Grocery shopping has always been my favorite of all the domestic tasks. I found food markets of all kinds calming sources of culinary inspiration. I would rarely shop with a list, preferring instead to wander the aisles and the produce bins piecing together a basket of items that suited my mood more than any particular meal (though spaghetti sauce fixings were always in the mix). When I would arrive home and realize I'd forgotten something crucial to the cause of whatever I was cooking, I would cheerfully head back out to the store, eager to see if anything further snagged my attention while I was there, rambling along with my hand basket on my hip, carefully inspecting apples and baskets of cherry tomatoes.

My first grocery forays in New York City quickly, decisively put asunder any expectation I may have had about maintaining my meandering, peaceful shopping habits. Grocery stores in NYC are the writhing, teeming embodiment of total chaos.

It's not like I'd never gone grocery shopping in New York City before. But somehow I had forgotten what precisely such an undertaking entails here. Your standard Whole Foods is three floors of produce and products connected by escalators and elevators and directional signs. Fairway market spans what must be close to a city block, a sprawling warren of narrow, strangely organized cattywampus aisles that pull you into a tangle of offerings. As you try to get your bearings while seeking mayonnaise, you'll happen upon a purveyor of soups and sandwiches hunched in a low-slung nook crowded in by hanging salamis and bags of onions, much like a hobbit might encounter a mischievous sprite in the woods. Then there's the storied Zabars with its piles of cheese and teetering shelves of crackers and huge jars of olives and its sawdust on the floor and its long meat and seafood counters with a half-a-dozen workers behind each slicing and filleting and weighing and shouting Ya want anything else? All mixed in with regular announcements on the loudspeaker, each one beginning with, Are you getting hungry?! And the going on to list the culinary delights the beehive of Zabars is working to provide you—from fresh baked knishes to fresh seafood to world-famous panini to Zabars-brand what-have-you. There are random grocery carts piled with the day's grocery specials left in the scant aisle space that is always occupied by a phalanx of tiny old Jewish ladies in costume jewelry telling the people in the white Zabars coats who are scooping coffee beans please only 2/3 pound of the light roast and 1/3 of the decaf and last time they ground it wrong, and please can you set the grinder to specifically between 5 and 6 this time, if you don't mind, thank you it's just that Maury likes it a bit coarser and the grinder they got for a wedding gift in 1962 finally broke in 2007 and their son bought them a new one last year, but it's got too many buttons and Maury just can't be bothered. I hoist my hand basket up and over their heads and dodge the strollers pushed by fit and harried stay-at-home moms and twirl around the knot of tourists who are just there to buy a mug and continue my hunt for a jar of peanut butter that I have failed to locate on my two previous circumnavigations of the obstacle course. I mean the store.

There's a Trader Joe's down the street too. I've tried to shop there two different times. The first time was a Sunday evening—admittedly a pretty terrible time to attempt to go to any Trader Joe's anywhere. I took the escalator downstairs (the second of the three floors it occupies) and beheld the line for the registers. There were probably almost forty working cash registers. Despite this, the line snaked around the perimeter of the floor, lining the produce displays that stood along the walls. I stepped off the escalator and saw the line continued along the back wall, then on around, ending essentially where it began. One wouldn't be blamed for thinking it was a closed loop of a line but for the fact that a Trader Joe's crew member was standing at the back of the room holding a sign that read: THIS IS THE END OF THE LINE, like she was a doomsday preacher in this Trader Joe's apocalypse.

Undeterred, I picked up a basket and steeled myself. I shouldered through a knot of people contemplating a nearly empty bin of citrus fruit and ducked under a guy's hand basket as he swung it up and over a double-wide stroller. I crossed the line for the cash registers with apologies to the woman whose toes I trod and reached into the display case to grab a bag of mixed greens. Apropos to the apocalypse, the display that I'm sure at one point a few hours ago had held a bounty of greens was now all but empty, with only a few scattered bags of sad-looking butter lettuce and a crumpled packet of shredded carrots.

I attempted to locate a few other items, but everything I wanted was either sold out or buried so far behind a crowd of people I couldn't figure out how I'd get to it. I gave up, abandoned my basket with a couple of others, which were clearly also the casualties of shoppers who were similarly lacking in tenacity. I tried Trader Joe's again early afternoon on the next Tuesday—to no avail. The scene was nearly identical and I decided I'd just take my chances with the sweet old Jewish ladies and the hot moms at Zabars instead of wading into grocery armageddon again.

There is nothing peaceful about New York, and I knew that before I got here. There is a constant crush of people, there is continuous movement, there is a steady rush that permeates the streets, the shops, the air itself. Like living near a river, you can always hear the city running. The peace one finds needs to be the kind of peace that comes from being able to, as the great Bruce Lee once said, float like a leaf on the river of humanity. It's energizing and enervating all at the same time—and the steady moments in the middle are fewer, and have to be consciously built in. And grocery shopping is definitely no longer one of those steady moments for me. I'm looking forward to figuring out what is.