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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

‎"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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''.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Young women are closer to the time when they were manipulative and childish and they don't let their babies manipulate them as much as older mothers do. These are only my conclusions from watching children in grocery stores. I love to watch them work on their mothers to get what they want, and, because I am always a child, I'm pulling for them to get the candy and to get it NOW. The other day I watched a little blond beauty pull her mother's face to her and lay her hands on her mother's cheeks and kiss her nose. Needless to say they opened the bag of cookies then and there.

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.

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.

I bought my groceries and they included free bags!

respond immediately to people who need something—anything—impulsively. I want to plug the hole. Like, I have to stifle this impulse to help people carry their grocery bags in my apartment building, or if I’m in line at the store and someone is short some money, I’ll always think about volunteering to pay. Even on the street, I’ll hear someone complain about how they can’t get somewhere, I’ll think, I have a car you can borrow. I don’t say it, thank God, but I find myself thinking it. If I see someone shivering on the street, I have an impulse to give them the coat off my back. It’s pathological, right? I have a neurotic impulse to help people?

Simply put, the way kettlebells work your muscles is the same as carrying a heavy bag, a gallon of milk, a toddler, or carrying some grocery bags—and that’s why the body easily adjusts to it.

While the kettlebell may look intimidating at first, research shows that when you condition your mind to think of it as just a heavy, big grocery bag, it’ll be easier for you to complete the workouts!

Plastics: Most curbside recycling pickups do not accept plastic bags, plastic sleeves, or Tyvek envelopes. Proactively requesting your senders not to mail any is the best way to avoid them. However, when your request is ignored, you can set the materials aside for reuse or check the list of items accepted in plastic bag collection bins such as those offered at grocery stores, as many accept more than grocery bags. Alternatively, you can send Tyvek envelopes for recycling (see “Resources”). Such parcel stuffers as bubble wrap (no tape attached), packing peanuts, or Styrofoam (entire pads only) are accepted at participating UPS stores for reuse. Alternatively, you can call the Plastic Loose Fill Council’s Peanut Hotline (1-800-828-2214) for the names of local businesses that also accept them for reuse.

Activity pouch on airplanes Buttons and pins Crayons and coloring place mats from restaurants Disposable sample cup from the grocery store Erasers and pencils with eraser tops Fireman hat from a visit to the fire station Goodie bags from county fairs and festivals Hair comb from picture day at school Infant goods from the maternity ward Junior ranger badge from the ranger station and Smokey the Bear Kids’ meal toys Lollipops and candy from various locations, such as the bank Medals and trophies for simply participating in (versus winning) a sporting activity Noisemakers to celebrate New Year’s Eve OTC samples from the doctor’s office Party favors and balloons from birthday parties Queen’s Jubilee freebies (for overseas travelers) Reusable plastic “souvenir” cup and straw from a diner Stickers from the doctor’s office Toothbrushes and floss from the dentist’s office United States flags on national holidays Viewing glasses for a 3-D movie (why not keep one pair and reuse them instead?) Water bottles at sporting events XYZ, etc.: The big foam hand at a football or baseball game or Band-Aids after a vaccination or various newspapers, prospectuses, and booklets from school, museums, national parks . . .

What matters is the kind of insight that can leap from here to there, from the simple fact of food on a plate to the ecological and ethical complexities of its origins. What matters is being able to walk into the grocery store, pick up a bag of apples or a loaf of bread, a bag of salad greens or a package of chicken legs, and imagine the mortality involved.

Richard found a pack of soup from the grocery bag. and cooked it.

Activities to Develop the Proprioceptive System Lifting and Carrying Heavy Loads—Have the child pick up and carry soft-drink bottles to the picnic; laundry baskets upstairs; or grocery bags, filled with nonbreakables, into the house. He can also lug a box of books, a bucket of blocks, or a pail of water from one spot to another. Pushing and Pulling—Have the child push or drag grocery bags from door to kitchen. Let him push the stroller, vacuum, rake, shove heavy boxes, tow a friend on a sled, or pull a loaded wagon. Hard muscular work jazzes up the muscles. Hanging by the Arms—Mount a chinning bar in a doorway, or take your child to the park to hang from the monkey bars. When she suspends her weight from her hands, her stretching muscles send sensory messages to her brain. When she shifts from hand to hand as she travels underneath the monkey bars, she is developing upper-body strength. Hermit Crab—Place a large bag of rice or beans on the child’s back and let her move around with a heavy “shell” on her back. Joint Squeeze—Put one hand on the child’s forearm and the other on his upper arm; slowly press toward and away from his elbow. Repeat at his knee and shoulder. Press down on his head. Straighten and bend his fingers, wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and toes. These extension and flexion techniques provide traction and compression to his joints and are effective when he’s stuck in tight spaces, such as church pews, movie theaters, cars, trains, and especially airplanes where the air pressure changes. Body Squeeze—Sit on the floor behind your child, straddling him with your legs. Put your arms around his knees, draw them toward his chest, and squeeze hard. Holding tight, rock him forward and back.

Not that I don't treat myself to a Papaya King hotdog sometimes, or maybe a falafel sandwich from a street vendor. And occasionally Gus will take me somewhere nice to "develop my palate," but that's rare. Though I can't afford anything sold at them, I do love wandering through the fancy gourmet markets, especially the one at Bloomingdale's. That place is so amazing, Meemaw. You have never seen so much good stuff in one place. I looked for Schrafft's when I first got here- wanting to eat a butterscotch sundae like the one you told me about- but I think they've all shut down. Mostly I shop at this really cheap grocery store I found in Spanish Harlem. They sell cheap cuts of meat- oxtail, trotters, and pigs' ears- as well as all varieties of offal. (I always think of you, Meemaw, when eating livers, think of you eating them every Sunday after church at The Colonnade.) I like to poke around the Asian markets, too, bringing home gingerroot, lemongrass, fish sauce, dehydrated shrimp, wonton wrappers, dozens of different chilies, and soft little candies wrapped in rice paper that dissolves in your mouth. As a special treat I go to the green market in Union Square on the weekends- which is a farmer's market smack-dab in the middle of downtown. Even though I really can't afford the produce, I'll often splurge anyway, arriving home with one or two perfect things- carrots the color of rubies with bright springy tops, or a little bag of fingerling potatoes, their skins delicate and golden.

It's slow at the café so Um-Nadia sends Mirielle and Sirine out to the Wednesday afternoon farmer's market in Westwood. The two women comb the tables and stalls full of gleaming tomatoes, black-eyed sunflowers, pomegranates full of blood-red seeds. The air smells like burst fruit. Heat rolls in across the neighborhoods, emptying the streets, rippling above the cars. The two women fill bags with knobs and globes of squashes and another bag with garlic and another bag with cucumbers. "Best walnuts in town," a tanned young farmhand tells Sirine and Mirielle. "They're fresh, perfect, and they taste like butter." Sirine cocks an eyebrow. "At these prices? They better." He smiles, his teeth impossibly white. "Hey, you gotta pay for the good stuff.

I raced around getting ingredients on the recipe Victoria had given me. I started making the dough for the Iraqi pita, which Violet on YouTube said would need two hours to rise. I used whole-wheat flour, though I'd never seen my mother touch anything but all-purpose or cake; I wasn't taking any chances. I'd do it right. I went to three different bodegas before I finally found mangoes for pickling. They were small and hard as rocks, but I'd try leaving them in a paper bag with a dozen apples to hurry up the ripening. If that didn't work, I'd read something about microwaving them until they were soft, but I was a little worried about ending up with mango mousse. I bought Meyer lemons, thinking the sweetness could be nice, but as soon as I got home, I thought of my mother, her mouth shrinking into a knot: You used Meyer lemons? Like she'd never understand why I did the things I did. I went back out, got snowed on again, bought real lemons on the corner, and then went home and pickled them with ginger, paprika, garlic, and salt. I hoped they'd taste like they'd been marinating for months but I was starting to have a bad feeling. Things weren't exactly working out. I cut myself twice, accidentally, trying to use the mandoline to slice the onions "as thin as a breath." I made a bed of them that looked like a lattice. I sprinkled thyme on top. The whole thing looked like the side of a house in Scotland where roses grew like weeds. I hoped my mother liked Scotland, but I'd never asked her. I minced garlic until my hand was shaking.

Sirine smiles back and asks what he would like to have for breakfast. He yawns and sits up, and asks almost timidly, "I don't suppose you could make some more of that frekeh?" The dish of smoked wheat kernels with olive oil and garlic. She sits still, the sunlight from the balcony skimming through the bedroom. There are bags and bags of frekeh at her uncle's house, pounds of it at the café, even the Indian market a few blocks away from Han's apartment sells it in bulk. But she takes a breath and frowns and says, "I'm not sure if I can find any more right now." She tells Han to sleep a little longer and she walks down to the Indian market by herself. But when she comes back with her groceries she doesn't have frekeh. She makes scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast. She stirs dollops of heavy cream and cheese into the eggs, letting the bacon grease soak into the egg, slicing squares of buttered toast in half, filling the glasses with orange juice. She serves this to Han while he's still in bed and he smiles and eats it and doesn't say anything more about frekeh.

I'd learned many years earlier to hold my true friends close. I was still deeply connected to the group of women who had started gathering for Saturday playdates years earlier, back in our diaper-bag days in Chicago, when our children blithely pitched food from their high chairs and all of us were so tired we wanted to weep. These were the friends who'd held me together, dropping off groceries when I was too busy to shop, picking up the girls for ballet when I was behind on work or just needing a break. A number of them had hopped planes to join me for unglamourous stops on the campaign trail, giving me emotional ballast when I needed it most. Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses like these, swapped back and forth and over again.

Chicken Nuggets Chicken nuggets. What can we say about them? They’re so simple, so ubiquitous, such a steady component in the diet of American kids. And, okay, American kids’ parents. And the choices--they’re abundant! From fast-food restaurants to big bulk bags in the freezer section of the grocery store, there are countless chicken nuggets to choose from in this great land of ours. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: The best chicken nuggets are ones you make yourself. For one thing, you can see exactly what’s goin’ in ’em. For another thing, you can make as many as you want. No deciding whether you want the 4-, 6-, or 10-pack! For another, they’re completely fresh and delicious. For yet another, there’s a cow in my yard right now. (That last thing had nothing to do with anything. I just thought I’d share.)

Then she remembered. The apple. Reaching over to her bag on the passenger seat with her right hand, left hand on the wheel, Grace grasped the apple like a baseball and brought it to her face. Again, she held it under her nose and took in its scent. Wow. Even with the wind blowing around her, the fragrance was full and lush and sweet- though not overtly, like so many of today's commercially bred grocery store apples, but deep, dark, sugared, as the night in a Caribbean cane field.

even further, and I shivered inside my wool coat as I trudged back to my car, two grocery bags in hand. I wanted to go home, but I still had the crushed vials. Where could you dispose of broken glass and no one would notice?

The New Dog I. “I’m intensely afraid of almost everything. Grocery bags, potted poinsettias, bunches of uprooted weeds wilting on a hot sidewalk, clothes hangers, deflated rubber balls, being looked in the eye, crutches, an overcoat tossed across the back of a chair (everybody knows empty overcoats house ghosts), children, doorways, music, human hands and the newspaper rustling as my owner, in striped pajamas, drinks coffee and turns its pages. He wants to find out where there’ll be war in the mid-east this week. Afraid even of eating, if someone burps or clinks a glass with a fork, or if my owner turns the kitchen faucet on to wash his hands during my meal I go rigid with fear, my legs buckle, then I slink from the room. I pee copiously if my food bowl is placed on the floor before the other dogs’. I have to be served last or the natural order of things - in which every moment I am about to be sacrificed - (have my heart ripped from my chest by the priest wielding his stone knife or get run out of the pack by snarling, snapping alphas) - the most sacred hierarchy, that fated arrangement, the glue of the universe, will unstick. The evolution will never itself, and life as we know it will subside entirely, until only the simplest animal form remain - jellyfish headless globs of cells, with only microscopic whips for legs and tails. Great swirling arms of gas will arm wrestle for eons to win cosmic dominance. Starless, undifferentiated chaos will reign. II. I alone of little escaped a hell of beating, neglect, and snuffling dumpsters for sustenance before this gullible man adopted me. Now my new owner would like me to walk nicely by his side on a leash (without cowering or pulling) and to lie down on a towel when he asks, regardless of whether he has a piece of bologna in his pocket or not. I’m growing fond of that optimistic young man in spite of myself. If only he would heed my warnings I’d pour out my thoughts to him: When panic strikes you like a squall wind and disaster falls on you like a gale, when you are hunted and scorned, wisdom shouts aloud in the streets: What is consciousness? What is sensation? What is mind? What is pain? What about the sorrows of unwatered houseplants? What indoor cloudburst will slake their thirst? What of my littler brothers and sisters, dead at the hands of dirty two legged brutes? Who’s the ghost in the universe behind its existence, necessary to everything that happens? Is it the pajama-clad man offering a strip of bacon in his frightening hand (who’ll take me to the park to play ball if he ever gets dressed)? Is it his quiet, wet-eyed, egg-frying wife? Dear Lord, Is it me?

The kitchen was baby-proofed, with locking mechanisms on all the below counter cabinets. The smell of rot was more prevalent, and Taylor spied a Wild Oats bag with a package of chicken in the deep stainless steel sink. Well, that accounted for the stink downstairs. If the victim hadn’t talked to her sister for two days, and the chicken was coming back to life, then there was a good chance she’d been dead at least a day. Taylor only put chicken in the sink if she needed to defrost it and had the time to do so. That would give a convenient timeline—a day to thaw and a day to start smelling. Though it just as easily could be the victim came home from grocery shopping and didn’t get all the packages stored before her assailant appeared. They’d need a liver temp or a potassium level from the vitreous fluid for something more accurate, but it was a start. Never assume, that was her mantra. Fruit

Consumers even avoid buying items placed near a product with icky connotations. Grocery shoppers, for instance, have been shown to be repelled by foods—including goodies like cookies—if those items come within an inch of touching garbage bags, diapers, or other products associated with filth or bodily waste.

Me: Hypothetical question. 
Mystery Date: Okay, shoot. 
Me: If someone were to carry five very heavy bags of groceries from their car to their apartment. Then proceed to spend hours baking cupcakes. Does that and clicking the button to let Netflix know they haven’t gotten their life together and are still watching while eating said cupcakes, count as exercise? 
Me: Asking for a friend, of course. ;)