Happiness and the price of groceries

The Column: 11.04.24

When I go to Trader Joe’s on Columbus Avenue to buy groceries, I do it to buy guy food, which my beloved cannot buy because she knows it’s not good for me. I don’t do this secretly; I come home in broad daylight and unpack the bag and she watches without comment. Sometimes, in place of comment, she’ll tell about something she read in the Times about some encouraging development in health care or public education, meanwhile she watches me put away the frozen mac and cheese, large potatoes for baking in the microwave, a few ears of sweet corn, a couple filets mignon, frozen lasagna, frozen meatballs, frozen knockoff White Castle sliders.

I don’t buy greens because that’s her territory, along with other vegetables, coffee, olive oil, cereal, rice, condiments, et cetera. With coffee, for example, she has a specific dark bean from a particular valley in Guatemala that meets her standards. Me, I’m happy with Maxwell House Instant. Coffee is coffee. She favors Portuguese oil from hand-harvested olives. Me, I’m fine with Mazola.

I don’t defend my choices and thanks to her, I don’t need to. I love mac and cheese because I loved grade school back in the Fifties and that’s what Mabel served in the Benson School cafeteria and when I eat a bowl of it now, I am back there sitting with boys and observing Corinne and Elaine and Diane with great interest. As a teenager, I loved to ride my bike downtown to the Minneapolis Public Library and I got my lunch at the White Castle across the street, sliders for 15 cents apiece. When I heat up a frozen one today, I am 15 again, enjoying independence, spending my babysitting money, reading Hemingway and Kafka and Cummings and other books my parents don’t approve of.

Joe doesn’t always stock radishes but if I see them, I buy a bunch because picking radishes was my first job around the age of 12, and I graduated from that to potato picking and hoeing corn.

I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’s because the store has 24 checkout cashiers and as I come toward checkout, this being New York, I wonder how many of the cashiers are hoping to be actors, writers, artists, dancers, composers, and I worry about them as I catch sight. I was a dishwasher when I was their age and I hoped to be published in The New Yorker where my heroes Updike, Perelman, Thurber published. For me, the magazine was the Big League and I needed to climb out of the Minors and when I made it, at 27, I bought filet mignon.

The Bigs are still around but the young and ambitious have found new roads — podcasting, for example — in which you pitch your own tent and invent your brand and see who stops to look at the goods. I find this sort of astonishing and wonderful. I look at the young and see how their ambition is to make their own good and productive life rather than win the silver trophy or be admitted to the Big Shot Society.

My beloved is 15 years younger than I and while I sit and toil at my new novel, her ambition is to walk six miles a day through the city and see the sights, the barefoot cellist in the park, the woman telling her dog to improve its attitude, the delight of apartment children set free on the playground, and talk to the French tourists taking photos of squirrels and the guy with the sign “Write You A Poem, $5.”

I want my novel to win the National Book Award. It won’t but that’s what I want. She wants to make a good life and every day she does. I come home with my autobiographical bag of groceries and she makes no comment. Life circles back. I eat Mabel’s macaroni and I am once again curious about girls. I once picked potatoes and now eat one with butter and sour cream and it is delicious and I feel truly grateful.

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