Mom's Home

Among my fondest memories of my years as a little kid are the ones that have to do with Mom coming home from the grocery store. While mundane and routine it was a weekly event that we all looked forward to. Sometimes we would beg Mom to take us with her, but as often as not she went alone. Buying groceries meant spending a big chunk of the weekly budget and it was something she did best when she did it alone.

When finished she would pull up in the driveway and honk. We knew what it meant, but just in case we didn't, my Dad would holler, "you boys go help your mom with the groceries", and we would all bolt outside. It was the one chore that never brought a complaint.

While we were never poor, there were probably days or weeks when it seemed that way to mom and dad and many times when things were close. There was something about bringing home sacks of food that signaled everything was ok. There was money in the bank. The groceries also tipped us off as to whether it was a prosperous time or a tight one. Dried milk, spam and velveeta meant things were tight. "Real" milk, Coke and strawberry preserves meant life was good.

"We're having steak tonite" meant round steak, floured and fried in bacon grease. It was the highest form of beef of the three that Mom brought home, chuck roast, hamburger, round steak. The Cartwrights on the Ponderosa ate steak at almost every meal and sometimes we were like them. I was well in to my 30's before it dawned on me that upscale restaurants did not carry round steak.

Three boys, we tore into the sacks of groceries like inmates just released from a WWII prison camp. Fighting over the new jar of peanut butter or who got the latest bugs bunny jelly glass, or opening up the new cereal box to dig for the prize, it was almost a little like Christmas the way we ripped open the loot.

Dad always took pleasure in opening the new peanut butter and running a finger deep into the jar, like a hoe across unbroken soil. He always got to it first and took a perverse pleasure when someone later opened the "new" jar only to find his handiwork.

There was alway commentary on the quality and quantity of the week's bounty. "Aw Mom, you forgot the Captain Crunch" "Mom, I told you not to get crunchy peanut butter" "Yea, Spaghetti!" "Gee Mom thanks for the Oreos" "Can I have a Coke?" "Can we make some Kool-Aid?" "Can I have some ice-cream?" "Mom you got a lot of groceries... Are we rich?" "You forgot the milk?" "Mom, you forgot the Nestle's Quik!"

The grocery store was usually a Winn Dixie or Piggly Wiggly, the two choices that seem to have been most prevalent for southern folk in the 60's. Of course there was also Quik Chek, Bi-Lo and A&P. I still have my Piggly Wiggly bow tie, a remnant from my high school days sacking groceries. In the days before starbucks and caribou coffee chains, A&P had the machine to grind your own Eight O'Clock coffee, which still provides one of the very best smells on this earth.

Some weeks, though not all, Mom would double check the groceries versus the receipt. I don't know that we've ever done that. Always a chance that we were over charged or something didn't end up in the sacks. Anything wrong with the order meant an immediate trip back to the store to put things right.

In the early years of our marriage, when things were so tight, I always looked forward to coming home to my parents house. There was nothing big or fancy waiting for me. But what was there was the simple things I wanted so much in my own world, a place where the bills were paid on time, where it was warm in the winter and cool in the summer, where the pantry was full, the roof didn't leak. A house that was always empty on Sunday morning. A very fine home.