Shopping

I like peanut butter on toast for my breakfast.  This morning I was wrestling with a 40oz jar of the stuff working with a strong knife to get up the goo at the bottom so as to blend it into a not too too creamy spread for my daily bread.  Oh, what a struggle.  At eighty six just lifting the jar off the shelf is a struggle, moving the knife around in the sludge to create even a modest fluidity exhausts me and puts terrible pressure on my wrist which is always in pain in any case from a fall a few years back. "Why is this happening to me,"  I wail in my interior dialogue that I keep up most of the day.  Well, it's because my husband loves box stores, and he does almost all the shopping.  As a poor boy who has never gotten over it, he wants bargains, coupons, advertised lower prices, in sum cheap food.  On the other hand, he spends dollars and dollars a week buying DVDs he may never watch again.  That was not part of the poor boy scenario of his childhood so he is free to spend.  Twenty four eggs in a plastic container that again I can scarcely lift out of the refrigerator, always tilting dangerously, with a plastic lid that I am terrified will burst open and spill its contents.  Two or three giant English cucumbers in one large plastic wrap, that he makes into bread and butter pickles, enough for an army, I thought I would puke, and even he at last threw the remnants out .  I remember in another life when I was a young father and my wife and I were shopping for six or eight at a time.  Box stores had not been invented but they would have been great, although I do remember day old bread we bought and froze, maybe fifty loaves at a pop.  Today in my kitchen we have twenty four apples in their plastic container in the kitchen.  He doesn't even eat apples, fifteen avocados all ripe which he distributes on every salad every day.  I have grown very very tired of apples and avocados.  Ah, well, it is true that he never notices the state of nor the amount of food once it is brought home, and I can freely throw things out, but then my childhood prejudice comes into play.  "Do not waste, there is a depression on, people are starving."  No, not exactly heard at my mother's knee, but certainly in the air everywhere.  We have had a showdown about the peanut butter, pleasantly enough.  My infirmities have been acknowledged, we will go to the local supermarket for a realistically--my word--sized jar of peanut butter next time.  And next time is going to be soon because I'll be damned if I am going to break my wrist again stirring up the peanut butter.