Happiness and the price of groceries

Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

Society & Culture, Fiction, Comedy Fiction, Improv, Comedy

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I like Trader Joe’s because the clientele is half my age or less and I stand with my cart in a long double line with college kids and mothers of tiny children and I listen to fragments of phone conversations that are fresh and fascinating to me. These people lean toward eagerness and curiosity with a streak of satire; my people tend toward dismay and resignation. The lines move fast at Trader Joe’s because the store has 24 checkout cashiers and as I come toward checkout, this being New York, I wonder how many of the cashiers are hoping to be actors, writers, artists, dancers, composers, and I worry about them as I catch sight. I was a dishwasher when I was their age and I hoped to be published in The New Yorker where my heroes Updike, Perelman, Thurber published. For me, the magazine was the Big League and I needed to climb out of the Minors and when I made it, at 27, I bought filet mignon.The Bigs are still around but the young and ambitious have found new roads — podcasting, for example — in which you pitch your own tent and invent your brand and see who stops to look at the goods. I find this sort of astonishing and wonderful. I look at the young and see how their ambition is to make their own good and productive life rather than win the silver trophy or be admitted to the Big Shot Society.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When I go to Trader Joe's on Columbus Avenue, New York, to buy groceries, I do it to buy guy food, which my beloved cannot buy because
0:26.3	she knows it's not good for me. I don't do this secretly. I come home in broad daylight,
0:34.1	unpack the bag, and she watches without comment.
0:40.0	Sometimes in place of comment, she'll tell about something she read in the New York Times
0:47.0	about some encouraging development in health care or public education.
0:53.4	Meanwhile, she watches me put away the frozen mac and cheese,
0:59.7	large potatoes for baking in the microwave,
1:03.9	a few ears of sweet corn, a couple filet mignon,
1:09.3	frozen lasagna, frozen meatballs, frozen knockoff, white castle sliders.
1:16.6	I don't buy greens because that's her territory, along with other vegetables, coffee, olive
1:24.6	oil, cereal, rice, condiments, etc.
1:35.8	With coffee, for example, she has a specific dark bean from a particular valley in Guatemala that meets her standards.
1:38.4	Me, I'm happy with Maxwell House instant.
1:42.0	Coffee is coffee.
1:51.8	She favors Portuguese olive oil from hand-harvested olives.
2:00.3	Me, I'm fine with Mazzola. I don't defend my choices, and thanks to her, I don't need to. I love mac and cheese because I loved
2:05.1	grade school back in the 1950s, and that's what Mabel served in the Benson School cafeteria.
2:14.9	And when I eat a bowl of it now, I am back there, sitting with boys and observing
2:23.0	Corinne and Elaine and Diane with great interest. As a teenager, I loved to ride my bike
2:32.5	downtown to the Minneapolis Public Library, and I caught my lunch at the White Castle across the street.
2:40.6	Sliders, 15 cents apiece.
2:44.6	When I heat up a frozen one today, I'm 15 years old again, enjoying independence, spending my babysitting money,
	...

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