You might remember that once a week, we would make a shopping list (with pictures) for Eric to go and get us a few things. It was what is called "life training"...teaching an autistic child lifeskills that the rest of us take for granted.

Unfortunately, they take him to...well...let's call the store "Food Tiger".

There is a nearby "Food Tiger" to us, not even a block from the store we usually use. When it first opened, we were afraid the bigger Food Tiger would swallow the store that we preferred.

Not to worry. There were a bad first few weeks, but gradually people returned to "our" store...and away from the Food Lion.

What do we have against "Food Tiger"? Well....

Nothing, per se. It seems to be a fairly well-run supermarket chain with excellent people and excellent products...

But... In the early eighties, Barb and I watched a 20/20 television show that showed one Food Tiger store bleaching its meat to preserve it longer. It doubtless was a one-time occurence, never to recur again, and I believe Food Tiger sued---and won---20/20 for doing that report.

No institution or business is one hundred per cent perfect, and sometimes the wrong people are hired in the best of places.

Still...

It left---a certain impression.

Suffice it to say that nothing, literally nothing, could ever incude me to try their meat.

It is, of course, a silly irrational prejudice of mine, and does not reflect at all on the fine quality of the meat Food Tiger sells...

(Psssst. You think that will satisfy the lawyers?)

Anyway, it seems that we are not the only ones to feel that way. For though it was five o'clock, the height of the after-work crowd which would make any other supermarket crowded, yet the parking lot was only half-filled, and the store itself was not crowded at all. (The other store had been there for years, and doubtless it was hard to get people to change. Perhaps that's the reason. Yeah, that's it...)

Yet they can't really screw up parmesan cheese (even in my baseless irrational paranoid fantasies), so we stopped there, to see if Eric would remember the layout and what to do in the store. It had been several months since he had been in there, after all...

Yet Eric knew right away what to do. He took a shopping cart and went right to the produce section. He got out a clear plastic produce bag off the roll and just needed a little help detaching it without dragging more than one off there. Then he grabbed four apples and put it in the produce bag.

He needed a little help tying it, but that was it. Then he proceeded to the next aisle....

He knew better what to do in a store than I did, at age twelve.

I've been eating meatless during lunch lately, to keep my chloresterol down. Of course, being the natural-born carnivore that I am, I actually have stuff that fools the tastebuds into thinking it's meat. Boca burgers, for instance, which are vegetarian hamburgers that pretty much taste like the real thing.

We were out of Morningstar meatless hot dogs,another way to fool the palate spoiled on meat for so long, so I ducked in the frozen section to pick them up. Again, this sort of thing was prepackaged so the chances of any sort of tampering in my paranoid fantasies were at a minimum...

When I rejoined Barb and Eric, he was picking out cereal....Marshmellow Fruit Loops, I believe. He was sticking very closely to the list we would give the teacher, his memory being near-infallible when it comes to details and routines.

Popcorn. Toaster pastries. Ritz Bits. Every time he would remember exactly where it used to be, and luckily they had not changed the layout of the store.

After he got everything that had been on his list, we got the parmesan cheese and a little italian seasoning, which was not on the original list, while Eric looked at a display with the Keebler Elf on it and then we were ready to go...

A small Pepsi and a smaller bag of Doritos as a reward for doing a good job, and Eric was ready to go.

It may be a little thing....but it makes me feel better. Barb and I won't be around forever. We hope someday to get him into some sort of assisted living facility. Eric will probably always need help. Yet if he can master an everyday thing like shopping for himself...

Maybe we won't always be needed.

Maybe he'll do just fine without us.

I hope so.

Other parents have children who grow up, and resent it when their parents can't see it. Others have children who will, in some sense of the word, never grow up...

As my twelve year old boy clutched his Big Bird doll as soon as he got in the car, babbling over and over without saying a single intelligible word, opening his Pepsi and his bag of Doritos....

Shopping with a minimum of assistance from an adult for a twelve year old may not be a big thing to you. I assure you it's a very big thing...for us.