The Great Shopping Cart Caper

The Great Shopping Cart Caper

           Doctors generally ignore me.  I’m the person who drives Aunt Joan and accompanies her into the office, explains what medications she is taking and describes her symptoms.  They listen to Joan as she tells them what they want to hear, check that her heart is still beating and send us away.  Ask about my stress?  No.  Ask if I’m coping?  No.  It’s okay – I’ve learned to laugh.
          
          Most of us who are family caregivers would call this a thankless job.  My mother, who is blind, believes that in my heart of hearts, I really want to go grocery shopping with her, not with my husband and certainly not by myself.  The idea!

But within this thankless job there are moments of pure pleasure, if you allow yourself to see them.  Taking confused Aunty Joan to Safeway is always an exhausting but oddly stimulating afternoon.  She loses her cart and takes someone else’s.  I find her wandering the soup aisle, her favourite place, and notice a large salmon and three turnips in her cart. 

“Joan, is this your salmon?” I ask.

“What salmon?”

“This 14 pound salmon right next to the turnips.”

“Someone stole my buggy,” she cries out, and the search begins for a puzzled shopper wondering what happened to her fish and why it was replaced with three hand picked sticks of celery.  We transfer the cans of soup from one buggy to another and carry on until I next take my eyes off Joan and she resorts again to the “Great Shopping Cart Caper.”

Mother is always with us, too, and it is my greatest wish that I could have a leash for both of them.  Mom is wandering along peering closely at the Kotex boxes wondering if they are cereal, Joan is in the soup aisle and I’m looking for both of them.

The upside?  When Joan moves out of her house we’ll have enough soup to keep the food bank going for a week and enough Kotex to insulate our walls.

We then go to lunch where Joan says in her loud voice, “There are a lot of fat people in here today, aren’t there, Barb.  Would you like to taste my soup?  And what will I do with that salmon?”