“We got to get the bread and milk!”.
The first blizzard of the season is on its way. When I worked in the grocery business days like today, the proverbial "calm before the storm", we would be slammed. The panic in the shoppers as they lined up before the doors opened in the morning. The only days worse were the ones before Thanksgiving.
They rush the milk aisle, the bread, the meat. Nothing is safe. They have to stock up. They fill their carts with the abandonment of a contest on that old game show "Supermarket Sweep". Except this was real life. This was bloodsport.
Most people these days are already pretty well stocked due to carrying extra inventory in the pandemic. In the spring we could not get supplies and were dealing with the first real shortages in our lives. People older than us had experienced worse I am sure. But fighting over toilet paper? That is not an issue right now. But the panic is still out there I am sure.
We get our groceries delivered now. It has been going on for nine months now. The last day either of us set foot in a market basket was March 14, 2020. I never imagined we would sit here months later and still be ordering our food on Instacart. The winning of the Trump administration shining through every aspect of our life.
I have a memory from my childhood. I am sitting at the table in my Nana’s kitchen. The table was between the two windows, with a mirror on the wall in the middle. My grandfather would sit to my right. My Nana to the left. We are having dinner. I slept over one weekend every December when I was in elementary school and she would take me Christmas shopping. I would use my paper route money to buy presents for the family. My grandparents would pick me up on Friday night (Nana didn’t drive) and I would spend Saturday and after church, on Sunday they would take me back home.
There was always a bottle of ice-cold milk on their table. In my younger days, it was a glass bottle with a paper cap. My grandfather had grown up on one of the last surviving dairy farms in Marblehead, (see the picture above), and when that was sold he had his own milk delivery business. He would bring home fresh milk every day. He had the coolest truck. He would stop at the house so I could dart down the stairs and climb up into it. Then he would race to the end of Vine Street to the lot where he parked it for the night. He left the door open and the ride, probably less than a minute, was one of the most exhilarating things I remember of my younger years. The pavement would fly by, an ashen blur, the empty bottles clanking against each other in the milk crates in the back, the engine whining as it went up the hill, the heat from the engine hump in the cab, smelling of a mixture of oil, exhaust, and sour milk.
No one gets their milk like that anymore. Now you pick it up at the store yourself. It has been that way for years. Unless you are stuck at home in a pandemic. Then you get it delivered. By Instacart. For the last nine months. And counting.
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