Many, many years ago there was an older man who came to our store pretty much weekly for about nine or ten years. He wasn't all that talkative, he came with a plan and left with all the things on his list and always 12 small white grapefruit. Not much conversation, not even any dialoge about the weather, even if it had rained every day in June. Things never changed. He always smelled of mothballs and pipe tobacco. Monk wore old Hathaway wool shirts, real cotton khaki trousers, leather and rubber L.L. Bean boots half laced up and we never saw him without a pipe in his mouth filled with unburned tobacco. He drove a large old pale yellow Ford Squire station wagon that looked retired from his other home in Connecticut. He came on the same day every week at roughly the same time.
We never saw him with anyone, but some weeks his grocery basket was heavier than other weeks and he would be downright grouchy, usually around the beginning of August. We could tell by his cantankerous attitude that he had family coming to visit. There is no stopping anyone from visiting friends or family in Maine the first couple weeks of August even if they aren't that fond of each other. My sister and I were sure to have the freshest grapefruit awaiting him because he wasn't shy about telling you the following week that "they were getting a little dry" and his tone could be quite unpleasant.
As usual, I'm the salmon
swimming upstream as far as weight is concerned. While everyone is vehemently
burning calories and lowering carb intake en route to shedding the weight they
gained over the holidays, I'm nonchalantly trying to make up for what I lost.
Last night, after that apple pie crumble, I lost 8 oz walking back to my car,
just yesterday moments after inhaling a scrumptious dish of fettuccine alfredo
I lost any calories consumed due to waving my arm to catch a cab, and a few
days before that my digestive track tumbled through the french toast crème
brûlée I had for brunch, losing a total pound.
Of all the things you can do with a radish — slice it into salads,
chop it into salsa, shred it into slaw or, better, top it with a thick
layer of sweet butter and a sprinkling of flaky sea salt — the last
thing I’d thought to do was cook it.
Yesterday, my favorite author died. He was not exactly plucked in the flower of youth, being 91 and all. He also hadn’t published anything since shortly after my third birthday. Well, he didn’t ever publish a whole lot of anything, at least not anything I could easily get my hands on. He wrote three books, a collection of short stories, and a novella which appeared in “The New Yorker,” but which I have never found in buyable form. I have been trying really hard not to read anything being written about him right now, not blog posts, not opinion pieces, not even obituaries, because this is a private thing for me. I need a little time to think my own thoughts before I open myself up to a flood of writing about how Catcher in the Rye wasn’t really that great, how Salinger was not really very nice to his wives or his children, or how he was (pick one) overrated, underrated, wrong to become a recluse, right to become a recluse, etc. ad nauseum.
I do not know how old you are.