One day earlier this week, as my wife and I picked up our 16-year-old son from his guitar lesson, my wife decided to stop at the grocery store to pick up a few items.

I personally hate shopping at the grocery store. There are a bewildering variety of products, and the way the store is organized seems to follow some logic that I will never get. When I have to go alone, I wander the aisles in confusion, a wrinkled shopping list in my hand and a frown on my face, looking for someone who knows what they're doing.

My wife seems to understand the layout perfectly and can weave her way through the store like a ninja, gliding from department to department in total silence. If I turn around, even for a second, she's gone, and I become one of those husbands you see stomping from aisle end to aisle end, throwing up my hands in frustration.

This time, though, we had to bring in our son as well. He would have preferred to stay in the car, as there are few things he hates more than shopping. But it was one of those heat-wave kind of days when you see a story on the TV news about someone getting arrested for leaving their family pet in the car while they shop for "just a few minutes." At 6 foot 2, our son might take slightly longer to bake through than a cocker spaniel, but it was probably a good idea to insist that he follow us inside.

Once inside, we wandered the aisles, my wife shopping, me trailing her and our son trailing me. Every few feet, he'd point to something he wished we buy but never do, something spicy, and I'd growl "Keep moving!" It got to where we'd go back and forth: "Hey, Dad ..." "Keep moving!" "Hey, Dad ..." "Keep moving!" so many times that my wife suggested that if I would just go to the other end of the store and get 1) butter, 2) heavy cream and 3) soap, we'd all save some time, and they could meet me at the checkout counter. It was a blatant ploy to get rid of me, but I went, as I'd do anything to speed up the process.

In the dairy department, it turned out there was no such thing as just heavy cream. There was half-and-half, and there was light cream. There was something called "heavy whipping cream." Did that mean it was only for whipping? I puzzled for five minutes before deciding it had to do. In the butter case, they had salted butter, unsalted butter and whipped butter. My head was starting to hurt.

It took three runs down the toiletries aisle to find the soap section, and then another five minutes of pondering to figure out which one to grab. I know what our usual soap looks like when I use it in the shower, but I only see the bar, not the box. I would have cracked open a few boxes, but the grocery store has security cameras every 10 feet. (My guess is they have a "greatest hits" highlight tape of husbands stamping around trying to find their wives. I probably have my own tape.)

By the time I stomped up to the checkout area 15 minutes later, my wife and son were waiting, she with an annoyed look on her face, and he with a guilty look on his. I looked down in the cart and got a ticked-off look on mine.

The cart was full of items that we never came here for. There were spicy hot cheese crackers, spicy hot nacho chips, and just to add a little more flavor, pepper sauce. There was a whole pile of very expensive-looking bottled smoothie concoctions in a variety of odd flavors -- so many we'd never find room in the fridge at home. There were enough Popsicles to start a business selling frozen treats out of the back of our station wagon. And on top of the pile, there were jumbo lump crab cakes from the butcher section ... at $17.99 a pound.

I looked up at my son, who'd clearly been waiting until my wife created a diversion before he pounced. He smirked and turned his back to me, pretending to be intent on the headlines in the gossip magazines. My wife shook her head.

"You know how they say never grocery shop on an empty stomach?" she said. "Well, from now on, the new rule is 'never grocery shop with a teenage boy with an empty stomach!' "

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