Trying to Carry Bags of Groceries Home

A few days ago, I saw an old woman from my apartment complex trying to get her grocery bags home from the bus stop a block away. She had bought too much stuff, and had too many bags to  carry all at once. So she carried 3 or 4 bags at a time across the street, set them down, then went back for the others.

From 2010 to 2016, I didn't have a car in Austin, so I also had to take a bus to the grocery store. And I often inadvertently bought too much stuff and subsequently had to struggle to get everything home. After I got off the bus, I often couldn't carry everything for more than half a block, and had to stop and set every bag down and wait a sec to get a second or third wind before I carried on.

Austin is hot for about 6 months out of the year, so I often arrived at my one-room apartment sopping wet. (Yet filled with a sense of accomplishment.)

Only years later, after I had a car, did I start to curse my mother and brother who had lived within 2 miles of me at the time of the above, and knew of my car-less situation, and yet never once offered to take me grocery shopping. No one was thinking about me.

I don't particularly know or like the old woman from my complex. We've had precisely two interactions: In the first, she saw my "C-SPAN Book TV" bag at the corner beer store and asked when Book TV came on. In the second encounter, she mistakenly thought I was the blonde mother of that obnoxious autistic girl who had been running around on the roof of my apartment and jumping into my backyard and entering my apartment last year---I immediately shut down THAT conversation because I so despised both that kid AND her mother after the mother pounded on my door one eve and shouted at me for daring to tell her creepy kid to stop staring into my window.

So, yeah, I feel for the old woman and her groceries! :)  But not gonna make her a grocery-trip friend o' mine or anything. (But damn---my mom and/or brother really should have helped me out back then...)