People watching is one of the best and cheapest forms of entertainment ever. Well, unless you are people watching at the Minnesota State Fair. Then it is an extremely expensive form of people watching, but I guess you do get what you pay for. For some reason fanny packs, socks with sandals, and drunk people never get old.
I have always paid attention to detail. Or I should say that I have always paid attention to the details I consciously and subconsciously found relevant. Let me explain.
Think about what you notice when you walk into a room. Is it how many people are in the room? What the people are wearing? The color of the walls? The size of the room? How many windows? How hot or cold it is? The volume of the tv, or music, or conversation? What grabs your attention and what matters to you?
I would safely bet that if you throw a handful of people into the same environment that is new to each of them, each one of them would explain the same environment differently with focus on different details. And when food allergies barreled into my world, the details I notice in every single situation I encounter are quite different than they were for the first 36 years of my life.
Let’s take the trip to the grocery store I made a few weeks ago. Now, to preface, I have a handful of grocery stores close to my home and I rotate between them all. No, this is not the wild way I incorporate change and spontaneity* into my life, but rather out of necessity. When the food you purchase is about safety first you learn very quickly that in order to purchase the products you need there is no place that has it all. Aldi, Whole Foods, Target, Hyvee, Cub, Lunds, Costco, and Coborns (and more) each carry certain things that can’t be found at the others. I have learned to stock up on the stuff I can so I am not going to ten different places each week. The result is my cabinets looking like an episode out of those super couponing shows.
One of these stores has a ginormous open bin of peanuts in the produce section. My family’s kryptonite right in the middle of our nutrition. I am going to assume most people would just think, ummm, just don’t touch the peanuts genius. Or just don’t go to this store. And trust me, I only go to this store and others with the same set up the least amount of times possible and without my kids. Here’s only a few situations what I’ve noticed at this particular store…
Peanut shells on the milk cart. I picked up a gallon and right underneath it was a crushed shells. If I would have not noticed I very easily could have grabbed it, purchased it, and put it on my counter where I prep my kids’ food. (This particular experience is why I wipe my counter off a disturbingly large amount).
Peanut shells masked within the jarred pickles. I pulled a jar and right behind it was a pile of peanut shells. Gross. So I put that jar back and grabbed one a couple spots down.
A customer who bagged up a scoopful of peanuts and plopped it onto the belt behind me only to have a hole in the bag leaking out a few of the peanuts. Now the belt is contaminated for those behind her.
My favorite though was watching a culprit in action. When I went a few weeks ago a random middle aged dude wearing a hooded sweatshirt stuffed a large amount of peanuts from the bin into his front pouch. Mr. Peanut Pocket proceeded to eat them one by one out of said pouch while walking through the store. I did the thing where I passed him up and down for a few aisles until I decided to skip one so I didn’t have to experience the annoyance and anxiety anymore. What I did notice about this thief, however, was that he was holding the accumulating empty shells in his hand. I’m not sure if he was just looking for the perfect spot to mask his crime or if he is a clean thief and was waiting for a garbage unlike the pickle schmuck.
Then, yesterday, I was thankful when my 3-year-old chose to ride in the cart at Target rather than walk alongside it. No, not because the store was packed full of Christmas clearance shoppers and I was afraid he would run off and get lost in the mix, but because for months now there has been a table there set up near the check out lines full of pretzel samples that are unsafe for him to eat. That those pretzels have a warning on it stating they may contain peanuts. That the table is down low enough for him to grab them. That even though we spoke in the car about him not grabbing food if he sees any, that he is only three years old, loves pretzels and might forget about that conversation when he sees something that we have a safe version of in our home. Because he chose to ride in the cart I didn’t have to worry about him running up to that table, grabbing those pretzels and shoving one in his mouth possibly ending in a jab from an epi and a trip to the ER.
So, what do you see when you walk into a store? Into a holiday party? At a baseball game? At a playground? I see food wrappers in carts. I see the peanut butter blossoms on the tray before any other Christmas cookie. I see fans throwing their peanut shells on the ground while watching the game. I see kids eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as they are playing on the equipment.
So what do I do? I throw away the wrappers (aka someone else’s garbage) and wipe down the cart. I ask the host to put the tray of cookies somewhere out of reach and then have a mild anxiety attack while following my kids around like a major helicopter mom (since he can’t eat any of the cookies since they were meshed with the peanut butter ones). I look up the dates they offer peanut-free games or sections and only consider attending a game on those dates. I ask the kid’s parent if they wouldn’t mind having their kid eat at the designated food area that they should be so they don’t contaminate the entire park and just wait to see if said parent is understanding or if they lose their shit on me.
I miss being ignorant to the seriousness of food allergies. I miss not needing to pay attention to details like these. I miss how easy simple errands and activities used to be. I miss not having anxiety. I miss focusing on someone’s wolf t-shirt and carpenter jean shorts rather than their deep fried Snickers and where it is going to end up. And I miss seeing a random guy shoving peanuts in his mouth at the grocery store and only thinking about how gross it is that he shoved his possibly unwashed poop hands into a bin that other people are purchasing from. Ahh, it was a simpler time.
*You don’t want to know how many times I attempted to spell ‘spontaneity’ until it finally gave me an option in spellcheck. I attempted twice here before I scrolled up.
Peanut Free Me by Kim Farley 