Yesterday I was standing outside our grocery store waiting for Pam to pick me up with the groceries I just bought. We were getting stocked up for the approaching snowstorm which was forecast for the next day…which is today when I’m writing this….but I digress.
Right before we left for the grocery store, Miss Kay, a precious friend told us something she learned from her mother. When there are blackbirds on the ground, eating worms, it indicates there’s going to be snow. She said there were a lot of blackbirds on the ground where they live. She was right…..it’s snowing like crazy.. Miss Kay, is a very special lady, who along with her lovely sister, Cindy, help Pam keep our house in order. We know this family well and have been at Fourth of July parties, multiple funerals and weddings. They mean the world to us. They attend a little Pentecostal church in the country and love Jesus. Pam and are inspired by their joyful experiential faith. When they come to the house, I turn on gospel music so they can sing as they work. They’re a singing family and often I’ll hear them, singing to the top of their lungs. We’ve prayed together and cried together. It’s one of the most beautiful relationships we have. It has been so for decades. When they come to the house, they’re eager to give us hugs and kisses. It’s mutual. Well, back to my story.
Pam hates going to the grocery store with me because she thinks I take to much time dilly dallying in the isles and not taking care of business, not value shopping, buying stuff we don’t need and not presenting coupons she’s given me to use. Pam just wants to go in and get out. I love to talk to friends, TALK to strangers and ,visit with the different employees working at the store… Pam actually told me the other day that she would not be surprised whatsoever if she found me talking to a head of cabbage in the produce department if I felt the compunction. That’s just silly…..well maybe an attractive head of lettuce.
All this basically drives her nuts, and into an exasperated state of spousal madness which often times she fears might turn into spousal abuse. That of course would never happen because she knows whenever you see a doctor, the people at the front desk always ask the old people if they have been mistreated (I always thought they said HIPPO law, but Pam caught me up to speed on that one, “you just can’ listen Greg, can you?!!!….”HIPAA regulation, honey…turn your hearing aids up”)… and since I’m an old person, they’re certain to ask me what could be damning information to said spouse, Pam. I watch Forensic Files and have seen all the ways wives get rid of their husbands. JUST KIDDING..maybe. All that said, she has finally settled on leaving me to my own devices in the grocery store while she takes four ibuprofen and escapes by listening to soothing music in the car as she waits for the inevitable overspending, missing and unneeded items, once again watching me walk out of the building with plastic bags holding our purchased items and not the cloth grocery bags she gave me. Okay so maybe in my quest to secure all our foodstuff needs, I inadvertently (Pam has another word for inadvertently) forgot I left them on the bottom section of the shopping cart…make that, I just forgot them, period. I then have to go back in, search for the cart I was using, and retrieve our cloth bags.
I see these problems as a minor oversight. Let’s just say, Pam sees things differently. She in fact, thinks that without question, the pharmaceutical companies should be listing my name for anyone who’s met me…. as one of the primary reasons for using any number of their anxiety medications. It’s a tough thing living with me. She never knows where I am…and that’s even when I’m sitting right next to her.
The Human Wave 