The Unsafeway

Welcome to the Unsafeway. I have been wanting to do a post on this lovable neighborhood grocery store for a while but now the pressure is on because the bastion of local culture is closing its doors forever on Saturday.

A 5 minute walk from our apartment, the Unsafeway has given us much in our 5 1/2 year stay. Josh christened it the "Unsafeway" because it is unlike any grocery store we've been accustomed to frequenting. We don't like to go there after 8pm because most of the customers are only buying alcohol. There is no bakery, no pharmacy, no photo-developing, just a deli, a lot of narrow aisles, meat marked down for quick sale, and wilted produce.

One thing this store has had, though, is employees. Lifelong career employees who always ask if you need help to your car and who always ask how the boys are doing. When the boys were born and I was home without a car and without friends, a walk to S*afeway was enough to fill my emotional reservoir for a few hours until Josh got home from work. Many days, because the boys cried unless they were being held, I didn't have time to eat anything at home so I would put the crying babies in their Double Snap and Go stroller, walk to the store, and buy a deli sandwich and those 25 cent brownies with the chopped walnuts on top to quiet the beast of an appetite I had while nursing two boys. At the store I would get compliments on the boys and sympathy from perfect strangers who could see the desperation in my face. I found comfort in the rows and rows of food and from customers going about a daily routine without 2 crying infants. I knew life would get better and I just had to stick it out a little longer. It was my lifeline.

Most of the time we've lived here we've only used the store for filling in the produce between visits to the bigger grocery store nearby. But, for about a year after the boys were born, it was really our primary store because it was so close. Yesterday, I took the boys over in their new stroller for some bananas, grapes, Gatorade, and a birthday card. I was surprised to see the shelves bare. They only have some produce and grocery items - no meat, no dairy, no deli, nothing that expires quickly. The smell on the laundry/baby aisle was unchanged and I teared up passing it. I have spent hours on that aisle trying to decide which baby food to buy, which flavor of Pedialyte the boys may actually drink to avoid a trip to the hospital for dehydration, deciding how many cans of formula I could afford this time or how many I could manage to push back home in the stroller. This store has witnessed me become a mother with a very tentatively emerging confidence. I have nourished my progeny, bite by bite, growing cell by growing cell, with food from it's shelves. I cried when I realized it will soon be gone.

In about a year and a half there will be a shiny new S*afeway in its place, complete with its own gas station and maybe even a bakery or fresher produce, but I doubt I will be as attached to it as I have been to this beaten down Unsafeway. In the meantime, Sam is having the time of his life watching the construction trucks.

So, goodbye Unsafeway. Thanks for the memories and the support of this harried mother of twins.