Today in Kansas City we had thunder, hail, sleet, and drizzle. I really wanted to just stay home. But my mother (87 years old; don’t tell her I revealed this!), who cannot drive (macular degeneration) was in a state of cabin fever, and so I took her over to Whole Foods in Overland Park. I didn’t think it would be too crowded. I was wrong! I didn’t correctly calculate the whole Super Bowl effect; we got there at around 2pm, which apparently is before the game actually started, so the place was packed. My mother got a little cart, I got a little cart, and she followed behind me, as I slowly found pathways through all the other customers, carts, children, pile-ups around the little food give-aways, and all that. Unfortunately, my mother likes to follow too closely when she is driving her grocery cart, and she repeatedly ran over my heels with her cart. Maybe 8 or 10 times. At one point, I told her that if she did it again, we would both suffer the embarrassment of me committing elder abuse in the grocery store; she giggled. We kept going. Since she can’t see well, I have to explain to her what everything is; she also can’t hear well, so I have to shout the explanations to her. She doesn’t always remember well, either, so I have to do it several times, as to some items. But she does love to get out of her house (it’s a nice house, but she contemptuously refers to it as “that hut”).
My mother got some grapefruit, an orange, a lot of the little shortbread cookies she loves, some shrimp etouffe, some lettuce, and some cheese. She already has a steak at home to cook for dinner, tonight. On the way to the store and back, she enjoyed looking at the houses in Overland Park, noticing that they were all dark, no lights burning inside them (that she could see, anyway) so she remarked, with some satisfaction: “They are all living above their means.” I got her home, and she turned on all her lights.
So, that’s her set, until tomorrow…
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