Instacart Here

I used to really love grocery shopping — choosing my avocados and Little Leaf lettuce and deciding about other produce depending upon what looked best. Now, though,  anxiety kicks in —not about getting the virus but about rudeness. The aisles at our Big Y are one way, and people mostly stay 6 feet apart; you can't really walk past someone.

So if I am reading the ingredients, or trying to choose, and someone is waiting, I get flustered. I don't want to keep them waiting and just end up grabbing something. Not that I am exactly Miss Manners! If other people take forever, or push past me, I  fume and give dirty looks. Thus the whole shopping trip turns far more intense and dramatic than it needs to be — not that it has escalated into outright fights. At least, so far the most I have said is,

“Hey! What about our six feet?’’in a pleasant tone.

This is in the supermarket. The next time a jogger runs within a foot of my face, though — as one did yesterday while I was walking  — I will say more than that, quite a bit more. This is fraught, I know. People here are mostly polite but a few days ago someone from New Jersey shouted:
“What are you doing taking our picture? Are you nuts?’’ when I pretended to be photographing her and her husband parking on the sidewalk.

Today, I decided to skip the drama of the supermarket and order from Instacart, something I've never done before. And yes, I do realize that another solution — theoretically — is to just stay calm, not let people push my buttons, put my meditation practice into action.

I chose Instacart. It ended up taking about the same amount of time as going to the store would have, between the texts from the young shopper:

“They don't have any ripe avocados, only firm ones....the only green banana isn't organic...no toilet paper...’’ and me texting back that firm was better than squishy and I hadn't wanted toilet paper, had meant to order paper towels — and him saying that was his mistake, he had misread it, they did have paper towels....he was so helpful! Finally we just talked, as that was faster and easier, as he made his way around the store.

Like many people in his generation, he was much nicer than my friends and I were at that age  — I can't imagine any teenager in the 1960s being that patient with an old lady who was a picky shopper! He even carried the groceries upstairs for me:

And set them down with great care, too.

This strange pause — global reset — has changed me and the world.  What things will be like afterwards I don't know. My generation grew up in a time of change, too: civil rights protests that led to new voting laws and affirmative action, for example. We thought racism would end; it's worse, we've gone backwards — and this generation needs more drastic changes than we did. We grew up during rising prosperity that we took for granted. 95% of boomers earned more than their parents — and most of those who didn't started near the top, not the bottom, of the economic ladder. It's different for people Randy's age: those at the bottom stay there and many in the middle are going down, not up. The gap between the rich and everyone else is widening.

(from the census -- https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2019/11/26/u-s-household-incomes-a-50-year-perspective)

Randy is a college graduate, and he's delivering groceries. He wasn't complaining, far from it: his face lit up when he talked about an old couple he met and is helping on his own:

“They needed bleach and cleaning supplies and I said I could get them. Her eyes filled with tears when I brought them over. Now they email me what they need and leave the cash in an envelope.’’

For people his age, any job now is hard to find. Only massive government action can change that.  I wish I believed it will, but seeing the young (those trusting, hopeful eyes! that energy and eagerness to please!) makes me sad — for their future, for how life in this country is ending for my generation. As someone said in the NY Times — if change for the better does come, we won't be alive to see it.