Volunteering to buy a neighbor's groceries during the coronavirus pandemic made me think hard about how we’ve always done things.
Every time we go to the grocery store during quarantine, we come home too tired to cook. Staying out of everyone’s way — 6 feet away, in narrow aisles — is stressful. Wearing a mask makes it hard to see, breathe, and be heard. Buying a week’s worth of food feels like a major logistical undertaking.
“We’re completely shut-in and don’t venture forth,” she wrote in an introductory email, “so we’re reliant on others to do what we can’t.”Caroline O'Donovan / BuzzFeed News “Shopping for someone else is far more difficult an endeavor than I thought,” she wrote."It’s quite an undertaking, and then it just keeps happening. I do have another person who has done some shopping for me, but it’s too much for one person to do.”
When I finally got inside, the counter attendant seemed exhausted and visibly irritated by the cheery Dean Martin–era soundtrack that made it hard for him to hear me. I explained in a muffled voice that I needed to place two orders, one for fish that would be paid for by phone and a second for a variety of meat that I would pay for by card.
When we’d spoken on the phone, Tobie had mentioned she liked this particular store because it sold very fresh peeled cloves of garlic. Just before checking out, my eyes alighted on a stack of plastic bags of the very same. I hadn’t seen anything about garlic on the list, but I felt an impulse to buy it anyway.
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