He's Incorrigible

He loves to go out shopping. Not with me, not when it's time to do the once-weekly grocery shopping. Mostly because he hates the supermarket I shop at, a bare-bones, basic type of store to which I bring along our own large plastic bins to haul the groceries back home in. It's a miserably cramped little supermarket, no frills to be seen anywhere. But the prices are an attraction and the basics which are on offer suit me fine quality-wise; I've no interest in pre-prepared and processed foods.

No, he does his own shopping. Once in a while he'll go into one of the larger, pricier, fancier supermarkets and bring home "special" things I can't get at the no-frills store, and be enormously pleased with himself. I'm pleased with him too, as long as he doesn't get carried away as sometimes happens when he brings home items I've already got plenty of, and how the hell are we going to use it all?

This morning, post-shower, his eyeglasses fell apart. The wire-type frame that suits him so well evidently succumbed to irreversible metal fatigue. He quickly ascertained that there was no procedure available to him whereby he could resuscitate the frame, so he put on an old pair for breakfast, then quickly made his way to a local optometrist to see if they could match his glass lenses with a frame similar to the croaked one.

From which emporium he later telephoned to inform me that he'd be just a little longer; the search was successful and he was awaiting the completion of the physical transaction from old frame to new. I was out in the front garden, cutting back a few of the roses, gathering up cuttings, emptying the garden pots of their soil into the garden proper when he arrived back home.

Time for a ravine walk, and off we went, Button and Riley in tow, snow flurries fluttering about, turning to light icicles of frozen rain, then abruptly halting to permit the sun to sneak through for two minutes, before the winds blew the clouds back into place directly over us and introduced more rain. Lots of squirrels rustling about in the forest interior. And there, high up in a pine at the top of one of the ascents, two black-eyed, fat-faced raccoons, hugging one another and peering down at us.

When we got home, he reached into the car to pull out a large heavy bag. He'd gone shopping again, while awaiting the eyeglass transition from kaput to complete. A large format picture book for our daughter's partner, languishing in a recovery bed in hospital after shoulder surgery. A large format picture book for him of English country estates. And a large format picture book for me, of English country gardens and the history of gardening in England. Bliss.

I should have known he's incapable of coming back empty-handed from any destination hard by shopping opportunities.