Once every week or so, my wife Julie enters into a serious grocery-shopping mode. She travels with her own extra-large, hefty shopping bags and stocks up. More often than not, the bags when full, especially with cans and liquid items, can be quite heavy. From experience, I have learned to watch for her return home, so that I may help her carry those bags into the house from her car; otherwise, rather than ask for help, she’ll struggle with as many bags as she can carry, sometimes straining herself with hurt that can linger for days. I’ve tried to suggest, in subtle ways, that she make two or three trips from the car by saying something like, “You might be able to carry more if you balance one on your head.” But such a comment never seems to make my point. So, when I recognize the sounds of her car coming down the driveway, I’m up and ready at the back door to greet her tired look with a smile and two helping hands.
On one of those mega-shopping days, hearing her car pull up the driveway, I finished the paragraph I was reading, put down the book, and forthwith proceeded to the back door. Julie’s car was parked in front of the garage, but she had already begun walking back down our driveway to the street to retrieve two wheeled garbage bins from the curb, as the scheduled pickup had occurred several hours earlier. So, I walked over to her car, grabbed three full bags of groceries, brought them into the kitchen, and set them on the countertops. With my task completed, I returned to my book on the couch, where I waited for her to enter the house with a smile, saying, Thank you, sweetheart for, carrying in the groceries.
But instead, after a few minutes, I saw her car race down the driveway and away. Hmm, I thought, she must have forgotten some crucial item and went back to the store. I resumed reading, soon engrossed within the rising tensions and conflicts of fine literary fiction; but something about the situation bothered me, something panicky about the way the car zoomed away down the street. Julie normally becomes quite burned out after grocery shopping and is usually ready for a cold drink and rest; this was odd. On the other hand, I concluded there was no use thinking about it too much; I would find out eventually. I went back to my book.
After what seemed like an hour, my subconscious mind, not satisfied to simply wait for her return, had, on its own, deduced a possible explanation for her rapid departure to only she knew where. Could she have brought in the garbage bins from the street, put them into the garage, opened her car door for the groceries that were not there, and then been so shocked at seeing the empty seat, that she “shot from the hip” and concluded the groceries had been left at the store? This my subconscious mind communicated to me after pulling in myriad clues unseen by the conscious mind, yet recorded nevertheless. Critical thinking on display, I must say.
Meanwhile, unknown to me at the time, Julie was at the grocery store demanding that the security staff play back their video from the parking lot camera, which would identify the criminal who stole her groceries from her car during the short time that she wheeled the empty shopping cart to its parking lot holding pen.
It was around that time in this sequence of events that Julie called me on her cell phone. “Hello Julie,” I said.
“Tom! You’ll never guess what happened to me!”
“Are you looking for your groceries?”
“Yes! How did you know?”
“Well…while you went to the street to bring in the garbage bins, I brought the groceries into the house.”
“Oh my God! You! It was you!”
“Sorry. I kept expecting you to come into the house. And then I saw you drive away.”
“But…wait, I have to go. And you’re in big trouble, mister!”
Fortunately, we both remained lighthearted about the incident. I explained that I was just trying to be the responsible husband, as is my wont, by helping with the groceries. Julie explained that the hassle and fatigue of shopping combined with low mid-day energy levels caused her normally clear-thinking mind to falter and latch onto the first panicky thought to materialize: the groceries were stolen.
In the end, I asked, “But didn’t you remember loading the grocery bags into your car?”
“Now I do! But I was so much on automatic pilot after leaving the store that I didn’t even think about it or notice. Like getting in or out of your car: Do you even pay attention?”
“Right,” I said. “I do a lot on automatic pilot these days. I get it.”
“And you can wipe that smirk off your face right now. You’re not out of the doghouse yet.”