Snowmageddon in Aisle 13

The weather forecasting business has long been in the back pocket of the grocery game.

Call it what you will – Big Grocery, The Grocery Brothers, the Canned Goods Cartel (these shadowy groups go by many names) – whenever commerce slows in the produce or the paper products aisle the word goes out that it is time to forecast a little snow.

When this signal broadcasts, the mental alarms that sound are similar in tone and intensity to a car horn of the Ah-OOOH-Gahh variety, the five o-clock quitting whistle at the factory in a Warner Brother’s cartoon, or the clash of two cymbals meeting each other in a lively manner behind your ear.

No matter what the matters at hand, or the actual weather conditions, up to and including grilling steaks under the broiling sun at a 4th of July picnic, once the snow forecast goes out people turn away from what they are doing in a mechanical manner, saying in a robotic voice, ‘must get eggs, bread, and milk; must get eggs, bread, and milk.”

And there they go.

This comes even with false forecasts that fall crazily short. How much stronger then is the urge to stock up for the remainder of the decade when the forecast clearly is the real thing?

Blinding weather conditions, blizzard whiteouts, and treacherous….well, treacherous anything, these words are music to the grocery professional’s ears. He has murmured them softly to his infant children all these years while rocking them asleep, and just look: here it is the real thing!

The grocery store parking lot, ordinarily containing one, or none, or a few cars at this time of the weekend morning, now looks as if it is in the latter stages of one of the more enthusiastic demolition derbies, when the remaining contestants are urged to pick off their competitors in a speedy manner so that the folks in the metal stands can get home and in bed at a decent time.

Inside it is no better.

The usually empty spaces outside the main current of the customer flow, ordinarily like shallow nooks of stillness just off and to one side of the rushing current of the Mississippi River, are now crowded with shoppers aimlessly bumping into one another, not dissimilar in action to the bumper car rides at the carnivals of our youth.

There is a large component here, even perhaps making for a majority, of people who seem to not be the regular shoppers in the family, who in fact, seem never to have stepped foot in a grocery store before in their lives.

It is not hard to construct a narrative which has these menfolk sent off to the store post-haste – “what do you want to happen? Do you want to just watch us slowly die of starvation? Is that it?” – while the rest of the family busies themselves with sending texts to him detailing what he must not omit from the shopping trip if he loves them, as he purports to do.

Delighted to get this important feedback while they claw their way through the tangle of wailing shoppers, many men prioritize their agenda by first turning off their phones completely and then, second, throwing them through the big plate glass windows in in front.

The going is slow up and down the aisles.

Everyone has dashed in to get bread, eggs, and milk, but there is an irresistible tendency to go ahead and ‘stock up’ while in there.

This may, after all be The End of the World, or at least The End of Man, and that’s not a thing you want to go through without enough potato chips and peanut butter in the house.

A lot of items are sold out. The barren cold shelves seem to mock the shopper as he hopefully turns the corner into the respective aisle.

Hot chocolate and marshmallows? Are you out of your mind? Those were gone by midnight last night after the evening weatherman said there might be a flake or two of snow sometime before winter is out.

Pancake mix and maple syrup, graham crackers, cheesecake pie mixes, ground beef for chili, cut meat for stew, hamburger for sloppy joes, the universe has apparently been sucked dry of these goods. The cozier, the more warming to the spirit, the more they help you huddle against the assaults of an uncaring universe, the more absent they are.

Beer? Seeing that incredulous look on your face as you close the cooler door upon, yes, yet more barren shelves, the viewer doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. You really thought there’d be beer left?

The only things left are what you might call angry foods, foods with a grudge, foods which lost the evolutionary battle to homo sapiens and are now looking for a way to even the score.

Think barbarously hot chilis, whole spike-finned bulge-eyed fish with a sheen of slime, imported wasabi, oddball barbecue sauces made of frog venom and the native juices within snake fangs, fresh fruit — or are they vegetables? — that in their bulbous, knotty, bulgy, misshapen, leathery particulars look as they they are a healthy addition to a school lunch menu for Martian children, these there are in abundance.

All of these and many others left on the shelf have spent eons developing painful or poisonous deterrents to the curiosity of man, so it is only natural that we now try to eat them. These are the types of things that are left.

You pack them, shovel them really, into you bumper car I mean grocery cart.

Past a point, say at about the three hour mark. you intend to get up to the front and get into a checkout line.

Turns out there is no actual getting up to the front, though there is certainly a checkout line. It is that snaking, miles-long length of humanity stretching back into the back storage area.

There is one of these lines for each checkout counter.

The disbelieving customers, one after the other, the fools, stride confidently to the front of the store pushing their carts with what the ancient Greeks called something or other, anyway, that sense that the bad news of the world applies to other people, not to them, hubris, that’s it, and then one by one come to the horrified realization that they are expected to choose and get in one line like any other human being, the furthest end of which, the end which they are expected to attach themselves to like one more add-on of a giant segmented worm, is back there somewhere out of sight.

Out of sight not just because it extends through the swinging metal doors to the back of the storeroom but because of the curvature of the earth. You can’t see over the horizon, dude!

The line inches forward, or better put, quarter inches forward.

It occurs to more than one man that it is as if time itself has stopped. Maybe he is in a Twilight Zone episode and the seasons have continued their natural cycle while he stands in line and waits, and waits, and waits. And waits some more. And waits. It might be summer outside again for all he knows.

That prompts him to buy some grilling charcoal, lighter fluid, a nifty new turning spatula, and some seasoned wood for the grill. He doesn’t have one, a grill, that is, but you never know, you never know. Better pick it up while you can. Your family can pry these items from the grip of your frozen remains.

In the same spirit you buy yeast, unmilled flour, raw corn shucks, each piece of equipment associated with canning and preserving farm products, a cardboard box the size of a block of stone from the Pyramids full of matchbooks, anything and everything that seems to speak of frontier self-sufficiency and the hard struggle of wresting a living out of the unforgiving land.

If they had adzes for sale, or other ancient implements, you’d buy them as well. A fire starter kit of the ‘spin a stick madly into a shallow depression on a stone stacked with a small heap of flammable forest debris’ category, that is what they really need in this store and for some reason do not have. Don’t they know? Don’t they know?

This points to an unusual phenomena.

All of a sudden, as you make your slow, slow trudge to the front, you pass by and consider any number of food products that you have never paid attention to in the least before.

Some of it is the slow pace of progress. Some of it is the pervasive sense of bare survival in the face of an unfeeling natural world.

Take for instance this jar of creamed cheese with pimentos imbedded in it, along with streaks of horseradish.

You hate each of these flavors separately, just hate them, and you almost certainly will hate them in combination.

It would be foolish to suppose that somehow the unpleasant flavor of each of the three – creamed cheese, pimento, and horseradish – will somehow combine into some lovely new tastebuds-pleasing combo, or at least cancel each other out.

My friend, why would that happen? Why in the world would that happen? They are going to make each other worse!

Better pick it up though, you never know when you might need this tiny jar in a starvation situation. In fact, take all of them from the shelf, all thirty of the jars, you can’t be too careful.

You pass by eggs born of hen who have only heard the music of Mozart their entire lives and who have enjoyed weekly massages, while their eggs are delicately turned by Peace Corps volunteers wielding spatulas built by native craftsmen, armed with degrees in Egg Psychology.

You can’t believe how crazy this whole ethical eating thing has gotten and just how damned expensive these products are. Crazy! Just crazy!

You grab fourteen dozen.

And so it is with all other products that you pass, shady items that otherwise don’t move for months at a time.

Seems for instance that there is a thing called soy tofu bacon. There are few certain things in this world, but one of them is that nothing that identifies itself as soy tofu bacon can be any good at all. It will, dead certainly, remind you entirely of tofu and completely not of bacon, the latter taste being your only interest in the thing at all.

Nonetheless, into the cart it goes.

The delicacies of other cultures, indeed, of other eras, which otherwise have gathered a layer of undisturbed dust over the years — pickled pigs knuckles and marinated hens feet in jars, and watery vegetable shoots of one variety or another, degrading further in quality and believability as you go down the aisle and rummage among the bottom shelves into canned seaweed, algae, and pond scum — are available in abundance. Or at least they used to be.

Half a dozen of each ought to do you.

You pass the frozen food section and see one remaining pizza. This pizza is notable for the lack of claims it makes upon your personal belief system.

The prose on the packaging does not say that it has a crispy thin crust.

It does not claim to having layers of cheese that string out like bridge cabling as you pick a piece up.

It does not claim to be ecologically friendly, nor come from the kitchen of a famous chef or restaurant, nor brag of its authentic spices, oils, meats, or vegetables.

It just calls itself a pizza.

This is enough to bring it under suspicion. This is pizza box prose that we’re talking about. It is a genre of literature not known for its dignified understatement or dedication to truthfulness. It, in fact, this genre, lies through its teeth all the time.

And yet here there one is more or less proclaiming to the world that the only possible thing that it can say about itself is that it’s a pizza. It can’t even bring itself to say with a straight face that it is any good.

The whole impression you get is that you could do better getting your pizza from a waste bin out back of a convenience store.

Nonetheless, into the cart it goes.

Now you are at the front of the store after all. It has come upon you like something that you never thought would happen to you, like growing old. There are sights available to you now that are not without interest.

There is, to take one instance, a man who just came into the store and has been roaming in the front sections of the aisles, clearly intent on running in and running out. He has three things in his hands and is surveying the enemy territory to see if he can insert himself into one line or another while no one is looking.

A mere three things! That is what his expression says. The theatrical type I would call him. Three things!

The rest of us close ranks. We are as uniform and coordinated in our motions as synchronous swimmers at the Olympics.

“I can’t believe this!” his expression cries. Again, with the stagy manner. “Do you really mean to tell me that not one of you will let a man cut into line who only has three things in his hand?”

Yes.

Yes, we do.

The checkout people have approximately the power of archangels over your lives right about now. It is not a good time to quibble over prices. Smile, even grin like an idiot, and give the impression of someone who will do anything they ask, including standing on your head as you pass the food onto the rolling belt.

It is also not a good time to say, “oh, wait, I just remembered something. I’ll be right back.” The rest of the customers will step in at that point and stone you to death with tuna cans and coconuts, or whatever else comes readily to hand.

And then finally you are back out in the parking lot! You have your food! You have done what you have told your loved ones you were going to do in the face of spectacular odds!

It occurs to you that you could auction your parking space off to the highest bidder, but put the idea to one side. The natives are looking pretty danged restless about now, and near anything you do might set off a full blown riot.

Well, they have no one to blame but themselves. They should have gotten here sooner.