As You Were by David Tromblay

Author:David Tromblay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: As you Were
ISBN: 9781850539291
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2020-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

YABBA DABBA DO

COMMODITIES ARE NOT A RAW material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee. Commodities are why you stand in line at the community center on the first Saturday of every month. There you receive blocks of pasteurized cheddar cheese product that comes in the same sort of flimsy cardboard box the government uses for clips of Ml6 ammunition. You’d think your seven-year-old self could tell the difference between MREs and commodities, with those gallon tubs of peanut butter, boxes of instant nonfat dry milk, egg mix, seedless raisins, corn flakes cereal—all of which comes in nondescript white waxy cardboard packaging lined with aluminum, or something silver-colored. But then there are the rusted cans of carrots and green beans, along with the ones featuring the silhouettes of the animal supposedly inside:

BEEF with juices.

PORK with juices.

One Whole Chicken with Broth without Giblets.

There is bag after bag of sugar and flour, too. But being handed sticks of butter or tubs of margarine is not something there’s a memory of. Neither is ever being out of Crisco.

If you’re lucky, the local grocery stores pitch in boxes of macaroni and cheese. Not Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, but the kind that doesn’t have a TV commercial.

Sometimes there is a twenty-pound sack of potatoes or a five- pound bag of apples. Sometimes they’ve already gone soft. There is always the bread that has to go straight into the freezer, so it won’t go bad.

Let’s not forget the farina: the flavorless, generic knockoff Cream of Wheat. Thankfully, there is always a big bowl of sugar on the table to fix its flavorlessness.

Grandma takes her coffee black—no sugar—so she doesn’t care how much you put on your cereal, so there is always a little white crystallized island rising from the sea of milk in your cereal bowl. When the farina and fake corn flakes run out, there is a bowl of rice with milk and cinnamon to get you through until school serves something for lunch. The rice gets hard to eat after it turns cold. It’s harder to eat once you see the kids you can help for just sixteen cents a day eating the same thing on the television set.

The Saturday after Halloween is when Grandma makes the first few batches of Christmas cookies. Thanks to her Betty Crocker cookbook looking like the collected works of Dickens, with dozens of dozens of recipes she’s scissored out of the newspaper sticking out of the pages, half serving as bookmarks, you never know what she’s going to make until it’s time to lick the beaters or roll out the dough when she says her hands hurt.

Saturday morning is always one of solitude. It’s when you wake to watch cartoons before the rest of the house stirs.

Friday night is when Grandma Audrey and Grandpa Bub spend the evening at the Moose Lodge doing their damnedest to outdrink one another, but that’s after they go to the grocery store. It’s almost winter, which means it’s too cold to take you and leave you out in the parking lot with the dogs.

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