The Grocery Cart

Have you ever been grocery shopping and walked away from your grocery cart?  Sure, most of us have. I have many times.  It is usually in the produce section.  I leave the cart parked by the grapes and walk to the apples. I make my selection and return to my waiting cart at the grapes.  No big deal.  Happens all the time.

I am pretty positive the person who lost their grocery cart in Trader Joe’s on Monday did the same thing, only to return to where it was left.  But the cart was missing.

I am getting ahead of myself.  Let me tell you what happened.

Doug and I went to Trader Joe’s on Monday.  It is a small grocery store that carries certain items we like.  We shop there about once a week.  As we approached the front entrance, Doug grabbed a grocery cart.  We walked into the store and headed to the produce section.

Doug’s dad owned a corner market when Doug was young.  His dad taught him how to select perfectly ripe and suitable produce.  It is a skill Doug learned well that I admire and often require.  (I know very little about the finesse of fresh food selection).

We were doing our married-for-a-long-time couple thing.  Without any discussion, Doug went over to the Avocados to choose the two best, and I went over and studied the lettuce in a bag.  We placed our choices in the shopping cart one by one, one at a time, with no words between us.  I glanced at my grocery list, compared it to what was in the cart, and broke the silence by asking Doug to please get some apples.  Which he did.  I pushed the grocery cart over to the chopped walnuts and then to the eggs.  Before long, I was in the chip aisle with the cart, and Doug, well, I’m not really sure where he was.

About the time I began to feel the tug of uneasiness concerning Doug’s whereabouts (after all he does have dementia, I did desert him a couple aisles over next to the apples, and he can get discombobulated) he showed up!  He met me in the chip aisle.  I had our cart, and he had… a… cart.  A shopping cart with groceries in it.

I asked him where he got the shopping cart.  Looking a little confused, he told me he got it outside in front of the store when we walked in.  I asked him if he put those things in the cart. He looked at the items (all things we don’t normally buy, except for the apples) and said, “No, I don’t think so.”

It was then that it registered with me that some poor soul was walking around the produce section looking for their grocery cart.  They were probably wondering where they left it.  They were probably trying to retrace their steps and possibly thinking, “I know I had a cart.  I’m pretty sure it was here a second ago.  Maybe I left it over there…”

Unbeknownst to them, a tall, innocent guy with dementia randomly decided their cart was his and needed it to finish the shopping.  So, he took it to the chip aisle, where I convinced him to leave it and push mine instead.

We finished shopping and checked out with no issue.  I was halfway expecting a Trader Joe’s manager to say over the intercom, “Attention all shoppers… If you stole the grocery cart from the produce section, please return it immediately…” But that didn’t happen.  I can just imagine the confused shopper, finding their cart deserted in the chip aisle and wondering how it got there.  Maybe even thinking, “Did I already come down this aisle?”  That poor soul might, for a brief moment, understand what it feels like to have dementia.

The whole scenario, from my angle, is just super funny.

And it is a peek into what it is like to be a well-liked, educated, hard-working, creative father, son, husband, and friend with dementia in a grocery store on a Monday afternoon.