Past Lives and Panic Buying

Meet my mom, Sue

Dec 17, 2024

I hope this blog article finds you cozy and warm. Please enjoy this humorous chapter from my book titled It’s Not So Bad.

Past Lives and Panic Buying

“I’m going to the store later. Let me know if you need anything.” I receive this phone call each week from my mom, Sue. Mind you, I’m an able-bodied forty-one-year-old who can shop for myself. I go shopping weekly. I even push my cart and everything.

I shop at places that don’t require membership cards. My wallet is already filled with too many cards. I’ve got a library card, a few debit cards, a driver’s license, a zoo pass, a dental insurance card, a medical insurance card, a few expired gift cards, and my daughter’s school photos – each year from preschool to third grade. My wallet is thicker than a hockey puck.

One more card and my wallet would be over its capacity. This is why I shop at “regular” stores, where they let in just anybody – even those who shop in public wearing bathrobes… or socks with sandals.

On the other hand, my mom does have a membership card. She shops at one of those giant wholesale superstores. The kind where shopping carts are roughly the size of battle tanks and shelving units rise high into the air like the New York City skyline. She usually goes there on Tuesdays. I expect the phone call to come in somewhere between ten and noon. “The breakfast sandwiches you like are on sale this week. How many boxes should I get you? Seven? Eight?”

I quickly do the math in my head. Twelve breakfast sandwiches multiplied by eight boxes. Ninety-six breakfast sandwiches. What kind of crazy person buys ninety-six break-fast sandwiches? It’s enough to last for three months. “It’s a good deal,” my mom will say. “You shouldn’t pass this up. The sale ends soon, and Gary said they won’t be this cheap again until next year due to the egg shortage.”

“Who’s Gary?” I’ll ask, wondering if my mom made friends with the farmer who supplies eggs to the breakfast sandwich company, who then ships them to the superstore. She makes connections everywhere she goes.

“Gary is the store manager here. He says the next pallet of breakfast sandwiches won’t be in for two more weeks. Better make it ten boxes,” she says.

I do the math. 120 breakfast sandwiches. Four-month supply. “Okay,” I reply hesitantly. “But I don’t have that much room in my freezer.”

“Don’t worry. Gary says that deep freezers are on sale. I’ll get you one, and you can put it in the garage. Fourteen cubic feet for less than $600 is a heck of a deal. I talked to my deep freezer guy just last week, and he couldn’t even match that price, what with the deep freezer shortage and every-thing.”

“Okay,” I mumble on the other end of the phone, shaking my head and wondering how this got out of hand so quickly. I had planned on shopping at the “regular” store soon and getting a six-pack of breakfast sandwiches like a normal person. Just six. Just enough to get me through the week until the next time I go shopping.

My mom always up-sells me, though. Why buy six when you can get 120 for twenty times the cost? Why buy a half pound of strawberries when you can get a whisky barrel full of them? One roll of duct tape? Absurd. Make it a twelve-pack, just in case you decide to become a serial kidnapper.

Once, she called me from the store and convinced me I needed a winter coat in July. “You can pay me back later,” she said. “You know what, never mind, this one’s on me. Besides, it will be twice the price come December.” Another time, she convinced me I needed a ten-pound fish food container even though I didn’t own a pet fish. I figured I’d mix it with my cat’s wet food for extra protein or something.

“But I’m not sure I have room for a new deep freezer in my garage,” I said to my mom, now trying to back out of this negotiation.

“Oh, I know, honey. I’ve already thought of that. We can just knock out the west wall of the garage and expand it by attaching a storage pod. It shouldn’t take more than an afternoon, tops. You’ve got those on sale too, right Gary?” She moves the phone away from her mouth while she talks to Gary. I hear mumbled conversations between her fat-fingering the keypad, assaulting my ears with beeps and bloops.

“Yep, Gary says the storage pods are on sale, but we better get one today due to the nationwide pod shortage.”

And this is how I usually spend my Tuesdays, any time between ten and noon when the phone call comes in. “I’m going to the store later. Let me know if you need anything.”

My response is always the same. “No thanks, Mom; I have everything I need.” But this is only phase one. Phase two comes when she’s at the store. I’ll get another call from her. She doesn’t bother with small talk or putting the conversation in context. She gets straight to the point, like a soldier behind enemy lines with limited time to relay the coordinates via a satellite phone.

“Toilet paper. Sixty-four count. Twelve dollars. Should I get you three packs or four?”

“No thanks,” I’ll say. “I’m still working through that pallet of toilet paper you gave me in March of 2020. I’ll be good for a few more years.”

“But Gary says that,”

“Mom, seriously, I’m good. But that’s sweet of you to ask.”

That’s phase two. And it’s so hard to say no to the woman. She’s incredibly persuasive. I can always think of a reason why I don’t need something in bulk. She’ll rebuttal by naming two reasons I do need it in bulk. When I politely decline, she’ll offer to keep the items at her house until I need them. When I still decline, she’ll buy it anyway. Instead of having me pay her back, she’ll just wrap it up as a Christmas gift, and I’ll receive it near the holidays against my will.

I sometimes wonder if she was a salesperson in a past lifetime. I’m convinced she’s the reincarnated soul of a telemarketer. Someone who blazed a path for others by becoming the lead salesperson in the early days of outbound calls. She undoubtedly set the bar so high that her coworkers resented her. Her sales record must have been impeccable. Nobody could have matched her numbers. She talked every customer into ordering more shit than they could use in ten lifetimes.

My sister Elizabeth moved back in with my mom and has lived with her for the past few years. She’s right there in the trenches and gets a front-row seat to our mom’s “panic buying.” That’s what Elizabeth calls it, anyway. I suppose, in some cases, that’s an accurate term. There have been times when Mom will see something on the news regarding supply chains, warehouse shortages, or an update on the pandemic, and it will be the catalyst that gets her to the store.

More often than not, though, she just enjoys a good deal and likes to be prepared. She has a storage room in the basement that I call The Survival Bunker. It’s roughly 400 square feet. The walls are lined with storage shelves containing nonperishable goods. It’s like an Amazon supply warehouse. She’s got everything in there.

Twelve boxes of pasta. Eleven bottles of salad dressing. Sixteen cans of chili beans. Two packages of paper towels (twelve count). Twenty-one and a half boxes of tissues (my sister’s kids were making little tissue ghosts at Halloween). Nine-teen bags of assorted potato chips. Seven containers of popcorn seeds – four expired and three still usable. And so much more.

I’ve already told my mom that when the zombie apocalypse hits, I’m moving into that storage room. No doubt, times will be dire. I’ll eat my feelings to console myself and still won’t run out of food for at least a year or two. At that time, I could still resort to the deep freezers for extra sustenance. There are three deep freezers in total – two in the basement and a third in the garage. The third one may be inaccessible, assuming the zombies would have infiltrated the garage two years into the apocalypse.

It’s not so bad, though, because Mom stores her Christmas cookies in the basement deep freezers – all 3,108 of them. It’s true. Last holiday season, she kept count. Like a manic elf who’d gone off her meds against the doctor’s orders, she transformed her kitchen into a palace of frosting and sprinkles. There were sixteen different varieties of cookies in total.

Of course, she recruited help whenever possible. She’d ask my sister or brother or me to stop by and pick up the bulk items she’d gotten at the superstore on our behalf. While there, she’d say, “Oh, well, if you’re not in a rush, why don’t you help me frost a few hundred cookies.” We’d usually take the bait. The labor was a small price, considering we could eat as many as we pleased during the process. When the diabetic coma wore off, we’d take our eight jars of pickles and head out the door.

“They’ll be back,” she’d think to herself. And she was always right. We’d come back to help bake (and eat) more cookies. Sometimes, she’d even get the grandkids in on the gig. They’d roll up their sleeves and begin mixing, dipping, frosting, sprinkling, molding, and shaping the cookies. It was like a sticky little sweatshop, each child putting in a long and arduous shift.

My nephew’s hand cramped up. My daughter Sky got her long hair caught in a tub of frosting, making it look like a unicorn’s mane. My other nephew sneezed on a batch of M&M cookies, which was a genius move on his part, by the way. That dozen was set aside specifically for him and nobody else. So, the 3,108 cookies became 3,096.

My mom had quite the system in place. Back in the fall, she’d purchased thirty-six massive Tupperware containers to hold all the cookies (Gary had given her a good deal at the store.) Like a game of Tetris, she found a way to cram them all inside deep freezer #1 in The Survival Bunker. Even after gifting platters of Christmas cookies to various friends and family members, I figured there would still be plenty left for me to graze on.

If the zombies eventually stumbled into this basement storage room, I imagine I could just crawl inside the deep freezer with a flashlight and eat cookies until I succumbed to the cold. Yes, they’d eventually figure out how to open the freezer door. By then, I’d be frostbitten and chewy, like frozen beef jerky. From the afterlife, I’d be laughing at them and hoping they’d crack a tooth on my hard skin while eating me.

As for my mom, she doesn’t care much for zombie movies. She prefers to watch Hallmark movies while decorating her Christmas cookies. She doesn’t always pay attention. It’s more just for background noise while she bakes. It’s just as well. The plots of those movies are relatively predictable anyway.

Someone beats cancer just in time for the holidays and realizes that life itself is the greatest gift of all. Or a child helps her lonely, single mother to find love again, and the family is complete when the step-dad-to-be proposes on Christmas Eve. Or a father and son reconcile their differences while performing as two of the three wise men in the reenactment of Jesus’ birth. No doubt, my mom would look at the television and be like, “That manger doesn’t have enough straw. They should talk to my straw guy.”

I swear my mom has “a guy” for everything. Need a new washing machine, you say? She’s got a guy for that. “Talk to Mark down at the hardware store. Aisle seven.” Are you in the market for some new tires? “You should talk to Patty over on 132nd Street. I’ll give her a heads up that you’re coming.” Looking to have your back patio mud-jacked? “Oh, you’ll wanna call Bob for that,” she’d say. “Here, I carry his business cards on me at all times.”

She can recommend someone for any job imaginable. If you go with anyone else besides her suggestion, she’ll raise a skeptical eyebrow, claiming nobody else can do the job quite like “her guy” can. She’ll convince you that everyone else cuts corners and is incompetent. “Do you want the job done cheap, or do you want the job done right?” she’ll ask.

When the job is to be done, my mom arrives to watch the people work – like it’s a spectacle or a free form of entertainment. She wants to be where the action is. I once had some landscaping done around my house, and she arrived snacking on a bag of popcorn. She claimed it was part of a twenty-four pack she’d just gotten at the store. But it seemed a little too coincidental to me. She was thoroughly enjoying the action, watching the landscapers as if they were Holly-wood actors on the big screen. She never micromanages the work. That’s not her style. But she does ask a lot of questions because it makes her feel more involved in the process.

“How thick are you laying that mulch? Two inches or three?”

The gardener looked up and seemed surprised, as if he didn’t see her standing nearby. “Um, three inches. I think.”

“Nice,” said my mom, sounding like a teenage boy who’d just looked at a poster of a model standing next to a hot rod. “That’s cypress mulch, you know. It’ll do well through the winter.”

The guy looked up, not quite knowing what to say. “Uh-huh,” he nodded.

There was another time I hired one of “her guys” to fix the cracked and uneven staircase at the front of my house. She figured out when he’d be arriving at my place and pulled up at the same time as the concrete worker, almost like she was a detective who’d been trailing him from a distance.

Mom exited her vehicle, and I noticed she was wearing her back brace. When she wears her back brace, you know she’s feeling particularly energetic. She had back surgery several years ago – a spinal fusion. Just as a precaution, she often straps it on when she’s planning to be out and about for any length of time. It doesn’t slow her down one bit. In fact, I think it enhances her productivity, like some robotic exoskeleton that gives an ordinary person superhuman strength.

More recently, she even had a partial knee replacement. Regarding the recovery process, her physical therapist reported she bounced back faster than any patient he’s ever worked with. Not bad for a sixty-eight-year-old lady. During recovery, she still made her weekly trips to the superstore, but she had to use an electric scooter to get around, which pissed her off because it only moved half the speed she was used to walking. I heard a rumor that she and Gary slapped a turbo-charger on the unit’s battery pack to give it more zip. I forgot to ask her if that was true because the very next week, she was back to walking at full speed.

Anyhow, she got out of her car wearing the back brace, and she approached “her guy,” who was hired to fix my cracked staircase. My mom was holding a caulk gun, which was locked and loaded. She held it like a soldier might hold an assault rifle while listening to orders from a superior. This was when I noticed she was also wearing knee pads as if she planned on getting down and doing the work herself.

I’d been peeking at the two of them through my window curtain. I decided to go outside and ask my mom what she was doing. “Mom, why are you all geared up like you’re going to help him? He can do the job himself. That’s what he’s getting paid for.”

She chuckled as if my question was ridiculous. “No, sweetie, Bob is going to handle this staircase.” She laughed again, amused that I had misread her intentions. “I’m just going back to caulk some cracks I saw on your patio.”

I looked at Bob. He shrugged his shoulders and grinned. He wasn’t surprised. Bob knew what to expect from her. My mom had already hired him a few times for odd jobs. Why? I’m not sure. The woman is capable of handling most fixer-upper tasks herself. I think she just likes the company and the camaraderie of being near someone who speaks her language.

She has three children, but sadly, my siblings and I shouldn’t be trusted with anything more complex than an electric screwdriver. The handyman genes didn’t land in our DNA. My mom, though, is knowledgeable about electrical, plumbing, heating and air, drywalling, woodworking, sanding, varnishing, roofing, tile work, and caulking. Man, does she love caulking. Most moms carry a first-aid kit in their vehicle. My mom usually totes around caulk guns, a tool kit, a Shop-Vac, and a six-foot ladder.

I’m convinced that, before being a telemarketer in a past lifetime, my mom was also a construction worker. She probably wore a hard hat, coveralls, and steel-toed boots. She likely had a meat-and-potatoes kind of name – hardy and straightforward, just like her personality. Something like Butch, Gus, or Frank. No more than one syllable. Nothing too fancy.

I can imagine some catchphrases she must have used in these blue-collar past lives she’s lived. Something like, “If it can be broken, I can fix it.” Or, “If it can’t be broken, then I probably built it.” Or maybe, “Cutting corners cuts character.”

I swear there’s the soul of a 300-pound construction worker trapped inside my mom’s 5’1’’ body. With a good night’s sleep and a back brace, there’s no project she can’t tackle. Fixer-upper projects aren’t her only skillset. Somewhere in her collection of past lifetimes, she must have also been an accountant and maybe a realtor as well.

Mom’s sister Joan lost her husband a while back. He’d taken care of the family’s finances and taxes ever since they’d been married. Joan was distraught and overwhelmed as she attempted to take over these newfound responsibilities. My mom cleared her schedule, made phone calls on Joan’s behalf, and helped her with issues regarding insurance, bills, filing taxes, and even making funeral arrangements.

When that process was over, and Joan needed to downsize, my mom even helped her find the perfect house. She strapped on her back brace and spent several weeks helping Joan declutter the old home, move boxes, and redecorate the new house, all while providing emotional support through the grief. And just in case Joan might crack under the stress of it all, my mom had two extra caulk guns locked and loaded in her vehicle.

This is just what my mom does. She helps. She lives to be of service. Hardly a minute of her day belongs to herself. It’s all for others. And she wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s what makes her tick. She doesn’t shop at the wholesale superstore each Tuesday just for herself. She partly goes there hoping she can talk my siblings and me into letting her pick up a few things on our behalf. More often than not, she’ll insist we don’t need to pay her back… and we shouldn’t bother stopping by to get the six-pound bag of shredded cheese because she’d love to drop it off while running more errands. All she asks for is a quick hug when she gets to our houses.

When she cooks dinner, it’s rarely for herself. She typically portions out half of it for her old neighbor, Dorothy – a ninety-five-year-old lady who my mom helped get into an assisted living facility after Dorothy had fallen a few times. Granted, she hasn’t been Dorothy’s neighbor in years. Since moving away, she vowed always to stop by and look after her. So, she has. And she’ll drop off dinner to Dorothy a few times a week, ensuring the food is just the right consistency so that Dorothy can easily swallow it. Nothing too chewy. Primarily soups and chilis and things that easily slide down the back of the throat, like a crocodile swallowing an eel.

Even the 3,108 Christmas cookies are made to be given away. Well, minus the twelve “sneezers,” that is. All but one of Mom’s ten brothers and sisters still live here in Omaha, Nebraska. She breaks out a map each year and plans the most efficient driving route when delivering platters of Christmas cookies to their doorsteps in mid-December. Of course, she factors in stops at other houses, too, like friends, old coworkers, and a few of “her guys.” Last holiday season, I believe she put 100 miles on her car in a single day while making the rounds.

One day, I walked into my mom’s house and was surprised to see Aunt Barb sitting there. She wasn’t a frequent visitor. Was she there delivering bad news? Was everything okay with Uncle Art? She assured me everything was fine. She was merely there begging for a fresh plate of Christmas cookies. Apparently, she and Art had devoured theirs in less than a week.

Like a drug addict searching for a fix, she’d meandered over to my mom’s house looking for free handouts and a sugar rush. Surely, she wasn’t the only one. Mom welcomes people to come get a “refill” anytime they want. A “refill.” Like she’s some sort of full-service fuel station or an outpost to load up on supplies while passing through.

Years from now, I imagine the whole operation growing in magnitude. Signs would be strewn about the neighborhood reading, “Grandma Sue’s Cookie Cravins.” We’d leave out the “g” to make it sound more wholesome and down to Earth. At first, the signs would be paper and cardboard, like garage sale signs. Eventually, they’d evolve to wood as the business grew and grew, ultimately culminating in a full-blown marquee sign like the ones standing outside grocery stores.

People will flock to her house from every corner of America, hands outstretched like starving beggars on the streets of Calcutta, India. And there would be my mom, like Mother Teresa, handing out cookies with Hallmark movies blaring in the background. Police officers would block off the streets to stop traffic and allow pedestrians to roam freely. By then, all three deep freezers would be stocked with containers full of Christmas cookies. Three times her current output. That’s 9,324 cookies. Well, 9,288 after you factor out three dozen that were inevitably sneezed on by my nephews.

My mom would welcome this three-ring circus. And she wouldn’t run out of sugar or M&Ms or dough or butter. By then, Gary at the superstore would have designated an entire wing of the warehouse just for my mom – somewhere over near the caulk section.

My siblings and I have already decided that someday, a long time from now, my mom’s headstone will read, “I’m going to the store later. Let me know if you need anything?” It perfectly encapsulates how she lives her life. People from near and far will make the pilgrimage to visit her grave site. They’ll leave offerings like a gallon-sized jar of green olives. Or a twelve-pack of furnace filters. A hammer. A Phillips-head screwdriver. Maybe an apron or two. Someone will leave a for-ty-eight pack of AA Energizer batteries. Because, like that damn bunny from the commercial, Mom just kept going and going and going. Even in the afterlife, she’ll hit the ground running, wondering how long it’s been since someone touched up the paint on the pearly gates.

I don’t think my mom even realizes how much she’s appreciated by everyone who knows her. She’s too busy baking and building and spackling and shopping. She’s too busy running errands on behalf of others.

“I’m going to the store later. Let me know if you need anything.”

Next time, I’ll respond with, “No thanks. All I need is the best mom in the whole world. And I’ve already got that.”

Soul Studios with Andy Myers

Discussion about this post