Grocery Shopping with Jeff

8/19/2014

The year is 1974 and Jeff and I had just started dating. I worked as a secretary and earned about $100 a week and $25 of that went to pay for nursery school for my son.  Shortly after I met Jeff, I suggested that he could come to the apartment and I would fix dinner.  Now the ability to fix dinner with the meager contents of both my cupboard and refrigerator, was a stretch.  This many years later, I don't even recall what I thought I was going to make.

When Jeff came over, and he looked at my barren shelves, he suggested a trip to the grocery store.  I pushed my cart buying the cheapest bread I could find, the smallest bottle of milk possible and a few other necessities for my son and I to live on for a week.

Jeff, had his own cart, and he was busily piling oodles of food into his cart.  When the two carts met somewhere in the middle of the store, I was horrified at the amount of food he had.  I told him that there was no way I could possibly pay for all of those groceries.  He'd have to put most, if not all, of those things back because I simply could not pay for that much food. He had bought cookies, a luxury for me as well as other food that I hadn't been able to afford since becoming single. Jeff told me that he would pay for all of the groceries!  That was the first nice thing that had happened to me in months.  I knew that he was a keeper.

In the end, the groceries from both carts were taken to the cashier and Jeff wrote a check (do you remember those) for everything, and I was grateful for his help.  Flash forward 40 years, and I'm still grateful for his help.

Grocery shopping today looks a lot different than in did in 1974.  There were grocery stores and retail stores like Target, but no "Mart" stores.  Now you can go to a "mart" store and buy groceries, clothes, cosmetics, furniture (generally on the cheap side), toys and you name it.  Last night Jeff and I went to WalMart and bought necessities, though we view necessities differently!  I believe the cart's not right unless there is a package of cookies and/or some kind of candy.  Jeff wants tomatoes, a certain kind of cracker, cream cheese and hot salsa.  He likes salt and I like sugar, so we make the ideal couple!

P