The grocery store song

The other day, which was maybe last week and maybe last month (time has lost almost all meaning), R brought home a papaya. I’m still off fruit and almost all sugars — more on that in a later post, but short version: I feel so much better now — so I did not partake, but it was interesting to see the inside of a papaya after hearing about them my whole life. The seeds are gray and squashy and look vaguely insectile. I didn’t hear any calls for buying a second papaya, so I’m thinking it wasn’t a favorite. Or maybe they just need to eat it two or three times.

Anyway. It triggered a memory, long faded, of how my mom and I would sing “Lone Palm” by Jimmy Buffett in the grocery store. The first line is “My garden is filled with papayas and mangoes,” and as we walked by the produce, one of us would start humming. We’d usually get to the chorus by the time we reached the canned goods, singing in harmony while getting side-eye from other shoppers. Over time, we began to refer to it as “the grocery store song.” I had to Google the lyrics to find the title just now, because I’d forgotten what it was really called.

It feels like another life, me and mom singing in a store. Those years were overall not happy ones for me, but there were good moments. In-jokes and routines and silliness. Singing about fruit we’d never eaten, without a care about who was listening.

On the heels of this memory was the realization that, some day all too soon, I will be the only person left who knows what the grocery store song is, and it was such a lonely feeling. So I decided to share it here, so someone else will remember with me.