Delivery

Willie T. texts me that he can’t find the kind of heavy cream I ordered and then he sends a picture of the alternative brands and asks if any of them will do. Yes, I say, the whipping cream in the red container. He does the same for the Gruyere cheese I want for Christmas dinner and the Dot’s Pretzels that have become a mainstay of snacking around here. The Southwest Dot’s are okay, I tell him. And then, just like that, 45 items later, Willie T. texts that he is checking out.

My grandmother told me stories of how, when my grandfather owned the lumber yard in their small town and they were considered pretty well-to-do, she would call the grocer on the telephone and place her order and they would bring everything to the house. When she told me this, I envisioned her standing on a chair so a seamstress could pin up the hem on her new dress. It made sense to me that if my grandmother had groceries delivered that she would also have her dresses made. I don’t know that to be true. I just imagined it, you know, how people do, imagine the lives of people, relatives or not.

I don’t order groceries on the phone, I order online. I have been in a grocery store a time or two since the pandemic started but no more. It seems crazy to wander around with a cart in a store with other people breathing, masked or not, I would have no control. And I know, from decades of experience, that the grocery trance would come over me. I’d start turning over every container of blueberries to get the best one, inspect all the soups and think about which ones I should be making myself, and driving circles around the donuts and cookies, the wee cheesecakes in the cold case, and the deli case, full of largely unkept promises of crispiness and freshness. I would spend an hour looking for the pita bread to go with the hummus I bought.

Now, I just wait to hear from Willie T.

I jacked up the tip in advance hoping my shopper would be Willie T. He cares if I get what I want, even if it’s not exactly what I want. I love that. I won’t go so far to say I love Willie T. but I do appreciate him. A lot.

My grandmother would think nothing of all this. She ordered her groceries on the telephone, maybe standing on a chair to have her dress hemmed and maybe not, and then, in a blink of an eye, she was a widow, learning to drive a car for the first time and going to work in the Ben Franklin store in her little town. She just did what came next. It was 1945. People just rolled with the punches then.

Just now, I got a text that my groceries are at the front door. I texted back “Thank you and I really appreciate your conscientiousness” and Willie T. responded “Your welcome and thank you.”

So, as we say, there it is.