mop-up on aisle 4!” mess. The bowling winner, as I recall, took home the bruised butterball.
Now. With my ego bruised by embarrassment, I thanked the helpful woman after she pointed out, almost apologetically, an expansive display of bottled waters that was in as plain sight as Mr. Poe’s purloined letter on a tabletop. In my defense, the stacked reservoir was beyond the checkout stations at the very front, not in the shopping aisles proper.
As a saving grace, I remembered to bring reusable grocery bags, sturdy ones that stand up and hold their shape like paper sacks of yore, and when a box boy/young man offered to help, I politely said, “I’ve got it.”
With the juggling drink-mixing flair of Brian Flanagan, the bartender character played by Tom Cruise in the movie “Cocktail,” I plucked the items off the conveyor belt with my right hand, flipped each airborne towards the open bags where my left hand caught-and-guided them into place, doing so with Tetris precision, filling them not too heavily nor too lightly, the dormant skill coming back to me as surely as riding a bike with nary a wobble.
“You’ve done this before,” the box boy/young man said with admiration, turning my frustrating excursion into a nostalgically happy one.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.
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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.