To this day I find grocery shopping an insufferable chore. In and of itself, pushing a cart in circles, throwing items into its basket is entertaining, but the drudgery of remembering where each item on your list is located and collecting them in order (rather than constantly reversing and backtracking and letting the frozen foods melt all over the toilet paper) wears me down.

My mother was a pro at grocery shopping. I assume she still is, but since we are all out of the house now, I doubt grocery shopping is the Herculean chore it once was. She had three separate lists going at any one time: stuff from Whole Foods, stuff from Albertson's, and stuff from Tom Thumb. Bagels could only be gotten at Whole Foods or Tom Thumb, while Albertson's was the place to get coffee yogurt (which was rare back then and to be horded in bulk when found). My mother would have been right at home in a medieval marketplace, combing through stall after stall to find the freshest apples and best cuts of meat, all the while telling the fruitsellers and the butchers intimate details of our family business.

We were not very useful the times we accompanied her. You would think she might have split the list in four and had each of us gather a section of the items, but we actually spent our time trudging next to the cart, hands entwined in its wire net so as not to get lost, or breaking things. Sometimes the breakage came about by honest accident, as when my little sister let an olive jar slip from her hands to shatter on the ground and immediately began howling because she thought she would be hauled away to grocery store jail, and sometimes it happened through less innocent twists of fate, as when I took down a pyramid of glass iced tea jars with one swing of a roll of wrapping paper.

Sometimes we made our own amusement by begging sample cookies from the bakery. Once we entered our teens, however, my mother tried to put a stop to that sort of thing. So we got more creative in our self-entertainments, such as the time when I stepped loudly on a plastic cup (for some reason discarded in an aisle) and squawked, "Oh no! My glasses!" Once my mother had reassured herself that I hadn't, actually, broken my glasses, and had wheeled our cart away from the now very interested in us bystanders...well, she still didn't find it funny. Which is too bad, because the sound of the crunch alone was priceless.

There was a science not just to the order, but to the timing of when she collected each item on her list. Her greatest fear was that the frozen foods would melt before we got home (a valid fear in the Texas summer; not one I myself face now, seeing as how a friend of mine accidentally left a package of lox in her trunk last winter that was still frozen when she stumbled across it a week later). This was our one contribution to each shopping trip. Like a drill sargeant she assigned us each a task, made us wait until she was almost at the head of the checkout station, and then sent us sprinting back into the aisles, this one to get ice cream, that one frozen juice.

There were enough of us that we made short work of carrying the grocery bags inside the house (FROZEN STUFF FIRST!). All the food always got put away quickly and efficiently as well. Except for the time we went away on Christmas vacation and left a full gallon of milk in the middle of the kitchen floor. It spoiled and blew its top off in a spray of white slime that spit halfway across the kitchen floor. That was a bit stinky to come home to.

In general, though, my mother had grocery shopping licked seven ways to Sunday.