my apologies

The reason there have been very few recipes lately on this supposedly food-related bl*g is because I have not been cooking, with the exception of setting afire the occasional piece of toast. For example, tonight at dinnertime I was in the car, driving two hours south to visit someone I love in rehab. However, before I left I bought a gruel-on-separate-plates-is-tapas dinner from City Market, which I almost crashed the car photographing.


At rehab I sat through an incoherent two-hour lecture on codependence by a counselor who halfway through her speech pulled up her sleeve and revealed a hideous bug bite, the kind that I'm pretty sure warrants a visit to the hospital. "I was bit by a spider," she muttered. "Everything seems slow to me. Does everything seem slow to you? I took two Benadryl. Am I talking slow?"

She went on to tell us that addiction is the elephant in the room for most families. "It stinks!" she yelled. "Have you ever had an elephant in your house?" She looked belligerently around the room. Unsure of whether she was talking about a literal or metaphorical elephant, no one answered, but she continued, not talking slowly at all: "You can tiptoe around it, but the elephant will take a big crap in your formal dining room! They're hairy and they smell!" She laughed meanly. "You can't ignore the elephant when it takes a dump in your parlor, can you? What are you going to do when the elephant gets drunk and won't come to the picnic?" The elephant/picnic attendance tirade went on for a full five minutes, during which time I waited for either the spider venom or the antihistamines to finally take her, but no such luck.

And then I drove home.

costco

We went seeking contact lenses.

But the other pilgrims had carts, so we procured a cart. And the others' carts were bountiful, overflowing with goods, so we, too, began to fill our cart.

First there were the pillows, two for $19.99, and another for $30.00. And why not? We deserve pillows, have earned a soft place to rest our heads at night. After the pillows came the toaster oven, but it had not convection, so we moved on. To the books. And though I have vowed to forsake Amazon and Borders, to instead support my nonexistent local bookstore, there was Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You, so lonely and literary among the piles of romance novels and mysteries and many copies of The Audacity of Hope. So it, too, at $6.99, went in the cart, followed by the bottles of wine, the 500 Ziploc sandwich bags, the jug of Kirkland-brand ibuprofen.

And then the lethargy set in, the catatonic trudging from aisle to aisle, confused about our wants and needs. We contemplated a plastic tray of 16 Fuji apples that could not possibly have been grown on trees. We passed by an old man wearing a hairnet and hawking Mentos. "Everyone loves Mentos," he called, and this is true. We do love Mentos, we love Mentos so very much. But should the Mentos go in the cart?

We looked again to the others, but now their carts were not bountiful but gluttonous. For whom did these pilgrims shop? Had they entire villages living in their McMansion basements? Did they send these foodstuffs to starving children in Africa? And what would the African children do with their five-pound tub of Nestle Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough? Their 49-pack of frozen beef taquitos?

"Let's go," I hissed.

"What?" he asked.

"Let's just get out of here."

"Did you see they have croissants?" He veered the cart toward the bakery.

"No, where?" I followed, mouth watering. Croissants. The cacophony of pilgrims and 52" flat-screen televisions. The lights shining fluorescently overhead.

Overhead. There were birds! Birds flying high above us, nesting in the corners of the cavernous ceiling.

"Wait! Stop!" I gestured toward what I thought was the front of the store, the huge warehouse doors that empty into the massive parking lot.

"But..." He looked longingly at our carefully selected, much-needed items, the bounty we would leave behind. "What about the cart?"

"Just leave it," I whispered. I grabbed his hand. "Leave the cart."

And so we went.