I found a radish! Just sitting in the middle of the road all by itself. It looked a little bruised and chipped. Poor little radish.
Tag: grocery shopping
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you are smoke
Lord, but I love giving advice to strangers. I bail them up in grocery stores to make suggestions about biodegradable washing powder. In boutiques and in op shops I say stuff like, Wow that looks good on you ~ you should buy it. Tonight I tore a strip off my napkin and wrote a note to the girl at the next table, having eavesdropped on her conversation with a slicked-back dude in a leather jacket. Snatches I’d overheard: “I find it gets messy when people get emotionally attached in a relationship.” (Him). “..to complicate a sexual feeling” (him). “So I’m supposed to just… ask if that’s ok?” (Her). My note said, “beautiful girl ~ this guy sounds like a selfish brute. You can do better. Don’t let him have you.” When I was pulling on my jacket I went over and said, Sorry to interrupt – this is for you. She gave me an shy, optimistic, luminous smile that made me so glad I had acted.
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symmetrical heaven-trees
Supermarkets turn me into a raging misanthrope. I am never more judgmental than when dodging slow-moving families in the aisles. Artificial food substitutes reach out like glistening fruit arranged on extremely symmetrical trees. There’s the couple towing two listless children who have not one fresh product in their cart. There’s the urge to tap them on the shoulder and plead, You’re not feeding that stuff to your kids, are you? There’s the inclination (all too often indulged) to bail up ladies choosing toilet paper and ask, Have you ever thought of trying the recycled? Because, you know… this stuff is made from trees. (Last time I tried this, she listened politely before saying, ah, but it’s so scratchy, I like soft. “I’m sensitive.” I gave her a smile that was more like a snarl: “Maybe it’s softer. After all, it’s been Pulped Twice.”) There’s the corrosive stench of ‘cleaning’ products pervading the laundry aisle. And through it all there’s the dreary easy-listening music that’s somehow so painful to hear. Once you start hearing the lyrics, it’s a whole world of confusion and grief. If you DO get caught between the moon and New York City, where are you exactly? Are you on some extremely high-flying jumbo jet? Or have you died, and is this what purgatory smells like? And do they really play my favourite song in heaven all night long? Or does it just feel that way.
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the c-u- in court
Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into a bag and thrust it at me, saying, One Euro. A little further on, a stall of organic produce, flecked apples and satisfyingly plump brown mushrooms. “I’d like 400g of those please and a lemon and a….” Reaching into my stash of German words I realized I’d no idea what is the collective noun for leaves of spinach. A bunch? A bouquet? A posy? I can’t say any of these things in German. “… a piece of spinach, please.” She was already stacking it into the bag I had handed her. “A piece! I like that.” “How would you normally say it?” “Ah, well… I’d like some of that spinach, or a little of your spinach, or a bag of spinach… But I like ‘piece.’”
In German piece and peace are different sounds but I do love the way they have named their cemeteries: literally the resting place, “the peace court.” Court as in shared space: courtyard. So I guess höflich (polite) means really, courtly. God… that was exhausting. But at least I have a mountain of strawberries to fill my bath.
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knifegold
An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks.
One was called Coia and the other something even more beautiful which I forget. They stood there in their pigtailed dreads and ludicrously cute knotty woollen hats, relaxed with hands in pockets, offering one carrot after another so I could slice and scrape and find out all the properties of the knives laid out like eyeless sharks on the flowered cloth. Thinner, lighter blades go through things easily and are best for small vegetables and watery stuff (like fruit). Denser blades suit heavier applications like meat and potatoes and bone. You can sharpen your blade every six months or so on the underside of a ceramic plate, and Coia demonstrated for me what the sound should be like (a kind of tabla whoomph). A few stalls along the Turkish keycutter had a whompa-slupf, whompa-slupf going from behind his counter somewhere and I stopped to ask is that music? Or is it a machinery.
Turns out it’s a machinery. But it had this sort of repetitive organic quality like two taps dripping at a sink that made me want to record a sample and build something over the top of it. Key music, knife music. Market friendships. Golden lights.
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mind your peas & queue
I realise it is an insufferable habit to peer into other people’s shopping trolleys and make guesses about their state of torpor and poor little stolid fat inactive kids as a result. And many people would see it as high-handed that I carry a thick black marker for amending signage that has missed its apostrophe. Never mind that our language is a treasury built by unremembered hands, a hundred thousand folk poets who first said, “male and female bolts” and “I couldn’t have got a word in edgewise.”
Never mind that our bodies are treasuries of soul, each body carting a soul never before seen & irreplaceable, and we are filling them up with stodge and sludge. (“Ahh… you’re not feeding that to your kids, are you? I mean, cos you realise that’s not actually food…”) As for that noxious petroleum dishwashing liquid that will induce a mild autism to make it easier for your little ones to sit a lifetime on the couch – just because it has a green dolphin on the label and is “now with added lemon juice” does not make it biodegradable. Unless you consider that ‘biodegradable’ really means just, ‘it will break down.’ In which case no worries – even nuclear waste is biodegradable, if you don’t mind waiting a few million years.
Everything you buy matters. Everything you eat builds you. Everything we say builds our world and nothing matters more than that.