“Now what else did we need … ?”
“Bacon!” said a child, pointing.
“No, we can’t. Remember?”
“Oh, right,” she said, and laughed. “For a second, I forgot it was meat.”
“What did you think it was, bread?” teased a sister.
“Well it’s not like regular meat. It’s way crispier.”
“What else did we need?” I repeated, feeling foggy.
My normal grocery-shopping routine was out of whack. Aisles I normally would plunder seemed to contain nothing of use.
The cause was our family’s decision to give up meat for the 40 days of Lent, which we’re about halfway through. It turns out that meats of one kind and another were the very heart of suppertime in our household, even if only as background flavoring. Making dinner without them does not come naturally.
Furthermore, half of us have renounced sweets and baked goods. In solidarity the other half is going along with them. This has greatly complicated the provisioning of lunchboxes and after-school snacks, in which chocolate typically has an aggressive presence.
So lately at the supermarket I often find myself in an unfamiliar position. Rather than gliding about adeptly, tossing our usual fare into my cart, I find myself now and again slowing to a halt and looking around in perplexity. It is a reminder of how much one relies on habit in the doing of weekly chores.
It is a reminder, too, of how the commonplace things we buy are like little flags that indicate where we are in life. A woman buying jars of organic baby food is probably in a different phase from a woman loading up on single-serve frozen dinners.
That’s at the supermarket; at the drugstore, one’s purchases are even more determinative. Life begins with orange-flavored chewable aspirin and bear-shaped vitamins; it ends with Depends and evening primrose oil.
I’ve always been struck by the way, as each decade passes, whole sections of the drugstore seem to come into focus. As a teenager, you may prowl the cosmetics racks and study the shampoo bottles, with their different fragrances and promises, but the section near the back devoted to knee braces and adjustable canes is a blur. It’s practically invisible. It might as well not be there. As the years go by, you begin to make forays down unfamiliar aisles. Products whose properties were puzzling begin to make awful sense. (I remember as a child feeling baffled by TV ads that coyly alluded to curious ailments. Apparently some grown-ups could not ride a bicycle unless they bought a certain product. Apparently some products caused women to dash in diaphanous gowns through fields of wildflowers.
Our purchases at the supermarket these days are not so eloquent. It does not scream “Lenten sacrifice” when one family doesn’t buy meat for 40 days, however much they may secret inwardly longing for it.
I tell you what, though: Come Easter, if there’s a sudden spike in bacon sales in the greater Washington area? Well, you’ll know the reason why.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
