Let me be the first to wish you a happy new year, before everyone else floods your voice mail or in-box with joyful greetings and well-wishes for a better-than-worse series of experiences for the next 365 354 or so days.
Things are busy, but what's new about that? Kelli is away teaching a national VBS conference in New Mexico. I tell you the truth, in no time at all, I'll be pleased to be known as Kelli McAnally's husband. I mean, I'm already pleased to be known that way, but it won't be long before its more than just in our own home and church!
With Kelli gone, I have to go grocery shopping tomorrow. That always fills me with anxiety. You see, my typical behavior in a grocery store is to just buy one of everything. Unless of course a particular food item looks familiar, then I'll buy two, or ten if its on sale. Oh, and if I go by the meat department, I'll pretty much buy any meat on sale. I still have a 57-pound brisket that we're planning to soon begin thawing for the 2009 McAnally family reunion, which I purchased just because an 11th grader fresh on a promotion from being an express lane bagger decided to slap a "Manager's Special" sticker on the shrink wrap to cover the odd/possibly health code-violating growing black bruise on the beef's surface.
The last time I went shopping, Kelli even supplied me with a list. That helped. A little. There was this one item....granola bars....they were the white whale to my Ishmael.*** The problem was that they just aren't *any ol'* granola bars...they are the *special* granola bars made by Sawdust & Sunflowers, or something like that. They don't stock these cheap little snacks along with all the other granola bars. So Bryan the Food Gatherer scanned and surveyed every...single...aisle.
I began at aisle 734, and quickly surmised they weren't kept alongside the beer and wine (but you never can be too sure, can you?). I didn't spend too much time at the freezers, either. Credit either intuition, or the post-traumatic shock from having my right ring finger tip crushed by a fraternity buddy who once "Heads Up, Mac"-d me with a 20-pound frozen gobbler as we shopped for cranberry sauce that we wanted for decidedly non-food purposes (don't ask).
Forty-five minutes after I had picked up the second-to-last item on the list (the very easy-to-find Diet Coke with Lime), I found the granola bars.
In aisle one.
Next to the loaves of bread.
Which makes perfect sense to me, especially because of that recent report that Nicole Ritchie was seen eating a granola-bar and mayo sandwich as she entered a nightclub where they do that sort of thing.
So yeah, the kids are excited because they know grocery-getting is on my to-do list, and they understand that means that Thursday dinner is either a bowl of Cap'n Crunch and a fistful of Cheetos, or that we're going out to eat because even after I go shopping there won't be anything we can legitimately call "dinner."
***This painful analogy has reminded me of an experience from my youth...click on the extended entry link for a very special episode of Blossom.
When I was a junior and senior in high school, I was that bagger who got promoted out of the checkout aisle. I wanted to be an actual checker, but that was back in the day when scanners were first being implemented into grocery stores and actually checking groceries meant you had to join the union. I didn't want my kneecaps busted....I was just trying to find a way to ask out the cute girl who worked at the stand next to me.
So I took the promotion instead to the seafood counter. This was a decent gig except for the fact that looking back, I have to pretty much confess that I worked at the fish counter for the local grocery store. Let's all agree that it was a promotion because, even though the pay was no better, the pace was much slower. Sure, I left each night smelling like a tuna boat badly in need of a hose-down, but it's not like the job didn't have other perks.
For example, I was responsible for making the seafood green chile dip that the store manufactured and sold. Store management allowed me to pluck the ingredients off the shelf to make a huge master batch of the snack dip, and then package it in 8-ounce plastic thingamajigs. Interestingly, my spell checker is not at all bothered by thingamajigs, yet protests chile. Anyway....I enjoyed this simple diversion, because it allowed me to snack on the treat as I prepared it. I remember lots of finger-licking, but not so much a lot of hand-washing. I can't really vouch for the hygienic excellence of that product, but it sure was tasty. I can guarantee that I never licked an actual plastic lid, unless of course I had already purchased it for personal consumption.
One time, the summer after my senior year, I was working behind the seafood counter, and Kelli came to see me. She was the cool college junior-to-be, but was in town for some reason. And I was behind a fish counter. There's a pretty good chance I offered to sell her jumbo prawns and put a whitefish label on the package, because somehow I thought that she'd think I was cool because of my ability to traffic illicit cut-rate crustaceans. That was the last time I saw her before I saw her again for the first time.
But that, dear friends, is another story altogether....
January 11, 2007 2:39 AMBest. Post. Ever.
Posted by: Dan at January 11, 2007 8:23 AM