Above Aisle Seven
While having the ability and inclination to appreciate a wide variety of activities it was not I think until she met me that Bernadette was made to consider football watching as one of the activities she might choose to enjoy. I do not mean to imply that I am a real football fan. For me it is a diversion I will gladly give into if in a given year there is a team that I can find even the remotest connection to and this year the New Orleans Saints more than fulfilled that role. There have been years or I daresay sequential years where I have not watched a single football game nor perused the sports pages for those statistics that seem to have so much meaning when you care about them and amount to so much wasted space when you don't.
Bernadette traveled all the way from NY to be here at Mt. P to watch with me last weekend's dismantling of the New Orleans dream season by the Chicago Bears.
It was predicted to snow here all day just as it was predicted for Chicago. I was going to make chili but only if I could find at a local mart a packet of chili seasoning that makes chili the way I like it. The seasoning packet is called Wick Fowlers, and I had the previous week seen it at the market . Several hours before the game I went to pick it up but it was sold out. There was not even a facsimile of the loose seasonings at the market to attempt real chili, that is chili the way I like it, which requires chili powder, onion powder, cumin, cayenne and whatever else I am forgetting, probably garlic. No sugar. Sugar is ok for Boston chili as is adding beans but I'm talking about chili with only chunks of chuck, and so hot with cayenne that it makes your cheeks sweat. I was not sure Bernadette would like this hot chili so I was not going to go all the way 3-alarm but maybe up to as high as 1.75 alarm. We have never talked about chili, Bernadette and I, so this was uncharted territory.
As Bernadette in her satellite office at Mt. P scratched on her Wacom tablet, filling in color to the outlines of the most famous and beloved (if slightly irritating) character in the modern history of children, a character emblazoned worldwide onto lunch boxes and t-shirts and panties and pencils, I broke to her the sad news. We won't be having chili.
At this point Bernadette, a woman who up to very recently, to my knowledge, was neither a fan of football nor chili, made in this context a rather curious and passionate response. She lifted her hand off the Wacom, thereby damning all children worldwide to a thing they are least good at--waiting (for some new product stamped with their favorite brightly colored character)--and said to me in no uncertain terms, we can't watch football without chili.
Ok then, I will drive to the nearest large grocery, in a town sixteen miles away, over one of the steepest and winding mountain passes in the area, during what was the very beginning of a mini-blizzard, and look for a product (Wick Fowlers) which I have never before seen on the shelves (it was a shock to see it at the local mart, as it is mostly a product sold in the southwest.) She said, great, see you when you get back, and returned to her work.
By the time I started climbing up the road to Chester Gap the snow was sticking and packing to the road quite well and I was shifted into 4-wheel drive. Or at least I think I was, this being the first time I had attempted to use it on this new second hand Jeep. I had already passed a few abandoned passenger cars skidded off into culverts but I was doing pretty well and was in no way grumbling or muttering under my breath--we can't watch football without chili? Where did she get that? I've never heard that before. Oh, so she's Miss Football Culinary expert now. None of those things did I say for they would have distracted me from the focus of keeping a very liberal distance between myself and the truck in front of me, with absolute minimal breaking, while keeping an eye on the passenger car behind me, on a winding 6 or 8 percent grade over packed snow.
I made it to the grocery parking lot and pulling into a space lost control for the first time but just a little fishtail, nothing serious. Inside the store was the predictable scene of an areas first snow of the season shopping panic. With two or three lanes open there was a line of at least 40 overflowing shopping carts running almost the entire width of the full sized grocery store. Sure I considering briefly that I could just loot the item and be on my way but then, above aisle 7, I saw the floating visage of Bernadette shaking her head and wagging a finger at me. Over the stores' loudspeaker system came her voice and it said--you get your skinny ass home right this minute. So I bolted.
Back at home but only after a crawling speed of 20 mph passing several more minor wrecks and I was met by a Bernadette apparently broken out of that spell, that fugue state which had her temporarily acting as a football crazed, chili loving chick, and she welcomed me contritely and lovingly in a way that made me feel that she honestly did care about me more than some dumb old NFC championship game and chili that would make her face sweat.
The game was a disappointment as was the Taco Bell queso dip I had heated up in the microwave. But football fan or not, the season of the Saints was of inestimable value to New Orleans lovers scattered around the country.
As it turns out, Harrisburg, PA, is the midpoint between Mt. P and NYC so if Saints rookie receiver, Marques Colston, holds any more of his fundraisers at the bowling alley there, I might just meet up with Bernadette and bowl a game or two. And I'll stock up on some of that Wick Fowlers before next season rolls around.
...more recent posts
BC And The Watchtower
An Interloper came up the driveway and parked at the bighouse. I watched from down here and thought about going up but there's no way out but back by me so I just waited and after a minute or two they rolled down this way and into my driveway. I crunched across the snow and realizing my belt was hanging loose (and that I might look the part of the lonely, ill-kempt, fumbling, demented caretaker) turned away from the aged woman exiting the vehicle and with some difficulty got my belt re-attached in its proper fashion. No benefit that I can see from allowing strangers near your door so I continued closer until she began her pitch with Watchtower in hand, us at the halfway point. She apparently doesn't remember me from the previous visits. It is a known fact that all reprobates look alike and she obviously had me mixed up with the many others she hasn't the ability to convert. I remember her though. She'll ask my name in a minute but she won't call me by it next time. She doesn't really want me. She wants that bighouse conversion. I was going to give it to her but not before we talked a little about the end times. Did I know the end was near? Did I ever. Maybe I would like to read about how it would go down, she spoke while tapping the Watchtower pamphlet. I am very interested in new information I replied with that sincerity that quite a few mistake for its opposite. Was I familiar with (a specific verse from) the book of Matthew? I was not. She did not take the time to recite it but I would have been glad for the words. I love a true believer but this woman has never struck me as having the patience for it.
I like to picture Mr. BC giggling 20 years ago as he on his way to work passed a Jehovah's Witness in his driveway and stopped long enough to chat with briefly, smiling out his rolled down window, before sending them up to me, the closest thing to a lost soul he has the privilege to know. I am not bitter about that day but I always thought it would be funny if I could return the favor so I gave this woman all four of his email addresses, his home phone, his cell phone, his home address, business address, and business phone, while telling her that he had just come into a sum of cash money that so much weighed him down he could barely carry it all, and as it happened, for awhile had had me carry, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars rolled into a fat wad and another fat chunk in a half fold. She looked only moderately concerned about this strange confession. Outlaws? Gamblers? Politicians? Who exactly was she dealing with here and what would it take to get her hands on this money? I told her I thought he was likely wanting to unburden himself of this heavy paper that had practically dropped into his lap and to give him various calls, and to tell Mr. BC the caretaker had referred her to him. In the pause that is amounted to by these words now being typed I allow Mr. BC to consider how unlikely or likely is it that I did this last part. It has been my lifelong experience to not be taken seriously by the Watchtower group but should they get a hold of you Mr. BC, you make sure they earn that money and that they call you by name and that you get the Matthew verse out of them. They owe you that much.
An Interloper came up the driveway and parked at the bighouse. I watched from down here and thought about going up but there's no way out but back by me so I just waited and after a minute or two they rolled down this way and into my driveway. I crunched across the snow and realizing my belt was hanging loose (and that I might look the part of the lonely, ill-kempt, fumbling, demented caretaker) turned away from the aged woman exiting the vehicle and with some difficulty got my belt re-attached in its proper fashion. No benefit that I can see from allowing strangers near your door so I continued closer until she began her pitch with Watchtower in hand, us at the halfway point. She apparently doesn't remember me from the previous visits. It is a known fact that all reprobates look alike and she obviously had me mixed up with the many others she hasn't the ability to convert. I remember her though. She'll ask my name in a minute but she won't call me by it next time. She doesn't really want me. She wants that bighouse conversion. I was going to give it to her but not before we talked a little about the end times. Did I know the end was near? Did I ever. Maybe I would like to read about how it would go down, she spoke while tapping the Watchtower pamphlet. I am very interested in new information I replied with that sincerity that quite a few mistake for its opposite. Was I familiar with (a specific verse from) the book of Matthew? I was not. She did not take the time to recite it but I would have been glad for the words. I love a true believer but this woman has never struck me as having the patience for it.
I like to picture Mr. BC giggling 20 years ago as he on his way to work passed a Jehovah's Witness in his driveway and stopped long enough to chat with briefly, smiling out his rolled down window, before sending them up to me, the closest thing to a lost soul he has the privilege to know. I am not bitter about that day but I always thought it would be funny if I could return the favor so I gave this woman all four of his email addresses, his home phone, his cell phone, his home address, business address, and business phone, while telling her that he had just come into a sum of cash money that so much weighed him down he could barely carry it all, and as it happened, for awhile had had me carry, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars rolled into a fat wad and another fat chunk in a half fold. She looked only moderately concerned about this strange confession. Outlaws? Gamblers? Politicians? Who exactly was she dealing with here and what would it take to get her hands on this money? I told her I thought he was likely wanting to unburden himself of this heavy paper that had practically dropped into his lap and to give him various calls, and to tell Mr. BC the caretaker had referred her to him. In the pause that is amounted to by these words now being typed I allow Mr. BC to consider how unlikely or likely is it that I did this last part. It has been my lifelong experience to not be taken seriously by the Watchtower group but should they get a hold of you Mr. BC, you make sure they earn that money and that they call you by name and that you get the Matthew verse out of them. They owe you that much.