It’s next to impossible to keep six feet apart from other people in the grocery store. I start down an aisle, and there is someone standing there in front of the empty pasta sauce shelf (looking at the emptiness will not cause more cans to appear…I know this from experience). So, what are my choices? I can wait for said person to give up and move along, which I usually do, but then someone else often comes around the corner and violates my six foot radius anyway. My second choice is to pass this person in the aisle, which means I get about two feet away from her back (it is almost always a her starting at the empty shelves) because the aisles are no where close to six feet wide. When I do this, I usually still say “sorry…excuse me…”, and then I hold my breath and go for it. Yes - I HOLD MY BREATH! As if I am diving under water. As if the woman in the aisle is toxic. As if holding my breath will even help, if she is toxic. And I feel all kinds of emotions, but mostly I feel unkind and antisocial and scared and stupid for even being in the grocery store in the first place (will peanut butter really seem so important when I am lying in bed with “glass lungs”?) . When I do finally get to the check-out, there are red tape lines, showing how far back I need to stand as I wait for the person ahead of me. Which is fine, until someone else comes along to join the line - where does he stand? And what about the next person? And then there’s that look we give each other, when we realize how absurd this all is, and maybe it’s okay if this person stands closer to me because doesn’t it seem silly to stand half-way down the coffee aisle when there is only one person in line, and surely you’re not sick and I’m not sick, and this is all a bit too much…right? And then I think about my mom, who is almost 80, and I realize that she is likely out grocery shopping, too (she refuses to see herself as “at risk”, and I live too far away to force her into submission while I get all of her supplies for her) and I realize that she is probably giving that look to the shoppers around her, and they are likely then taking that as her consent to come closer to her….and I snap out of my tendency to be socially acceptably polite, and I re-enforce my six-foot boundary by moving to the other side of my grocery cart (which means I am moving within the cashier’s six-foot boundary…grocery stores were NOT designed for pandemics), and I once again promise myself to stop coming to the grocery store. Peanut butter is not worth it. Why do I keep forgetting that?
