When Accidentally Flashing the Neighbors Became Part of My Grocery Routine

Moving the Finish Line

As the 2020 Spring Break stretched into April, it was becoming apparent that the Stop the Spread approach to the pandemic had failed. Despite guidance to stay home, a lot of folks either couldn’t or wouldn’t and some of these gatherings resulted in superspreader events.

At our house, except for the dried beans and rice, we’d run thorough our initial stores of food and someone had to venture out to gather additional supplies. Obviously the Kindergartener wasn’t going to run errands and the husband had asthma, which health professionals thought might make a COVID infection more deadly. So it was up to me to restock. I tried to order groceries online, but no matter which chain or store location I tried, all the available pick up time slots in my area and surrounding suburbs were always full.

I was able to order a delivery of meat and seafood from a small business that operated out of the North Market downtown. They were trying to sell off their frozen stock before it all went bad and offered some pretty compelling deals. The delivery guy came by in the middle of the day and lobbed a damp cardboard box full of loose ice cubes and meat onto my front lawn. Most of the items were wrapped in butcher paper, but the ground beef came in a frozen lump wrapped in plastic grocery bags. I was grateful to get it.

Despite this unexpected protein bounty, we still needed to reup on staples and fresh produce. So, I decided I could probably muster up the courage to forage for groceries about once per month. This would give me two weeks to agonize about whether I had caught COVID from the mouth breather in the produce section or not and two weeks to relax if I remained healthy before having to brave the outside world again.

Monitoring myself for illness was somewhat difficult though, as COVID symptoms were vague and wide-ranging. According to the CDC, possible symptoms included:

·      Fever and chills

·      Cough

·      Difficulty breathing

·      Fatigue

·      Muscle ache

·      Headache

·      Sore throat

·      Stuffed up or runny nose

·      Nausea and/or vomiting

·      Diarrhea

·      Loss of taste and/or smell

Basically symptoms of all minor respiratory illnesses, allergies, stress, and food-poisoning.

It was spring, and every time I sneezed or got a tickle in my throat because of the pollen that was steadily turning my now-only-rarely-driven-car yellow, I gave myself a headache, nausea, and shortness of breath just with the self-induced anxiety attack caused by my growing certainty that lingering too long inspecting the berries for mold would result in my entire family slowly suffocating to death while being intubated in an overcrowded hospital hallway. So, in the two weeks post-grocery, I’d frequently stick my head in the trash can or over the cats’ litter box. Which resulted in nausea, but that nausea was at least a sign that my nose was still functional.

By the first time I went back out, grocery shopping had gotten weird. Stores had capacity limits posted on the front doors now. Although I never saw bouncers controlling the crowds. You were supposed to stay six-feet away from any other shoppers. Giant Eagle, my local chain, had one-way aisles to help facilitate this with little arrow stickers on the floor showing you the correct way to proceed—down the bread aisle, but up the canned goods aisle, down the baking aisle, but up the chips aisle…

This system completely broke down in the liquor store/produce/bakery areas. Here shopping resembled hydration attempts at a watering hole in a nature documentary. People would suspiciously eye each other like zebras monitoring for trembling tall grass or wavering reeds that could indicate the possible presence of a crouching lion or submerged crocodile. At the opportune moment, when the invisible six-foot bubble surrounding a desired item cleared, shoppers would spring forward to snatch their broccoli or bourbon or box of comfort doughnuts from the shelves like the zebra sneaking a slurp. Once the item was grasped, the shopper bounded away to relative safety.

For the first couple of weeks when we were just sheltering in place, I could forget the pandemic sometimes, but shopping made it impossible to ignore. Announcements were regularly broadcast over the stores’ PA systems reminding patrons to keep their distance and staff to sanitize the surfaces. I eyed fellow shoppers with suspicion, scanning their brows for perspiration that might indicate a fever. I cursed at them when they stopped in a one-way aisle to read the label on every single goddamn can of chicken noodle soup, resulting in a traffic jam that snaked its way down four or five consecutive aisles.

You could feel the tension in the store increasing as the day went on. Every time someone coughed at least six people squealed and clutched at their chests as if an axe-wielding maniac had just lunged at them from behind an end-cap display. Above their now-mandated face masks, you could see the veins in shopper’s foreheads threatening to pop out of their skin. I was acutely aware of my increased breathing rate behind my mask and smelled the stale remnants of what I had had for breakfast. I tried not to cry as I didn’t want people to think my eyes were watering from potential sickness. As I went past the trash bags I tried to tamp down intrusive thoughts about the national body bag shortage.

It was difficult to predict which items would be out of stock. Supplies of toilet paper, paper towels, and hand soap had been low since before the stay at home directive. But some weeks, I couldn’t find salt. Other weeks, canned corn would be hard to find or yeast or flour. The stores began to adjust and started stocking restaurant supply store-sized packages of some items like canned beans and evaporated milk.

Because I only wanted to go out once a month, I bought multiples of some staples like bags of coffee. The contents of my cart started to resemble an avalanche-prone mountain as I tried to make a month’s worth of food fit into a standard-sized shopping cart. As I neared the end of my shopping trip, I tried to balance the carton of eggs on top of the stack and had to stand on my toes so I could see over the overfull wire contraption and maneuver it toward the checkout lines while trying to avoid the judgmental eyes of fellow shoppers and while broadcasting the psychic message I’m not hording. I’m not hording, with my eyes.

At the checkout, clerks were separated from patrons behind plexiglass shields and the payment devices had moved to the ends of the checkout lanes to leave as much distance as possible between clerk and patron. I shouted my apology about the overflowing shopping cart at the clerk as they tried to Tetris my bagged groceries into a new cart. One time, the clerk sighed and got me another cart and left me to haul two grocery carts out to my car. I felt like I had the scarlet letter H on my back for hoarder. I only come once a month, I swear, I tried to communicate with my eyes.

After loading the car with supplies, I would sanitize my hands with the bottle of repurposed grain alcohol that now lived permanently in the car. Then it was home to squirrel my supplies in the basement quarantine area, take off my clothes next to the sump pump, throw them in the washing machine, and run up the stairs naked to hop in the shower and sanitize my own personal surfaces.

Every time I ran by the living room windows, I cursed myself for forgetting to buy curtains or at least lower the blinds, and waved sheepishly at the horrified neighbors out walking their dogs. Out of the corner of my eye, I’d sometimes see my neighbor shimmying out of his trousers on the front porch while trying not to drop a carton of eggs.

By the middle of April, people started talking about the need to reopen America to “save the economy.” On the 10th, protesters gathered on the lawn outside the Ohio Statehouse downtown and demanded the reopening of Ohio. They held signs like, “Stop the tyranny,” “Survival is not living,” and, “Quarantine worse than virus.” The governor said the protests were permitted under the state's stay-at-home order as First Amendment protected speech. I considered making my own “Ignorance is Strength” sign and cosplaying a character from 1984, but figured that risking infection and possible death for a AP English joke wasn’t worth it.

It was bad enough having to calculate my mortality risk trying to restock the string cheese.

On April 16th, the governor announced his intent to start gradually restarting Ohio’s economy as of May 1. The same day, the Ohio Department of Health said there were 8,414 confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 in the state, resulting in 389 deaths and 2,331 hospitalizations.

Despite it being ok to reopen businesses, on April 20th, the governor said K-12 school buildings would remain closed for the rest of the academic year. So, what was initially a two week work sabbatical I’d taken to entertain/help educate the Kindergartener was now officially going to last me until at least the following fall.

I blinked, stunned. Tension twisted the muscles of my neck and shoulders. My teeth ground together causing a throbbing in my head. Exhaustion hit me like a grand piano in an old cartoon. How was I going to keep the kiddo entertained through the spring and summer? True, kids were supposed to be less susceptible to COVID, but toward the end of April there were reports of children getting admitted to intensive care units with a condition that looked like toxic shock syndrome and that lead to mult-iorgan failure. And this was caused by a COVID infection. How was I going to keep the kid safe? How was I going to teach her how to read? I wondered, reaching for a paper bag to hyperventilate into.

Later, after I fished the old receipt that had apparently lurked unnoticed in the paper bag out of my trachea, I opened a new tab on my computer browser and stated shopping for curtains. If I was going to keep shopping like this, the least I could do was spare the neighbors the view.

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