What's in Your Grocery Bag?

Do you ever wonder what the checker is thinking about you when you buy your groceries? Not so much the days when you are clearly buying food for your meals. What do they care that you picked up some pig knuckles and rutabagas? To each their own. No, I'm thinking of the times when you pop in for those little incidentals. Like the time I picked up toilet paper, a 1.5 liter of wine and the Vanity Fair with Jennifer Aniston on the cover. Did that look like an afternoon of fun to the checker? Today I bought tea lights, odor neutralizer and a Lunchable. I also hadn't yet changed out of my workout clothes or done my hair and makeup. Did that suggest a certain funk about my life? No electricity, smelly house and a twisted notion of nutrition? Nah. I'm sure Ernie wasn't judging.

The tealights are for our Day of the Dead altar. We have votives remembering some of our dearly departed but I was out of little candles. The altar looks good with our collection of sugar skulls and calaveras (those groovy skelteton figures from Mexico). The Child just has to pick some flowers to add and we're good to go for our remembrance feast. We'll eat Mexican food and listen to Mozart's "Requiem". I love All Souls. If you believe, as I do, that death is not the end then it's appropriate to pause and celebrate the sweetness of life and remember fondly those who have gone before.

The Lunchable is the result of a bargain with the devil. We have always done a pretty good job of giving nutritious food to The Child. She's inhaled her share of candy and we aren't exactly strangers to fast food but on balance her diet is, in fact, balanced. But the small ones, they do resist the wholesome imperatives of well-meaning parents. Once she started school and was exposed to the Lunchable it became her dearest desire to be able to have them for lunch. Any steady diet of this product was out of the question but I compromised when it comes to field trips. I personally think of Lunchables as a gagfest in a box but The Child, with the tastebuds of youth likes 'em and what the hey. I remember the mystique of the field trip lunch, the sheer grooviness of opening up your brown bag to see that Mom had sprung for a Twinkie. So The Child got her (disgusting) "Pizza and Treatza" lunch and I hope someday she'll remember and think kindly of her old mom.

The Frebreze-like product? I have a dog but it doesn't mean my house has to smell like a kennel.