Saturday, August 26, 2000

 

1:17 a.m. Housewives, who used to be rotund and proud of it, also used to walk around with a beltful of dangling, clanking keys on a chain. I imagine that the most important lock was the one on the pantry door, and I imagine that the long-ago housewife took great pride in keeping a well-stocked pantry, full to the brim and locked up tight.

I could be such a housewife with very little prodding. I like to play store and I like to husband my supplies. Suddenly, I have a lot of new supplies.

Today we went to Smart and Final, which is one of the Big Food establishments in our area. This is the place where the restaurants come to buy all those metaphorical treats. Homestyle gravies, breaded tater tots, farm-fresh and pure. There are literally ten-gallon tubs of mayo, big as paint buckets. More Skittles than you want to see in one place.

It's Oz behind the curtain, and this store is full of what makes a Chinese or a Mexican restaurant hum, including a big motor-oil-sized tin of soy sauce, which I now own. I'm always running out of soy sauce. Not any more.

Now that there's no more worry about all the systems on the grid breaking down all at once and leaving us with no food to gnaw on, we normally never think about "stocking up." Must be the end of summer coming on ... the old bury the nuts instinct. And what a lot of nuts they have there -- such big bags of nuts.

I'm trying to balance staying on a diet against a big bag of meatballs and a tub of fluffy whipped butter and box of pasta the size of a microwave. Those were three things I've bought (and consumed) in the past. Today, I'm proud to say I bought straw mushrooms instead -- lots of them. You can never go wrong with mushrooms and water chestnuts.

Speaking of food: Our little rat friend, by the way, is still coming out at night, in full view, lumbering down the stairs as sweet as you please. He's really no trouble at all. He ambles over to his food/poison tray, eats a whole lot of it, and then disappears again. He has become something of a pet, I guess.

At least there's food enough for the three of us.