I was in my local grocer’s Wednesday on my way home. I’m a creature of habit and prisoner of my own routines. I always stop off to assemble and purchase a salad from the only grocer offering a make-it-yourself salad area. When I started a few years back, it was going for $3.99 a pound, which was a lot of salad; now it’s priced at $6.49. Thank goodness the dressings remain a bargain.
I assemble my salad the same way everyday with the lettuces (at least two different kinds, some purplish and dark green leaves and then really light, bright green and crinkly leaves), peppers (hopefully green), cauliflower, a few onion rings, the occasional cherry or grape tomato and pieces of pineapple and sliced strawberries. The latter two I never eat alone as fruits, just in a mixed salad. I don’t know why I like them one way and not the other.
As I was assembling the salad, I realized I was listening to Ballroom Blitz by The Sweet over the store’s loudspeakers (they were more like just about conversational tone, rather than loud) and smiled. When I was a kid, shopping with our parents the music in the stores was all muzak, all the time.
Not sure when pop and rock took over but I’d like to imagine a Target somewhere in China, filled with eager shoppers browsing the aisles while Eat the Rich plays. Talk about clean-up in aisle four. And five.
Anyway, an older (even to me) woman, perhaps keying on my smile, sort of nicked her head to the right and up and offered, ‘young man, isn’t it nice they’re marking the passing of Robert Bowie?’ Absolutely, I nodded (she had me at ‘young man’); good ole Bob, wherever he is right now, looking down on us back near the cheeses and imported Italian water chestnuts, concluding ‘dumb is forever.’
-bill kenny
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