My sister and I told this story at my uncle’s memorial service yesterday. I’m not going to change it (I’m too lazy), so it’s in speech format. Whatever, you get the point 
By far my favorite Angelo-related adventure!
We’re Caro and Mel, and we’re Angelo’s great-nieces.
As you all know, Angelo and Norma didn’t get out of the house much in the last few years. One day Mel and I went over to their house for lunch and a visit. Toward the end of the visit Angelo asked if we could pick some things up from Safeway. Our parents frequently grocery shopped for them, and I had been with my mom on a couple of shopping trips. It really didn’t seem like rocket science so Mel and I happily took the list and headed to the store.
On our way to the store we looked over the list. It was 7 pages. Angelo had attempted to make things easier for us by grouping things together: the meats, the veggies, the frozen foods, and so on. Again, how hard could this be?
We got to the store and started with the easier things. Milk, cottage cheese, some yogurts. But then we got into some trouble. What kind of yogurt do they like? What brand of creamer? I called our mom and asked. She laughed but was happy to help. Then we moved on. But we kept running into problems. What does that say? I’ve never heard of that brand, is that a mistake? So of course we kept calling our mom.
I think about an hour and 12 phone calls later she was pretty tired of us. So when we made it to the vegetable section we started calling our dad. Angelo wants red onions – are those the purple ones? What does zucchini look like? Which ones are the sweet potatoes? We must have called our dad 8 times in 10 minutes. Angelo had made everything very specific: 2 pounds of this, half a pound of that. I remember we were measuring the green beans and I thought to myself “a pound of green beans sure is a lot!”. But we just kept piling them into the bag. We would later come to realize that we measured out one kilogram of green beans. Oops!
I think it was about this point that my sister and I realized that not only did we have a 7 page list on our hands, but this thing was double sided. We had milk and other perishable items that we worried were going bad, so we actually swapped some things for fresh ones, then headed over to the frozen section on our way out.
Mel and I grabbed some waffles and some other frozen stuff. Then I noticed we were supposed to get 2 boxes of drumsticks. For some reason, I had it in my head that we were supposed to get drumstick chicken and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why on earth Angelo would think that would come in a box. We had called our parents so many times that they were sick of us so I just made an executive decision: we were getting 2 bags. 2 5-pound bags of drumsticks.
We were happy with what we picked out and pushed our overloaded shopping cart to the register. A few hundred dollars and some creative car loading later, we headed back to Angelo and Norma’s. The look on Angelo’s face when we arrived was priceless. He looked at us and exclaimed “What the hell happened to you? Did you fall into a well or something? You’ve been gone for 3 hours!!” We briefly explained what happened and started unloading the groceries.
Despite 50 calls to our parents we managed to get half the items wrong. We got over double the amount of each vegetable because we measured in kilograms, the wrong size cleaning products, and so forth. And then there were the drumsticks. I told him I had never heard of drumsticks that came in a box, so I showed him the 2 bags that we got and asked if they were an ok substitute. Angelo just about had a heart attack. He was laughing so hard we thought he was going to collapse. He didn’t say anything as he went to the den to tell Norma.
It turns out they had wanted two boxes of drumsticks – the ice cream cones. Instead, we brought them 10 pounds of marinated chicken legs.
Angelo, in the way that only he could, assured us that even though we had done a horrendous job with his list, he bets we were the two prettiest confused girls in the store.
After that day Angelo only asked me to shop for him on a couple more occasions. Each of those times were “emergency” situations and only had a half a page worth of groceries. And every time we went up there for the next year, he offered to cook us some of those chicken legs! It’s adventures such as this that we’ll miss the most.
