Grocery Bag Quotes

A Poem By Max White is the color of little bunnies with pink noses. White is the color of fluffy clouds fluffing their way across the sky. White is the color of angel's wings and Angel's wings. White is the color of brand-new ankle socks fresh out of the bag. White is the color of crisp sheets in schmancy hotels. White is the color of every last freaking, gol-danged thing you see for endless miles and miles if you happen to be in Antarctica trying to save the world, which now you aren't so sure you can do because you feel like if you see any more whiteness-Wonder Bread, someone's underwear, teeth-you will completely and totally lose your ever-lovin' mind and wind up pushing a grocery cart full of empty cans around New York City, muttering to yourself. That was my first poem ever. Okay, so it's not Shakespeare, but I liked it.

I do love Trader Joe’s,” I said, smiling at the bag. “Nothing like a grocery store that makes you have to visit another grocery store right after.

I thought about throwing my grocery bags at him and making a run for it, but those avocados were expensive. Damn my love of guacamole.

Nobody believes that the man who says, 'Look, lady, you wanted equality,' to explain why he won't give up his seat to a pregnant woman carrying three grocery bags, a briefcase, and a toddler is seized with the symbolism of idealism.

We go on in her room, where we like to set. I get up in the big chair and she get up on me and smile, bounce a little. "Tell me bout the brown wrapping. And the present." She so excited, she squirming. She has to jump off my lap, squirm a little to get it out. Then she crawl back up. That's her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my Piggly Wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like piece a candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole's Drug Store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside.

The elevator doors opened on the first floor and Van Holtz was waiting there with several bags of groceries in his hands. “Oh. You,” he said. He started to walk in and, without thinking, simply reacting, Bo shoved him back out of the elevator by his head and hit the elevator button again. “You asshole!” Bo heard as the door closed.

[Greens] don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked 'Liberty.' They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.

The problem was that such simple, ordinary bliss seldom formed memories. It was too smooth and silken to adhere. It was the bad stuff, ragged and uneven, that caught, like all those plastic grocery bags stuck in the trees of Baltimore.

Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?

The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to go to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer; getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and then I I I O U E A; eyes racing to the end of Villette (skip the parts about the crétin, sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.

I've been practicing in my mind, trying to find some words, but they've all been taken, all used for ordinary considerations that mean nothing in comparison to what he has meant. We say "Thank you very much" and "I so appreciate what you have done" to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offer us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether?

But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed. When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. When I bring a half dozen gross, mangled kittens home to foster for a few nights and they shit everywhere and pee on your side of the bed. When I go “grocery shopping” and come back with only a bag of Fritos and five pounds of pork tenderloin. When I’m sick and stumbling around the crib with half a roll of toilet paper shoved in each nostril. When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like about it and I call you an uneducated idiot piece of shit. Lovebird city.

Then he reached to an even higher shelf and brought down another plastic grocery bag, this one from Tesco, which is decidedly less upscale. “Now, a smell is going to hit you when I open this up, but don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just the smoke they used to preserve the head.” That’s a phrase you don’t hear too often, so it took a moment for it to sink in.

Every romantic movie with a grocery shopping scene had to have a baguette sticking out of the bag. And a bundle of flowers.

But I just couldn't seem to get excited about the fact that we were sorta having a date.I mean, he'd asked me to go skiing with him, and so here I was, and my heart should have been pounding. But it wasn't. I could have been going to the grocery store to pick up a bag of potatoes for all the thudding it was doing.

Over the years, I’d learned that under the bed was the best place to keep anything I didn’t want found, because there was so much crap—papers, magazines, dirty socks, grocery bags—that no one would ever suspect that anything of value was under there. Sort of like hiding in plain sight.

‎"Repeat that?" "It's National Talk Like a Pirate Day. Didn't you know?" "Somehow I missed the memo." "You mean, 'Somehow I missed the memo, arrr!'" "Precisely. Arr. So, Mrs. Jack... Er, is that still your name? Or, I tremble to ask, have you adopted a pirate identity?" "Arr, matey, of course I have! It's..." She pulled an eggplant from the grocery bag. "Captain Eggplantier." She needed to stop speaking the first words that popped into her mind. "Captain Eggplanteir." He sounded very doubtful. "That's right. A family name. It's Belgian.

Why do magazines do this to women?” Miranda complains now, glaring at Vogue. “It’s all about creating insecurity. Trying to make women feel like they’re not good enough. And when women don’t feel like they’re good enough, guess what?” “What?” I ask, picking up the grocery bag. “Men win. That’s how they keep us down,” she concludes. “Except the problem with women’s magazines is that they’re written by women,” I point out. “That only shows you how deep this thing goes. Men have made women coconspirators in their own oppression. I mean, if you spend all your time worrying about leg hair, how can you possibly have time to take over the world?

That’s her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my Piggly Wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like piece a candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole’s Drug Store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain’t the color a the wrapping that count, it’s what we is inside.

At some point, to counter the list of the dead, I had begun keeping my own list of the living. It was something I noticed Len Fenerman did too. When he was off duty he would note the young girls and elderly women and every other female in the rainbow in between and count them among the things that sustained him. The young girl in the mall whose pale legs had grown too long for her now too-young dress and who had an aching vulnerability that went straight to both Len's and my own heart. Elderly women, wobbling with walkers, who insisted on dyeing their hair unnatural versions of the colors they had in youth. Middle-aged single mothers racing around in grocery stores while their children pulled bags of candy off the shelves. When I saw them, I took count. Living, breathing women. Sometimes I saw the wounded- those who had been beaten by husbands or raped by strangers, children raped by their fathers- and I would wish to intervene somehow. Len saw these wounded women all the time. They were regulars at the station, but even when he went somewhere outside his jurisdiction he could sense them when they came near. The wife in that bait-'n'-tackle shop had no bruises on her face but cowered like a dog and spoke in apologetic whispers. The girl he saw walk the road each time he went upstate to visit his sisters. As the years passed she'd grown leaner, the fat from her cheeks had drained, and sorrow had loaded her eyes in a way that made them hang heavy and hopeless inside her mallowed skin. When she was not there it worried him. When she was there it both depressed and revived him. ~Len Fenerman on stepping back/letting go/giving up pgs 271-272

Hardwick was showing the frustration of a man trying to hold his groceries inside a ripped bag.

Silly that a grocery should depress one—nothing in it but trifling domestic doings—women buying beans—riding children in those grocery go-carts—higgling about an eighth of a pound more or less of squash—what did they get out of it? Miss Willerton wondered. Where was there any chance for self-expression, for creation, for art? All around her it was the same—sidewalks full of people scurrying about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full of little packages—that woman there with the child on the leash, pulling him, jerking him, dragging him away from a window with a jack-o’-lantern in it; she would probably be pulling and jerking him the rest of her life. And there was another, dropping a shopping bag all over the street, and another wiping a child’s nose, and up the street an old woman was coming with three grandchildren jumping all over her, and behind them was a couple walking too close for refinement.

WHAT THE LIVING DO Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking, I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve, I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning. What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it. But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless: I am living. I remember you.

He is the most wonderful person alive. I am suddenly struck by the fact that he is unlike anyone else in the world. How many people could love me like this? How many people would visit every day at six o'clock, without fail? And bring me dinner, and a grocery bag of fruit? Who could? Who would? Why would they?

It is the grimmest os times. Marilyn's death is now visible on the horizon, growing ever closer and permeating every decision, large and small. She drinks Earl Grey breakfast tea, and when I see there are only two tea bags remaining, I go the grocery store to buy some more. But how many? No one else in the house drinks tea. There are twenty bags in each box. I fear she shan't be alive for more than a few more days, yet I purchase two boxes - forty tea bags - a magical plea to keep her with me a bit longer.

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time. I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.

Even the deepest point in the ocean is littered with trash: a grocery bag was recently seen drifting along the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

It is not easy to hurl snowballs while holding on to a plastic bag of groceries, so my first few efforts were subpar, missing their mark. The nine maybe ten nine-maybe-ten-year-olds ridiculed me - if I turned to aim at one, four others outflanked me and shot from the sides and the back. I was, in the parlance of an ancient day, cruising for a bruising, and while a more disdainful teenager would have walked away, and a more aggressive teenager wouls have dropped the bag and kicked some major preteen ass, I kept fighting snowball with snowball, laughing as if Boomer and I were playing a school yard game, flinging my orbs with abandon.

You know what I love? The spaces between I love you. The tap of your fork against the plate and how my cup of wine clicks against our table. The scratchy voice coming from the radio in the other room. The quiet sound of your hand reaching across the table and whispering over mine. How your voice sounds like your mouth on the back of my neck. The soft murmur of our easy conversation. Between these quiet Tuesday night routines, following every comma and right after every pause for breath, is I, love, and you. In the middle of every I love you is a sink full of dishes, whisper of socked feet tangled in white sheets, and gentle kisses against curved cheeks. We lyric ourselves into the laundry that needs to be finished, into the ends of every smile that follows me repeating your name. We write ourselves into the grocery bags we need to carry, the cracks running up our rented walls, the sides of the bed we choose to drag up the sails of heavy eyed dreams. Like the spaces between our fingers, in the spaces between I, love, and you, we wait. The in-betweens have always been my favorite.

I ask you, what is the proper etiquette? Do you tell someone their breast is rolling around on their stomach like a cantaloupe in a plastic grocery bag, or do you wait until they notice?

I reached between the seats to the backseat, where her purse was on the floor. It was the size of a grocery bag and it weighed a ton. "What the hell do you have in this thing?" "Everything." I didn't ask for further explanation. I managed to pull the bag up to the front seat, open it, and find her iPad. I put the bag on the floor between my feet, lest I pull a muscle leveraging it into the back again.

She looked like a hippie who’d been kicked to the side of the road maybe forty years ago, where she’d been collecting trash and rags ever since. She wore a dress made of tie-dyed cloth, ripped-up quilts, and plastic grocery bags. Her frizzy mop of hair was gray-brown, like root-beer foam, tied back with a peace-sign headband. Warts and moles covered her face. When she smiled, she showed exactly three teeth.

thin, sticklike men, leaning forward from the seat of a bicycle, as they pedal along a carriage bearing a pyramid of middle-class flesh—some fat man with his fat wife and all their shopping bags and groceries.

When the elevator doors open there is only one other person inside it, a homeless man with electric blue sunglasses and six plastic grocery bags filled with rags. "Close the doors, dammit," he yells as soon as we step inside. "Can't you see I'm blind?" [...] From the back, the homeless man shoves between us, his bounty rustling in his arms. "Stop yelling," he shouts. though we stand in utter silence. "Can't you tell that I'm deaf?

When I was a kid growing up in the country, my dad taught me that the best way to carry something heavy is to carry something equally heavy in the other hand. From personal experience, this applies to buckets of water, overstuffed suitcases, concrete blocks, grocery bags filled with large cans of Spaghetti-Os, and dense emotions. Decades later, I remain a distracted and forgetful student of balance. Gratitude and sorrow aren't, as I once believed, mutually exclusive. They pair quite well together, one in each hand. It can be easy to ebb into the dark seas of sadness, staring too long at grief and disunity. The trick is to keep filling the other bucket.

Wonder then is a force of liberation, it makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for. Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again. If you really want to get free, find God on the subway, find God in the soap bubble. Me, I meet God in the taste of my grandmas chicken, I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simones voice, I see the face of God in the boney teenager bagging my groceries and why shouldn't I? My faith is held together by wonder, by ever defined commitment to presence and paying attention.

It’s all right,” I said, spying what was inside his bag. “Went grocery shopping?” “I picked up a few things,” he said amicably, but then a silence stretched out between us. I got my key out, wanting to say so much more but not knowing where to start. “I see you did too.” Oh my God. I covered up the side of my bag, even though I knew he’d already seen the big yellow rooster with Cocks-A-Lot emblazoned on the side. I really had to have a word with Terry about his packaging.

My daughter married a Italian. His name is Sergio. When they come stay with me, he and I have our kitchen dialogues... in Russian...We'll talk until morning. Sergio thinks that Russians love to suffer, that that's the trick of the Russian soul. For us, suffering is '' a personal struggle,'' '' the path for salvation''. Italians aren't like that, they don't want to suffer. They love life, they believe is given to them to enjoy. Like...my daughter and Sergio will come home from the supermarket, and he'll be carrying the grocery bags. In the evening, she can play piano while he makes dinner. For me it was nothing like that: he'd try to take the bags from me, and I'd grab them away ''I'll do it. You shouldn't''. He'd come into the kitchen and I'd tell him, '' this isn't your place''.

And even though she couldn’t write, Kya had found a way to label her specimens. Her talent had matured and now she could draw, paint, and sketch anything. Using chalks or watercolors from the Five and Dime, she sketched the birds, insects, or shells on grocery bags and attached them to her samples.

And yet I thought of him almost every day. The Russian novels I had to read for school reminded me of him; Russian novels, and seven pillars of wisdom, and so too the Lower East Side—tattoo parlors and pierogi shops, pot in the air, old polish ladies swaying side to side with grocery bags and kids smoking in the doorways of bars along Second Avenue.

The upper body sat atop two thick loaves of bread.  Between those whole-grain thighs hung a long, thick cucumber and a pair of smooth, ripe nectarines.

A twitching movement drew her eyes higher, and she saw that his cucumber cock had begun to rise, angling upward like a flagpole jutting from the side of a building.

Their faces are familiar, but you don't get names and life stories when you're bagging folks' groceries.

I don’t think you bought enough beer,” my dad commented in Spanish. I shot him a look over my shoulder as I poured another two bags of ice over the bottles. “Pa, it’s Josh’s birthday. Nobody needs to be getting drunk. Come on. I bought like half the sodas, waters, and juice boxes that the grocery store carried. Everyone can get Capri Sun wasted if they want.

I thought about Mother’s life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway - new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at a Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption she had. And I thought, all these things don’t seem that much like life, when you’re doing them, they’re just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you’ll find yourself, then you’ll find yourself, in life. It’s not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, youre comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you’re dying, Mother is dying, and it’s just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you’ve had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O god doesn’t it, you’d break your heart wanting back there.

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out. Question your tea spoons. What is there under your wallpaper? How many movements does it take to dial a phone number? Why? Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?

The prescription for spiritual transformation has often been too individualistically oriented. We are encouraged to engage in spiritual disciplines so that we might have the power to do what we can’t do by will power alone. But what happens when people don’t have the “will power” to engage spiritual disciples on a consistent basis? Our character is left untended. “In a wild world like ours, your character, left untended, will become a stale room, an obnoxious child, a vacant lot filled with thorns, weeds, broken bottles, raggedy grocery bags, and dog droppings. Your deepest channels will silt in, and you will feel yourself shallowing. You’ll become a presence neither you nor others will enjoy, and you and they will spend more and more time and energy trying to be anywhere else.”[1] So what are we to do?

She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica's store sells in April.. there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida... but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrink-wrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica's little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then trows them in the same trash bin where her corn husks and citrus rinds go.

It’s not only this village, Mr. Baker. Just because you don’t experience prejudice in your everyday doesn’t stop it from existing for the rest of us.” SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING, the sign on the bus had read. And everywhere, really, wasn’t it? More and more lately. On buses. In newspapers. Billboards. Radio ads. Why, he’d even seen the words printed on a grocery bag of all places. “No,” he said slowly. “I don’t suppose it does.

…Ten minutes later I pulled the van into the loading dock behind the hospital and removed my gurney. It was a bit of a farce to use a full-sized adult gurney for a few babies, but I didn’t think walking through the corridors with my arms filled with them was a particularly good plan either. I had an image of fumbling and dropping them, like a stressed out mom carrying too many grocery bags to avoid the extra trip in from the car.

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers —so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the thin plastic handles longer and longer and you know it’s only a matter of time until bottom suddenly splits. There is no single, unimpeachable word for that vague sensation of something moving away from you as it exceeds its elastic capacity —which is too bad, because that is the word I would like to use to describe standing on the street chatting with an old friend as the awareness grows in me that he is no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance, a person with whom I never made the effort— until this moment, when as we say goodbye I think we share a feeling of relief, a recognition that we have reached the end of a pretense, though to tell the truth what I already am thinking about is my gratitude for language— how it will stretch just so much and no farther; how there are some holes it will not cover up; how it will move, if not inside, then around the circumference of almost anything— how, over the years, it has given me back all the hours and days, all the plodding love and faith, all the misunderstandings and secrets I have willingly poured into it.

It ain’t what he’s done to get here, son. It’s what’s inside him. Call it a curse or a devilment. Whatever it is, it lives in some people. There’s not many types like ’em in this world. But Nate’s one of ’em. He got that thing in him, son, deep inside. It’s too bad really, on account of he’s a good man, my kind of man. But a man can’t control what’s in him once it’s turned loose no more than you or I can hold on to a bag of groceries if we was to get hit by a bus.

He was doing well too: junior quality control at Dimple Robotics, testing the Empathy Module in the automated Customer Fulfillment models. People didn’t just want their groceries bagged, he used to explain to Charmaine: they wanted a total shopping experience, and that included a smile. Smiles were hard; they could turn into grimaces or leers, but if you got a smile right, they’d spend extra for it. Amazing to remember, now, what people would once spend extra for.

We say 'Thank you very much' and 'I so appreciate what you have done' to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offer us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether? And if I use the same old words, did I change what I was trying to say? Did I make it a same old thing?

The house is designed in the way of old Florida houses to be as dark as possible. The blinds are down and brown linoleum puffs up under my bare feet. By the door, there is a pile of shoes, and the floor beneath is covered in gray grit, relics from beach days. The furniture is mostly dark wood, chipped, missing knobs or panels, and full of plastic cups, dishes, newspapers, wires, grocery bags. Socks, notebooks, flashcards, receipts, coins are littered along the hallway. I notice a few curled shells of dead roaches in the carpet borders.

he believes it is, overall, a wiser approach to life’s problems. After all, how can you pick up something new—a new career, a new relationship, a new outlook on life—without first letting go of the old? It’s like trying to pick up a bag of groceries when your hands are already full.

A passerby discovered a toddler sitting on the chilly concrete on an alley, playing with the wrapper of a cat food container. By the time she was brought to the hospital, her limbs were blue with cold. She was a wizened little thing, too thin, made of sticks. She knew only one word, her name. Wren. As she grew, her skin retained a slight bluish cast, resembling skimmed milk. Her foster parents bundled her up in jackets and coats and mittens and gloves, but unlike her sister, she was never cold. Her lip colour changed like a mood ring, staying bluish and purple even in summer, turning pink only when close to a fire. And she could play in the snow for hours, constructing elaborate tunnels and mock-fighting with icicles, coming inside only when called. Although she appeared bony and anaemic, she was strong. By the time she was eight, she could lift bags of groceries that her adoptive mother struggled with. By the time she was nine, she was gone.

And meanwhile everybody's wondering what this old woman with half her face drooping onto her shoulder is doing bagging their groceries. You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. The invisibility of it." "Let's not romanticize the cubicle," Pip said. "This is the terrible thing about bodies. They're so visible, so visible.

My premonition was not mistaken. When I got home, the cat came out to greet me. Just as I opened the front door, he let out a loud meow as if he had been waiting all day and came up to me, bent-tip tail held high. It was Noboru Wataya, missing now for almost a year. I set the bag of groceries down and scooped him up in my arms.

Katsuobushi is dried bonito, or skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis). Chunks of the fish are smoked and dried into hard blocks, which keep for several months. Along with kombu, katsuobushi is the other main ingredient used in making dashi. Throwing the whole block of fish in the water won't work; it must first be shaved into flakes with a tool that resembles an inverted carpenter's plane. However, almost no one actually prepares the flakes by hand anymore; home cooks buy bags of them at the grocery store or use instant powder preparations instead. Although bonito is the most popular type of dried fish for making dashi, many others are used as well, such as mackerel (sababushi), bluefin tuna (magurobushi), and sardines (niboshi).

Isabelle's moods began to vary with alarming speed. She wondered if she had always been this way and simply failed to notice. No. Good heavens, you noticed something like this: driving to the A&P feeling collected and cozy, as though your clothes fit around you exactly right, and by the time you drove home feeling completely undone, because as you walked across the parking lot the smell of the grocery bag you held in your arms mingled with the smell of spring and produced some scrape of longing in your heart. Frankly, it was exhausting. Because for all those moments of hope that God was near, of some bursting, some widening seeming to take place in her heart, Isabelle had other moments that could only be described as rage. (117)

Used to be when a bird flew into a window, Milly and Twiss got a visit. Milly would put a kettle on and set out whatever culinary adventure she'd gone on that day. For morning arrivals, she offered her famous vanilla drop biscuits and raspberry jam. Twiss would get the medicine bag from the hall closet and sterilize the tools she needed, depending on the seriousness of the injury. A wounded limb was one thing. A wounded crop was another. People used to come from as far away as Reedsburg and Wilton. Milly would sit with them while Twiss patched up the 'poor old robin' or the 'sweet little meadowlark.' Over the years, the number of visitors had dwindled. Now that the grocery store sold ready-bake biscuits and jelly in all the colors of the rainbow, people didn't bother as much about birds.

Soon after World War II, a tired-looking woman entered a store and asked the owner for enough food to make a Christmas dinner for her children. When he inquired how much she could afford, she answered, “My husband was killed in the war. Truthfully, I have nothing to offer but a little prayer.” The man was not very sentimental, for a grocery store cannot be run like a breadline. So he said, “Write your prayer on a paper.” To his surprise she plucked a little folded note out of her pocket and handed it to him, saying, “I already did that.” As the grocer took the paper, an idea struck him. Without even reading the prayer, he put it on the weight side of his old-fashioned scales, saying, “We shall see how much food this is worth.” To his surprise, the scale would not go down when he put a loaf of bread on the other side. To his even greater astonishment, it would not balance when he added many more items. Finally he blurted out, “Well, that’s all the scales will hold anyway. Here’s a bag. You’ll have to put them in yourself. I’m busy.” With a tearful “thank you,” the lady went happily on her way. The grocer later found that the mechanism of the scales was out of order, but as the years passed, he often wondered if that really was the answer to what had occurred. Why did the woman have the prayer already written to satisfy his unpremeditated demands? Why did she come at exactly the time the mechanism was broken? Frequently he looked at that slip of paper upon which the woman’s prayer was written, for amazingly enough, it read, “Please, dear Lord, give us this day our daily bread!” —Henry Bosch

Hike 1.5 miles on a hilly trail. Get up off the floor under your own power, using a maximum of one arm for support. Pick up a young child from the floor. Carry two five-pound bags of groceries for five blocks. Lift a twenty-pound suitcase into the overhead compartment of a plane. Balance on one leg for thirty seconds, eyes open. (Bonus points: eyes closed, fifteen seconds.) Have sex. Climb four flights of stairs in three minutes. Open a jar. Do thirty consecutive jump-rope skips.

One of his great pleasures is overdoing it with the groceries, involving several stops at little markets, cheese shops, the East Haven lady who makes her own Thai BBQ sauce and fries up a bag of plantains for him while he waits. At our old house, we had a refrigerator just for condiments. Even now, my older daughter always says, How can you be only two people and never have an empty fridge? That’s Brian, I say, buyer of burrata, soppressata, Meyer lemons, white peaches, Benton’s ham.

When I got home, I unloaded all the groceries, stuffing them in wherever I could find an open space. I hoped Charlie wouldn't mind. I wrapped potatoes in foil and stuck them in the oven to bake, covered a steak in marinade and balanced it on top of a carton of eggs in the fridge. When I was finished with that, I took my book bag upstairs. Before starting my homework, I changed into a pair of dry sweats, pulled my damp hair up into a pony-tail, and checked my e-mail for the first time.

Even though they were staring at each other across a busy street, the little old lady and the gang of adolescent skinheads might just as well have been nose to nose. They stared. No one blinked. No one backed down. This little old lady had never in her life backed down before mere adolescents. Her daughter had what was perhaps a better grasp of what was perhaps reality. “Mama,” she said as she shifted her bag of groceries to her other arm, “Come on. Let’s go. They’re skinheads. Probably up from Bircher country.

You coming with us?” “Not this time. I’ve got a different errand to run.” “Okay.” She reached up and tucked my hair behind my ear affectionately. “Be careful. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to the worst Spanish student in the history of the language.” I laughed. “No probelmo.” By the time I found Reth, he was deep in discussion with the banshees, their discordant voices chiding him for something or other. I hated to pull him away from getting chewed out, but it had to be done. Another faeries, all spring and mint green, was with him. After briefly explaining about the location of the dancers, she left to retrieve them. I wanted to send Reth because I trusted him more, but he didn’t look good. I’d keep him with me so I could keep an eye on him. He wouldn’t ask for help—not from anyone—but I’d be there no matter what. When we got back to the house, Lend was already there with several grocery bags full of bread. Reth turned his head away as though the very sight of it was distasteful. “Even the food of this world is nothing but decay.” Clearly he had never tried pizza, because honestly. We linked hands—my ex-boyfriend, my boyfriend, and my former friend-then-enemy-then-friend and I—and walked through a door to see if maybe empty carbs were good for something after all.

Let me ask you three questions,” he said. “And then you’ll see it my way. Question One: What’s the worst thing that you have ever done to someone? It’s okay. You don’t have to confess it out loud. Question Two: What’s the worst criminal act that has ever been committed against you? Question Three: Which of the two was the most damaging for the victim?” The worst criminal act that has ever been committed against me was burglary. How damaging was it? Hardly damaging at all. I felt theoretically violated at the idea of a stranger wandering through my house. But I got the insurance money. I was mugged one time. I was eighteen. The man who mugged me was an alcoholic. He saw me coming out of a supermarket. “Give me your alcohol,” he yelled. He punched me in the face, grabbed my groceries, and ran away. There wasn’t any alcohol in my bag. I was upset for a few weeks, but it passed. And what was the worst thing I had ever done to someone? It was a terrible thing. It was devastating for them. It wasn’t against the law. Clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners—young, black—have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time—bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers.

I admitted it to myself. I had all kinds of dreams. I wanted to go skiing again and get fast and good. I wanted to go to London too someday. I wanted to fall in love.i wanted to own a bookstore or a restraunt and have people come in and say, "Hi, Cedar," and I wanted from ride a bike down the streets in a little town in a country where people spoke a different language. Maybe my bike would a basket and maybe the basket would have flowers in it. I wanted to live in a big city and wear lipstick and my hair in bun and buy groceries and carry them home in a paper bag. My high heels would click when I climbed the stairs to my apartment. I wanted to stand at the edge of a lake and listen.

inside “VIRTUE,” according to George Bernard Shaw, “is insufficient temptation.” But new research on the consumption patterns of the environmentally minded suggests that virtue and self-indulgence often go hand-in-hand. A recent paper* by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. But the eco-shoppers were also more likely to buy sweets, ice cream and crisps. Psychologists call this sort of behaviour “moral

And I thought, all these things don't seem that much like life, when you're doing them, they're just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you'll find yourself, then you'll find yourself, in life. It's not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you're comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you're dying, Mother is dying, and it's just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you're had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.

Everyone around you is just doing their best to make it through today. Because tomorrow will come, and you have to repeat the same day over and over again.  As a kid, you go into the grocery store, and it feels like a never-ending castle filled with different rooms. You feel like every time you enter, there’s always something new to discover. But as an adult, you’ll start to get mad when they change the aisles around because now you can't find the damn oranges!  I never imagined that I would one day be employed in the magical grocery store my family and I went to every Saturday. I never imagined that the place I swore I’d never end up, would soon become the place where I was stuck. Emotionally and physically. As I watch customers trickle in and out, I create stories for each of them. The guy holding flowers and staring at his watch is probably late for a date. The young woman reading the get well soon greeting cards might have had someone close to her get hurt—or maybe they're sick.  All the stories I create for these people make me happy. They’re out in the world. They’re living whereas I’m only existing. I have nobody to share my oranges with. I have nobody to blow out candles in front of. I’m directionless and alone. This big magical place I once thought of is now holding me hostage. I had love once. I had people around me once. I had someone to grocery shop with on the weekends and laugh with when our groceries dropped through the bag. I once had someone to argue with over who was allowed to push the cart. I once had someone who would peel my oranges for me when we got home. Now, my oranges sit and rot in the bowl on my small kitchen table. I have to throw them away most of the time. Yet, I still buy them because it reminds me of something I once had. Is that all life is?

Hey beautiful,” Trey answers, sounding exhausted. “Hey you.” My heart clenches in my chest from the sound of his voice. He breathes heavily. “I’m sitting here, shirt off, beer in hand, TV on, and I feel so fucking empty.” The image of him lying on the couch we bought together, his beautiful body stretched out across the cushions, makes me ache in places I haven’t ached in a long time. I want him so bad. “I’m missing my girl tucked against my chest.” “I would give anything to be there right now,” I answer honestly. Sighing, he asks, “Remember that piece of spaghetti I threw on the ceiling the night before you left?” “Yeah.” I smile to myself, thinking about that night. Trey insisted upon making spaghetti and meatballs for me. He came home with a grocery bag full of pasta, spaghetti sauce, and pre-made meatballs. When cooking the noodles, he told me an “old wives’ tale.” He said if you throw the noodles to the ceiling and it sticks, then the pasta is done. What he didn’t realize is if that pasta never comes down, you overcooked it. “It fell this morning. Scared the shit out of me. I thought it was a spider trying to bury itself in my hair while I was making eggs.” A laugh bursts out of me as I think about Trey bouncing around the apartment, spaghetti in hair thinking it was a spider. “Oh no. Miss Pasta-relli finally fell?” “She did and that squirrely bitch knew exactly what she was doing, too. Trying to scare the crap right out of me.” “Seems like she did.” I chuckle. “But I got the last laugh when I turned the trash compactor on. Her little pasta self squiggled down the drain. Revenge never felt so sweet.” Still laughing, I shake my head. “Is this what your life has come to? Fighting with old, overcooked pasta?” “I’m telling you, Amelia, with you gone, I’ve lost my damn mind.” “Sounds like it

But here’s the dilemma: Why is “how-to” so alluring when, truthfully, we already know “how to” yet we’re still standing in the same place longing for more joy, connection, and meaning? Most everyone reading this book knows how to eat healthy. I can tell you the Weight Watcher points for every food in the grocery store. I can recite the South Beach Phase I grocery shopping list and the glycemic index like they’re the Pledge of Allegiance. We know how to eat healthy. We also know how to make good choices with our money. We know how to take care of our emotional needs. We know all of this, yet … We are the most obese, medicated, addicted, and in-debt Americans EVER. Why? We have more access to information, more books, and more good science—why are we struggling like never before? Because we don’t talk about the things that get in the way of doing what we know is best for us, our children, our families, our organizations, and our communities. I can know everything there is to know about eating healthy, but if it’s one of those days when Ellen is struggling with a school project and Charlie’s home sick from school and I’m trying to make a writing deadline and Homeland Security increased the threat level and our grass is dying and my jeans don’t fit and the economy is tanking and the Internet is down and we’re out of poop bags for the dog—forget it! All I want to do is snuff out the sizzling anxiety with a pumpkin muffin, a bag of chips, and chocolate. We don’t talk about what keeps us eating until we’re sick, busy beyond human scale, desperate to numb and take the edge off, and full of so much anxiety and self-doubt that we can’t act on what we know is best for us. We don’t talk about the hustle for worthiness that’s become such a part of our lives that we don’t even realize that we’re dancing. When I’m having one of those days that I just described, some of the anxiety is just a part of living, but there are days when most of my anxiety grows out of the expectations I put on myself. I want Ellen’s project to be amazing. I want to take care of Charlie without worrying about my own deadlines. I want to show the world how great I am at balancing my family and career. I want our yard to look beautiful. I want people to see us picking up our dog’s poop in biodegradable bags and think, My God! They are such outstanding citizens. There are days when I can fight the urge to be everything to everyone, and there are days when it gets the best of me.

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

1. Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By the most astounding stroke of luck an infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life,nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special. 2. But not that special. There are five billion other people on this planet, every one of them just as important, just as central to the great scheme of things, as you are. Don't ever make the horrible, unworthy mistake of thinking yourself more vital and significant than anyone else. Nearly all the people you encounter in life merit your consideration. Many of them will be there to help you-to deliver your pizza, bag your groceries, clean up the motel room you have made such a lavish mess of. If you are not in the habit of being extremely nice to these people, then get in the habit now. Millions more people, most of whom you will never meet or even see, won't help you, indeed can't help you, may not even be able to help themselves. They deserve your compassion. We live in a sadly heartless age, when we seem to have less and less space in our consciences and our pocketbooks for the poor and lame and dispossessed, particularly those in far-off lands.

They had her in Intensive Care. I sat outside Intensive Care in their slick little awful waiting room. They had red slippery chairs, cheap covering, and a stand full of pebbles with green plastic leaves growing up. I sat there hour after hour and read The Reader's Digest. The jokes. Thinking this is how it is, this is it, really, she's dying. Now, this moment, behind those doors, dying. Nothing stops or holds off for it the way you somehow and against all your sense believe it will. I thought about Mother's life, the part of it I knew. Going to work every day, first on the ferry then on the bus. Shopping at the old Red-and-White then at the new Safeway -- new, fifteen years old! Going down to the Library one night a week, taking me with her, and we would come home on the bus with our load of books and a bag of grapes we bought at the Chinese place, for a treat. Wednesday afternoons too when my kids were small and I went over there to drink coffee and she rolled us cigarettes on that contraption she had. And I thought, all these things don't seem that much like life, when you're doing them, they're just what you do, how you fill up your days, and you think all the time something is going to crack open, and you'll find yourself, then you'll find yourself, in life. It's not even that you particularly want this to happen, this cracking open, you're comfortable enough the way things are, but you do expect it. Then you're dying, Mother is dying, and it's just the same plastic chairs and plastic plants and ordinary day outside with people getting groceries and what you've had is all there is, and going to the Library, just a thing like that, coming back up the hill on the bus with books and a bag of grapes seems now worth wanting, O God doesn't it, you'd break your heart wanting back there.

As Frank promised, there was no other public explosion. Still. The multiple times when she came home to find him idle again, just sitting on the sofa staring at the rug, were unnerving. She tried; she really tried. But every bit of housework—however minor—was hers: his clothes scattered on the floor, food-encrusted dishes in the sink, ketchup bottles left open, beard hair in the drain, waterlogged towels bunched on bathroom tiles. Lily could go on and on. And did. Complaints grew into one-sided arguments, since he wouldn’t engage. “Where were you?” “Just out.” “Out where?” “Down the street.” Bar? Barbershop? Pool hall. He certainly wasn’t sitting in the park. “Frank, could you rinse the milk bottles before you put them on the stoop?” “Sorry. I’ll do it now.” “Too late. I’ve done it already. You know, I can’t do everything.” “Nobody can.” “But you can do something, can’t you?” “Lily, please. I’ll do anything you want.” “What I want? This place is ours.” The fog of displeasure surrounding Lily thickened. Her resentment was justified by his clear indifference, along with his combination of need and irresponsibility. Their bed work, once so downright good to a young woman who had known no other, became a duty. On that snowy day when he asked to borrow all that money to take care of his sick sister in Georgia, Lily’s disgust fought with relief and lost. She picked up the dog tags he’d left on the bathroom sink and hid them away in a drawer next to her bankbook. Now the apartment was all hers to clean properly, put things where they belonged, and wake up knowing they’d not been moved or smashed to pieces. The loneliness she felt before Frank walked her home from Wang’s cleaners began to dissolve and in its place a shiver of freedom, of earned solitude, of choosing the wall she wanted to break through, minus the burden of shouldering a tilted man. Unobstructed and undistracted, she could get serious and develop a plan to match her ambition and succeed. That was what her parents had taught her and what she had promised them: To choose, they insisted, and not ever be moved. Let no insult or slight knock her off her ground. Or, as her father was fond of misquoting, “Gather up your loins, daughter. You named Lillian Florence Jones after my mother. A tougher lady never lived. Find your talent and drive it.” The afternoon Frank left, Lily moved to the front window, startled to see heavy snowflakes powdering the street. She decided to shop right away in case the weather became an impediment. Once outside, she spotted a leather change purse on the sidewalk. Opening it she saw it was full of coins—mostly quarters and fifty-cent pieces. Immediately she wondered if anybody was watching her. Did the curtains across the street shift a little? The passengers in the car rolling by—did they see? Lily closed the purse and placed it on the porch post. When she returned with a shopping bag full of emergency food and supplies the purse was still there, though covered in a fluff of snow. Lily didn’t look around. Casually she scooped it up and dropped it into the groceries. Later, spread out on the side of the bed where Frank had slept, the coins, cold and bright, seemed a perfectly fair trade. In Frank Money’s empty space real money glittered. Who could mistake a sign that clear? Not Lillian Florence Jones.

Spar Grocery: Winter 2000”. I see them at nightfall, coming from grey, dilapidated flats, Shuffling in trainers and tracksuits, their crumpled lives in a carrier bag, Drawn like moths to the bright lights of the store, To top up on provisions: a carton of milk, a tin of beans, a sliced loaf and

Whenever the cashier at the grocery store asks my dad if he would like the milk in a bag he replies, “No, just leave it in the carton!

One of the more interesting work-alignment tactics I came across while writing this book was that of Sheryl Woodhouse-Keese, who owns an earth-friendly stationery outfit called Twisted Limb Paperworks in Bloomington, Indiana. Woodhouse-Keese put her headquarters on a ten-acre farm (her house is at the other end), and started growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, herbs, melons, and so forth. But, of course, there turned out to be a huge overlap between people who wanted to work at a recycled paper stationery company, and people who are interested in small scale, sustainable agriculture. So, quickly, the farm “turned from my personal garden into an employee garden,” Woodhouse-Keese says. Now, many Twisted Limb Paperworks employees take their breaks in the garden while pulling weeds, and load up bags of produce into their trunks rather than stopping by the grocery store on the way home. While the employees don’t necessarily use the garden as a social outlet or place for meetings (as Woodhouse-Keese points out, it gets hot in the summer), its existence lets everyone fit gardening into their lives in a way that might not otherwise be possible given how busy employees at small businesses tend to be.

Swinging the kettlebell tones the core and the muscles of the posterior chain, such as hamstrings and glutes. The swing replicates natural work movements of which we used to do a lot more, such as shoveling. The basic lifting motion is part of everyday need, such as lifting a child or hefting a bag of groceries.

they’ll still believe the same things that caused the war in the first place—socialism, communism, vegan grocery bags, twenty-seven genders, guns are evil, America has never been great, never hit back, government should be in charge of everything, all of it. That’s not peace or victory, that’s just a temporary ceasefire. Their beliefs aren’t just evil, they’re a poison, a cancer, a rot. Winning doesn’t just mean the war stops, we want to have a healthy country after all this.

There is no such thing as healthy adjustment anymore. We’re all carrying around reusable grocery bags of trauma simply as a product of being alive in this world and pretending everything is fine.

To be a human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation. It is a challenge to believe that this right is ours. Wonder, then, is a force of liberation. It makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for. Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again. If you really want to get free, find God on the subway. Find God in the soap bubble. Me? I meet God in the taste of my gramma's chicken. I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simone's voice. I see the face of God in the bony teenager bagging my groceries. And why shouldn't I? My faith is held together by wonder—by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colors, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.

MAUDE LAURENT, A TALL, slender, sixteen-year-old girl with smooth brown skin, was quickly walking in Carvin’s deserted streets in the rain. Her long eyelashes drooped to avoid the droplets from entering her wide brown eyes. Her dark natural hair, usually held back in a bun, had frizzled with the rain and rebellious locks of hair covered her forehead under her soaked hood. She could barely see where she was going, but walked steadily nonetheless, her step firm and graceful at the same time although she carried two heavy grocery bags.

Pittsburgh. The late 1930s. Fear was rampant as to where the next meal would come from. There was little in the way of excitement, just the day to day struggle to make ends meet. Little or no surprise existed, and hope was at a low ebb. In the middle of this, a man sold his life insurance policy. He bought a new car, a fur coat for his wife, boxing gloves for his sons, and four full bags of groceries for the family. He drove up the street for the neighborhood to see. The celebration was deafening. That was my father, and he taught me this lesson in scarcity. I never forgot it. Thanks, George.

I loved shopping on rue Montorgueil so much that I often carted home more food- slices of spinach and goat cheese tourtes; jars of lavender honey and cherry jam, tiny, wild handpicked strawberries; fraises aux bois- than one person alone could possibly eat. Now at least I had an excuse to fill up my canvas shopping bag. "Doesn't it smell amazing?" I gushed once we had crossed the threshold of my favorite boulangerie. Mom, standing inside the doorway clutching her purse, just nodded as she filled her lungs with the warm, yeasty air, her eyes alight with a brightness I didn't remember from home. With a fresh-from-the-oven baguette in hand, we went to the Italian épicerie, where from the long display of red peppers glistening in olive oil, fresh raviolis dusted in flour, and piles and piles of salumi, soppressata, and saucisson, which we chose some thinly sliced jambon blanc and a mound of creamy mozzarella. At the artisanal bakery, Eric Kayser, we took our time selecting three different cakes from the rows of lemon tarts, chocolate éclairs, and what I was beginning to recognize as the French classics: dazzling gâteaux with names like the Saint-Honoré, Paris-Brest, and Opéra. Voila, just like that, we had dinner and dessert. We headed back to the tree house- those pesky six flights were still there- and prepared for our modest dinner chez-moi. Mom set the table with the chipped white dinner plates and pressed linen napkins. I set out the condiments- Maille Dijon mustard, tart and grainy with multicolored seeds; organic mayo from my local "bio" market; and Nicolas Alziari olive oil in a beautiful blue and yellow tin- and watched them get to it. They sliced open the baguette, the intersection of crisp and chewy, and dressed it with slivers of ham and dollops of mustard. I made a fresh mozzarella sandwich, drizzling it with olive oil and dusting it with salt and pepper.

She had already tied on her apron and started tapping notes into her phone as Daisy laid out the ingredients: a whole kosher chicken; a bottle of olive oil, a pound of butter, a lemon. Onions, garlic, shallots, shiitake mushrooms, Parmesan cheese, and a container of arborio rice; fresh rosemary and thyme, a bag of carrots, a half-pound of asparagus, and a half-pound of sugar snap peas. That was for dinner. For pantry staples, she'd gotten flour, white and brown sugar, kosher salt and Maldon salt, pepper, chili, and paprika; for the refrigerator: milk, eggs, and half-and-half, and, for a housewarming gift, a copy of Ruth Reichl's My Kitchen Year and two quarts of her own homemade chicken stock.

escaped from a Russian prison camp?” “Yes. I know cement from this time.” “Then you’re hired.” Chapter Forty The Martels rented a small house in Baker within walking distance of Emil’s work site. Adeline found a job cleaning rooms at the only motel in town for fifty cents an hour. Walt officially changed his formal name from Waldemar to Walter and found work after school at the butcher shop and at the movie theater as a projectionist. Will changed his name from Wilhelm to William and called himself “Bill.” He bagged groceries at the local store and swept the theater floors. They pooled their money, saving until they could afford to buy a small lot across from the high school and pay to have a basement foundation dug and poured. Emil worked at the hospital site and other projects during the day and, with Bill, put down a subfloor on top of the foundation in the evenings. They also installed plumbing, electrical lines, and a woodstove in the basement.

I went mad and then I was 45, which was older than I thought I'd ever be, and then I was 50, which was older than I thought I'd ever be when I was 45, and then on the night of my 57th birthday I went blind and I stood naked in the middle of my bedroom and all of a sudden I was at the center of the universe, facing out. No more trying to get in anyone else's head. Oh, what does she think of me? What does that man bagging my groceries think of--nope. It's just me! Alone in the universe! Standing in the center of my own life. I can't even look in a mirror. It's just me and my thoughts and sometimes I have no thoughts at all. Sometimes I just lie in bed in the morning and think about nothing. Imagine that. Before you take a break, imagine that. Sitting in the center of your own life with no thoughts at all about what other people are thinking. They can think whatever they like. You can all think whatever you like about me.

Any asshole can fall in love on a private beach in a tropical locale, surrounded by lush flora and adorable fauna, shining suns and chirping birds. Give me ten uninterrupted minutes without some ding-dong demanding something or subtweeting me or making me do work and I could fall in love with my worst fucking enemy. Seriously. What’s not to love about being expertly lit and drunk at two in the afternoon? But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed. When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. When I bring a half dozen gross, mangled kittens home to foster for a few nights and they shit everywhere and pee on your side of the bed. When I go “grocery shopping” and come back with only a bag of Fritos and five pounds of pork tenderloin. When I’m sick and stumbling around the crib with half a roll of toilet paper shoved in each nostril. When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like about it and I call you an uneducated idiot piece of shit. Lovebird city.

Why can't people just be nice to each other? I don't understand it, because nice is good, right? Nice means helping old people across the road and spending hours for a lost puppy. It's holding the door open for somebody and getting rewarded with a smile from a stressed mother juggling kids and grocery bags. Yet people say it with a wrinkle on their nose, holding the vowel sound for a bit too long. We should bring nice back. We need it more than ever.

I'm not sure why, but my instinct today is to go with the taste of home. Some chicken thighs, some poblano peppers, a bag of rice, Mexican crema (I'm surprised to find the real stuff, not that whipped-cream-looking shit they serve in Tex-Mex restaurants). Tortillas and Oaxaca cheese. I lose myself in the aisles, fingers trailing over heirloom tomatoes, herbs and produce and packets of exotic spices I can never find at home.

I rang out a couple more customers as I thought about it, and...he slowly walked up to the counter and set down two spools of line. I should really figure out what the point of one being thicker than the other was. “Hi, Mr. Rhodes,” I greeted him with a smile. He’d taken his sunglasses off and slid them through one of the gaps between the buttons of his work shirt. His gray eyes were steady on me as he said in that same uninterested, stern tone from before, “Hi.” I took the first package of fishing line and scanned it. “How is your day going?” “Fine.” I scanned the next package and figured I might as well go in for the kill since no one was around. “You remember that time you said you owed me?” A day ago. He didn’t say anything, and I peeked up at him. Since his eyebrows couldn’t talk, they formed a shape that told me exactly how distrustful he was feeling right then. “You do, okay. Well,” and I lowered my voice, “I was going to ask if I could redeem that favor.” Those gray eyes stayed narrowed. This was going well. I glanced around to make sure no one was listening and quickly said, “When you aren’t busy… could you teach me about all this stuff? Even if it’s just a little bit?” That got him to blink in what I was pretty sure was surprise. And to give him credit, he too lowered his voice as he asked slowly and possibly in confusion, “What stuff?” I tipped my head to the side. “All this stuff in here. Fishing, camping, you know, general knowledge I might need to work here so I have an idea of what I’m doing.” There was another blink. I might as well go for it. “Only when you aren’t super busy. Please. If you can, but if you can’t, that’s okay.” I’d just cry myself to sleep at night. No biggie. Worst case, I could hit up the library on my days off. Hang out in the grocery store parking lot and google information. I could make it work. I would, regardless. Dark, thick, black eyelashes dipped over his nice eyes, and his voice came out low and even. “You’re serious?” He thought I was shitting him. “Dead.” His head turned to the side, giving me a good view of his short but really pretty eyelashes. “You want me to teach you to fish?” he asked like he couldn’t believe it, like I’d asked him to… I don’t know, show me his wiener. “You don’t have to teach me to fish, but I wouldn’t be opposed to it. I haven’t been in forever. But more about everything else. Like, what is the point of these two different kinds of line? What are all the lures good for? Or are they called flies? Do you really need those gadgets to start a fire?” I knew I was whispering as I said, “I have so many random questions, and not having internet makes it hard to look things up. Your total is $40.69, by the way.” My landlord blinked for about the hundredth time at that point, and I was pretty sure he was either confused or stunned as he pulled his wallet out and slipped his card through the reader, his gaze staying on me for the majority of the time in that long, watchful way that was completely different from the way the older men had been eyeballing me earlier. Not sexually or with interest, but more like I was a raccoon and he wasn’t sure if I had rabies or not. In a weird way, I preferred it by a lot. I smiled. “It’s okay if not,” I told him, handing over a small paper bag with his purchases inside. The tall man took it from me and let his eyes wander to a spot to my left. His Adam’s apple bobbed; then he took a step back and sighed. “Fine. Tonight, 7:30. I’ve got thirty minutes and not one longer.” What! “You’re my hero,” I whispered. He looked at me, then blinked. “I’ll be there, thank you,” I told him. He grunted, and before I could thank him again, he was out of there so fast I had no chance to check out his butt in those work pants of his.

He was twenty-eight years old with no family or partner to help make ends meet, and certainly no savings to allow him to pursue higher education in hope of finding a better career. When he wasn’t unclogging toilets and mopping up spills, he worked at a local tech-support call center. He delivered flyers. He bagged groceries and retrieved wayward carts and cleaned yet more spills at the local grocery store closest to his one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood that shouldn’t cost as much to live in as it did. And it still wasn’t enough. Still Hero struggled to pay all his bills and afford the little luxuries of life like food and clothing and deeply necessary medication.

Watching him live was a daily lesson in parsimony. He would walk miles to save a few francs on green peppers, he bought the barest of staples from the discount grocery stores, he furnished his wardrobe exclusively through church rummage sales. In his kitchen, the same piece of aluminium foil was reused until it was blackened and tattered, while tea was bought in bulk because it was marginally cheaper than buying it in individual bags.

But a man can't control what's in him once it's turned loose no more than you and I can hold onto a bag of groceries if we was to get hit by a bus.