THERE'S a pile-up ahead of me. Nowhere to go. My wheels grind to a halt. Tempers flare. Honk! Honk! "What's the hold-up?" from behind. "Hey, get out of the way. I haven't got all day."

No, this is not rush hour on Storrow Drive, this is two days before Thanksgiving at the local Star Shoppe. While I wait for a break in the jam of shopping carts I compose little rhymes to myself. "Twinkle, twinkle little star (get it, star shoppe, star . . .), how I wonder where the heck the marjoram are . . ."

Yeah, I know my months in the Creative Writing programme haven't improved my poetry skills any. Meanwhile, my husband is standing near the turkeys among a crowd of white-haired ladies. He looks at the turkeys in bafflement. Thanksgiving Day is not one of our more practised holidays.

The best Thanksgiving Day I ever had was one year when I was an undergraduate and my mother and grandmother came up to Boston for a visit. During the day, while most Americans were gobbling down bird meat, we took one of those trolley tours around the city. We were the only ones on the trolley except for a Japanese couple. Because there was absolutely no traffic on the roads, the conductor took us all over Boston, far outside the normal route.

But now we're going to cook a real Thanksgiving dinner for my sister and sundry lonely fellow foreigners we've collected. My husband mumbles: "Which one should I get? Do we need a 40-pound turkey for five people?"

He begins to tussle with an 80-year-old granny over a particularly promising looking naked bird. The granny wins and goes away cackling. Darn walking sticks. Just wait till I get the Nimbus Walking Stick 2000, then we'll see who's boss (obscure Harry Potter reference). Then we'll see who'll walk away with the last turkey.

I pick up a package of stuffing bread. It looks just like any other loaf of bread except it's uncut and has the word "stuffing" written on the side. Well, they must know best, I think. But I do note that it costs twice as much as its sister loaf in a regular bread bag.

In the next aisle there's a clean-up. There's another cart pile-up as we watch a group of three Star Shoppe employees attempt to clean up a mess. As we watch they proceed to knock two more bottles of spaghetti sauce onto the floor. They laugh and joke. I think maybe they're enjoying this clean-up business too much.

I know an avoidance technique when I see one. As long as they're cleaning up they don't have to deal with the hundreds of white-haired customers (minus us) looking for the marjoram, turkey, stuffing and whatever else.

Down the other aisles the other customers are always coming at me from the other direction, three abreast. I try to turn around and find three more carts coming from the opposite direction. Can't go forward, can't turn back. I'm caught in some kind of supermarket Alamo. Finally, someone relents and backs up and I'm able to squeeze through.

One thing about the store is that there's plenty of staff. It looks as though residents of a home for the mentally challenged have been sent to act as back-up. These are not the staff members knocking the spaghetti jars onto the floor, by the way. No, those staff members have full mental capacity, supposedly.

"Houston, we have a crisis in aisle three," one of the part-time staff members calls into a microphone pinned to his collar. "We're running low on the herbed stuffing mix. I repeat we're running low on stuffing mix. Things are about to get ugly here. Send reinforcements. We might need tear gas . . ."

Anyway, it was a relief to stumble back onto the subway dragging an 11-pound turkey, bag of potatoes and various other absolutely vital Thanksgiving Day items. But I know there was something I forgot.

What was it . . . the marjoram. Darn. Oh well, whatever I needed it for anyway will have to do without. There's no way I'm going back into that raging frenzy.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving Bermuda, to those who celebrated it.