Post Shift

I often tell stories that begin with the words "When I worked at a restaurant...". They all refer to a particular one which lay in a shopping center anchored by a grocery store and an adjacent pharmacy. It was nice to have those things so close. Sometimes I would be sent over to the former in order to procure ingredients on which the store was low. Often I would make my way over there after my shifts concluded. I've been thinking about that after rekindling my affection for the two things which I usually bought there as a snack on such occasions: fresh sourdough baguettes and Hershey's chocolate bars. I disdain direct references to commercial brands except when it's necessary to say, and it feels so in this case. I love those things.

For whatever reason, it strikes people as odd that someone should care to snack on such things. Even when someone of singular inclinations such as myself does it, it still somehow warrants comment. Is it really so remarkable when unusual people do unusual things? I for one find it most amazing when the common do the uncommon, and the uncommon do the mundane. Never mind that, though: I'm here to say that I remain a big fan of that pairing. Actually, I must make mention of another item, which is the plain French baguette. On days when I was unusually hungry, I would maybe get sourdough and French as well as both plain and almond Hershey's bars- I mean the big ones, not the little vending machine-sized ones.

As I said, it's evidently weird that I enjoy buying and eating in a sitting whole loaves of fresh bread. Nothing can be done about that. It's been a thing for me going fairly far back. I never bought into the Atkins thing, but I do appreciate the hazards associated with the high amount of starch which my diet entails. Even so, I have gone for the bread as far back as early high school. The chocolate, on the other hand, is quite normal, it seems to me. The pairing of the two seems out of the ordinary given that there's no question of fondue entering into the picture. That's one aspect of 70's culture that I don't know I'll ever buy into. The hair and the music work, but the inseparable foods maybe don't. That's fine with me. Today's food is one contemporary thing I manage to stay on top of.

Now, I have gotten somewhat back into the habit lately, but I have always believed that you can't go home again. That is to say that even if you go through the motions of doing exactly what you had done at some time in the past- even if you assemble all all the ingredients and moving parts which once came together in a certain way for a certain outcome, you can never have it as it was. It can even be good, but never the same. So it is with my old way of fresh baguettes and chocolate. I'm not the same, they're not the same, and being together again won't change that. It's sad, but the upside is that it's an excellent spur to go forward and upward, not backwards or sideways. We must change and grow or wither and die.