Week 3 funny story

I promised my support team a funny story if they checked out my blog. So here it goes:
This is the story of two white, suburban young adults grocery shopping in Garfield Park, Chicago. Once a week our team nominates a few people to grocery shop for most of the week. Aldi's is the store of choice because of their dirt cheap prices and the short 7 block walk from our house. They save money by demanding you buy your own bags and bag your own groceries. They don't waste money on nice shelves, or time on taking products out of their shipping boxes before placing them on the shelves. Nor do they value name brands, Aldi's is all about the Malt-O-Meal.

This nice Wed afternoon Stephenie and I were on grocery duty. Of course we wondered how the two of us would transport a weeks worth of food for 8 people from the grocery store to the Faith House. We came up with a brilliant solution. Jon, one of the 2 men in our house, has a duffel bag on wheels. We would bring his bag and some plastic bags and be good to go. We had high expectations for this shopping trip.

We entered the store, got our off brand cereal and milk, fruits and vegetables, and argued about which ground beef is better. After shopping, we sorted all our food. We put the heavy items like milk and canned food in the duffel bag, and we carried the toilet paper and bread in the plastic bags. It was about that time that our hopes began the sharp plummet to the protruding tree branch saving us from river below the canyon.

It was terribly apparent that the bag was too heavy for us to roll. The bag was not a sturdy suitcase where most of the weight is one the backside of the bag, it was a fabric bag with wheels that require arm strength to keep the bag from clinging to your leg. Of course, being young-adult females, upper arm strength is about the only thing we lack. Feeling totally ridiculous, we stop about 20 feet from the store to re-distribute our bags. We replace the milk and the frozen meat with the bread and toilet paper, and this seems to work alright, except for the unmistakable sensation of my arms struggling to stay in their sockets against the pull of the milk bags. We managed to hobble by the homeless pow-wow on the street corner with some dignity and luckily hit a red light at the next street. We were hanging on to the protruding branch above the canyon river pretty tightly.

Then our worst fears became reality. A plastic bag broke. Once again we had to humbly kneel on the sidewalk to redistribute our groceries. Since the duffel bag at this point was quite heavy, we each grabbed a handle with one hand, a gallon of milk in another, and stuck a package of toilet paper under our arms. We walked side by side jointly carrying our groceries and our wealth. We were burdened by our possessions, and yet could not let them go. Poor people only buy groceries for a few days, and never find themselves in this predicament. However, we were carrying this burden for our team, they had nominated us, and it was our duty to follow through. No one said it would be easy. Although we did make a few panicked calls to the house hoping someone would be there to meet us, they failed, and we were left, carrying our burden for all of Garfield Park to know.