So I just put in my earbuds and turned on the iRelax app.

Branching Out

 I shopped in my new neighborhood’s grocery store tonight—a big step for me, since you might know my history of emotional involvement when it comes to grocery stores, and because I have been committed for 6 years to the grocery store in the neighborhood where I lived two moves ago.  Not that they are all that far a part mind you, but it’s a nice feeling to shop close to your house and to be pleasantly surprised that other stores do indeed carry things like soy nuts, organic mangoes and almond milk. 

In fact they carried things the old grocery never had, including an enormous ethnic foods section.  When I saw a beautiful bag of red lentils I literally grabbed them and hugged them to my chest and exclaimed, “I thought I could only find you at Whole Foods!”  I am kind of ridiculous when it comes to food that way.  My wonder quickly got the best of me though, and at the check-out I realized how far I’d strayed from my list—my bill looked like I was still shopping for two. 

I had what I guess Oprah calls an ah-ha moment (I hate that I know this fact) wondering through this new store.  I’d been so stringent in my ways—dead set on never shopping anywhere but my old store simply because I liked the location, the clientele and the organic produce—which makes sense you know, go where the cheese is, but if I’d loosened up and branched out back then, would that have made a difference?  Would that have set a precedent for an open mind about other things and would have changed the course of this relationship?   I don’t know the answer to that, but I do know it’s changed my future.

The only jank-ass weirdness I encountered was in passing the deli, where a man asked me if I could spare a quarter.  I did a double take as I maneuvered by, wondering why a customer would ask me for change, unless he was homeless and had wondered in to do just that, which is entirely plausible since the shopping nook surrounding the grocery is a common hang out for beggars. My white middle class guilt reared its well-coiffed head and told me that would not have happened if I had shopped at my old favorite store. But whatever.  I’m accosted by Girl Scouts peddling their wares at that location—seems like a fair trade off.