The Simple Things, part 2

Last Friday evening, Kev and Teenage Stepson went to a retreat at church, so Teenage Stepdaughter and I had the house to ourselves. After tidying up in the kitchen a little bit, I decided to go to the grocery store to pick up some things for the weekend meals, and I asked Teenage Stepdaughter if she wanted to come along. Though the prospect of grocery shopping on a Friday night didn't exactly put a spring in her step, perhaps due to sheer boredom or a lack of a better offer she shrugged and said, "I suppose."

At the grocery store, after gathering ingredients for build-your-own burritos and while the browsing the organic section for quick freezer meals, Teenage Stepdaughter said something about how Amy's Pizza Snacks look like Pizza Rolls. She had me at "Pizza Rolls." We'd eaten supper early so the guys could get off to their retreat, and my stomach was growling. I couldn't get Pizza Rolls out of my head.

"Those sound really good," I said. "Should we get some?"

She was on board.

As we hurried to the freezer aisle, I had a moment of deja vu and laughed out loud. In my preteen and early teen years, my dad was on several synod committees that required him to travel to Wisconsin for meetings three or four times a year. He usually stayed overnight in Wisconsin, and on those nights he was gone, my mom took us kids to the store to pick out TV dinners. On the way home from the store, we often stopped at the library to get a video to watch. As we sat in front of TV trays in the living room and savored our salisbury steak and chicken nuggets and, if we were lucky, the warm chocolate pudding that usually came with the salisbury steak or chicken nuggets, while we watched the movie from the library, we wished we could have this ritual every night.

Those rare evening three or four times a year were pretty much the only times we didn't eat at the table, and they were certainly the only times we had TV dinners, and so they were special. 

After I finished college and moved back to Minnesota, not too far from but not too close to my parents' house, my mom would call me when my dad had to go out of town. She'd pick up eclairs from the grocery store and order a pizza, and we'd eat in the living room while watching a movie--usually something with Sean Connery.

While laughing out loud in the freezer aisle, I shared this memory with Teenage Stepdaughter. We checked the bakery aisle and snatched up the last box of eclairs. Then we went home, curled up on the couch with our Pizza Rolls and eclairs, and watched one of the movies I'd watched with my mom years ago.

You just gotta love the simple things.