Throozedaddle, Februanny 13, 2003




So I'm at Safeway last night, right? waltzing down the drink aisle, naively looking for water wherewith to slake my health-conscious thirst over the coming week, when what do you suppose?

Ooh, girlfriend, I'm tellin' you, the shelf devoted to that commodity was (to put it literarily) :

as bare as a board (Anthony Trollope in "The Prime Minister")
as bare as a stubble-field (Bram Stoker in "Dracula")
as bare as a sheared lamb (Willa Cather in "My Antonia")
as bare as a friar's poll (Arthur Conan Doyle in "The White Company")




We're talking bare! Paradigmatic Mother Hubbard, if you please!

Then I hit myself on the head (a la the forgetful health-nuts in the V-8 commercials):

Of course! The shopping public is prudently panicking per the portents of Tom Ridge and company, whom, it will be remembered, recently bade us stock up on water in the event of a terrorist attack. Of course!













Well, I've got to tell you, I was hurt at first. I was like, "Fine, and what am I supposed to do? Die of thirst thanks to all this hoarding? Gee, thanks a LOT, everybody: thanks a lot for NOTHING, that is!" ("Oh self, self, self!" I reflected, in the suddenly apropos words of the beleaguered Martin Chuzzlewit Sr.: "At every turn nothing but self!")

I was reminded of those late nights (early mornings, actually) when I'd return to my apartment building's parking lot after performing overtime at my place of employment, only to find that the thoughtless residents (long-since having "gone beddy-bye" themselves) had contrived to fill every available parking space with their precious vehicles, blithely indifferent to the parking needs of the overworked latecomer, who they perforce oblige to putter about the complex like the Flying Dutchman racing about the Cape of Good Hope, desperately searching for a port in the storm (or in this case, a space in the parking lot).

I even raised a fist toward the barren aisles in all their heartless emptiness and scrunched up my face like John Cleese in "Fawlty Towers," spluttering aborted sentences like, "You stupid -- How could you -- Of all the --") -- But then I recalled that I was hardly alone in the store. In fact, I was being approached at that moment by an apparent mother-daughter team of shoppers, who, to judge by their badinage, were pursuing a good-natured search for some as-yet undetermined ice-cream treat. So, disingenuously humming, I lowered my fist and relaxed my facial muscles, striving to take a philosophical view of my dilemma, as follows:

Was there not a whole city-soaking supply of soft drinks and fruit juice on the aisle behind me? (Yes, there was!)

Besides, where was the old "Titanic" spirit in me? You know, women and children first? Supposing there had been one bottled gallon of H20 remaining on the shelves that everyone had somehow managed to overlook? I mean, I'm a bachelor, right? Should I scarf up that remaining provision, haply to deprive some toddler in a time of need? I should think not. I really should. Especially since I'm not going to go thirsty in any case, since (oh, didn't I tell you?) my shopping cart is already loaded with a 12-pack of Minute Maid Fruit Punch in convenient 12-ounce cans.

Long story short: I may have left Safeway last night without bottled water, but I left as a better person, clearer in my mind as to my place in the great scheme of things. (Ahh!) I even nodded to the manager on the way out and said, "Thank you" (which, however, was overdoing it, as it turned out, for the gesture only seemed to puzzle him greatly, thus adding a slightly uncomfortable touch to my departure, which, by rights, should have been unqualifiedly triumphant, what with the epiphany I had just undergone!)