The store in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was the first Wegmans to open in New York City. It's been around for a while, and it is easier to reach than I first envisioned. So, when FH asked me to take her and her daughter on a shopping run today, I didn't mind doing so.
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FH's daughter is a pretty young woman, and has a long happy life ahead of her if she can conquer the demons in her life. No, I won't go into the details here, but she has many of the problems often exhibited by a woman her age. My impression of her mom asking me to include the daughter on our shopping trip was that of a mother trying to keep her daughter occupied in a time of stress.
When I arrived in Forest Hills, FH asked me if we could stop by a doughnut shop so that her daughter could eat and drink something, so that her stomach wouldn't fight a uncivil war. Throughout the trip to Brooklyn, the daughter was complaining of how ill she felt. And it seemed as if she would rather have been left at home to deal with her problems by herself, instead of accompanying her mother on this shopping trip.
Arriving at Wegmans, I let them off at the front door while I hunted down a hard to get parking space. Entering the store, I looked around and found the daughter on a motorized shopping cart for handicapped people. She was tooling around on the shopping cart, while her mom was trying to select food for the week. Surprisingly, FH's daughter seemed to calm down after a few minutes in the store, as the cart distracted her enough from her sick stomach to make this shopping trip almost a pleasure. $230 later, we exited the store and headed home. While on local streets, the daughter got sick, and we had to wait for her to be ready for the rest of the trip home.
Eventually, we made it back to Forest Hills. We were lucky to find a parking spot across the street from her apartment building. This made it possible for me to join mom and daughter in carrying the afternoon's purchases to the apartment and loading them into the refrigerator. Both FH and her daughter had unsettled stomachs for different reasons, and we hung out at the apartment until FH was ready to go out to eat.
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Dining out in the age of Covid-19 raises many questions. One of which is: How many people in a restaurant are "too many" people? There is a legal definition of "too many." In NYC, a restaurant is limited to 25% of pre-Covid capacity until 2/28/21. In the suburbs, it is 50% of pre-Covid capacity. The restaurant I chose was less than 100 feet from the Nassau county line, and was subject to NYC capacity limits. This, I thought, would keep occupancy low enough for FH to feel comfortable dining at the restaurant. At first, she was comfortable. But, people started coming in, and she was ready to leave the place. As for me, I have not yet had my first vaccination shot, and I'm the person at greater risk. Yet, she was the person who was uncomfortable as the place approached 25% capacity.
Once I was done with my dinner, we took a drive to Hicksville, and then I dropped her off at her apartment. This was a night that I didn't go back upstairs - she was getting tired after a long day. And I was just as happy to drop her off at her front door, since I was getting a little tired myself after a long week of work.
