Gotta Dance

“He can spend hours meandering  the aisles of a grocery store,” Husband’s mother once told me.

“Well, he does like to cook,” I defended him. “He gets the ingredients for his recipes there.”

She slightly shook her head, and the expression on her face indicated that she thought I was rather young and naïve.  She may have thought I was totally simple-minded.

Actually I had followed him through grocery stores by then and thought it pure genius that he had such a vast knowledge of foods and how he can use them.

It was long before we settled house together while I raised children and did the mundane of keeping a home.

By that stage in our lives, I just want to get in, get my groceries, and get out. Crowds offend me, and I do not get emotionally attached to grocery items.

On the other hand, Husband delights in an hour wandering his favorite health-food store when I am teaching a night class. He checks the produce aisle, inspects the sale items, reads health magazines, and contemplates the specialties.

When he picks me up after school and says he had been at Green Acres, I know his bag will include asparagus and bananas. It is the things he buys over and again that he remembers.

Last week we decided to prepare a menu of Mexican foods.  On the list I included two bags of tortilla chips. He got home without the chips.

“So ,what is the big deal?” you may ask. “Everyone forgets things now and then.”

Now and then?

It is a way of shopping around here. I don’t even bother checking the grocery bags to see what he forgot.

He will eventually spend extra time going back for the items he missed.

It used to be that when he forgot, he made an excuse for it. Now he merely laments.

I think he forgets because he gets distracted. The rows and rows of shelves and hundreds and hundreds of items grab his attention and melt his memory.

In our early years we most always shopped together: groceries, drugstores, and department stores. It was exciting because we spent  thousands of dollars in our minds without opening our wallets.

Where I can block the piped-in music to the back of my mind and attention, it grabs Husband’s attention, and he has to respond to it. Just as his mother said many years ago, he must dance.

Several times in those early years as I read labels from shelved items, he would whisk me away from my task and dance with me down the aisle.

He thought it great fun. On the other hand, I with the two left feet hung on until dancing feet stopped. Had you seen us, I was the one with a bright red face.

Stores are the places where he sees people and make comments, a number of which are really very not nice.

I think he picked up making negative comments as a child growing up with his siblings; they loved to make each other laugh with their critical remarks.

Husband has perfected this habit to an art, and his thirst to do so can be insatiable. Sometimes I tell him that he is plain mean or grossly unkind.

“Don’t flatter me, Atha,” he will tell me.