I don't often find my weekly grocery shopping cash register receipt at variance with what I actually shopped for, but I observe a ritual scrutiny of the receipt at home, after I've done the shopping, and put everything away. That ritual resulted from my having often discovered that I'd been charged wrongly, or items were misidentified in the past. The supermarket where I regularly shop has long since ensured that they input correct data in their computers, since most of the errors originated there, where sale items hadn't been changed to reflect that sale price in their pricing inventory.

After my shopping excursion last week, though, I discovered a few glaring irregularities in what I'd actually purchased as opposed to what I was charged for. We enjoy having oranges and bananas daily for our breakfast, but we also alternate between oranges and melons. Usually I find that honeydew melons and cantaloupes are available, but leap at the opportunity to put other types of melons on the breakfast table, when they're available. And last week the store had Canary melons on their shelves, so I bought three of them, at a very good price of $2.97 each.

I discovered, when perusing my receipt that I'd been charged instead for spaghetti squash, three of them, at over $5.00 each. So I retained that receipt, pulled the identifying stickers off the three melons, stuck them to the receipt and the following week returned the receipt back to the store, and was given a refund of almost six dollars, representing almost half of what I spend weekly for food staples to put out in the large receptacle placed in the store's foyer accepting donations for our area Food Bank.

Those Canary melons were still available, so I bought another two, never imagining that another cashier, all of whom are excellent at their job, good-natured and friendly young women, would plug in yet again 'spaghetti squash', at their prevailing higher cost. So, that's another cash register receipt that will be returned once again.

I felt badly presenting it at the Customer Service desk because the person who looks after that client-interface desk is someone I've known casually for years, an older woman I really like. And she was busy, harried, a line of people needing attention. She looked absolutely awful that day, wan, drained of energy, so I asked if she was nursing a cold once my turn had arrived. No, she said, smiling ruefully, just awfully tired.

During that same shopping expedition I meant to buy a package of blackberries. I'd seen an intriguing looking upside-down fruitcake recipe in the newspaper of the day before's food section, and thought I'd try it. Another woman, beside me, was also carefully selecting among the blackberries and I mentioned to her the recipe. She laughed and admitted that she'd seen it as well herself, and that was her purpose in buying the fruit. Like me, she was intrigued enough to try the cake for a family dessert treat.