2/13/20 Friday Night Mistake

2/13/20
Friday Night Mistake
by Holly Winter

I ran into my house to change my shoes before I met friends for dinner, because cool women don't dine out while wearing work-related footwear, especially if you are a kindergarten teacher as I am. 

As I zipped up my 2-inch heeled booties, I beelined for the refrigerator to see what I would have eaten if I had to eat at home, you know, out of curiosity.

Hummus. Lemon pudding.

As an act of necessity, I pulled out my phone and added, "Food shopping" to my list of things to do this weekend.

There wasn't a lot of lemon pudding in that small bowl, maybe a half a cup. Why did I even save it? I ate the pudding and placed the bowl in the sink.

What a great way to start my Friday evening. Lemon pudding. I eyed the hummus. There wasn't a lot in that bowl, why did I save such small amounts?

I grabbed a few crackers and dipped them into the bean dip. Delicious. I ate a few more. What a fabulous snack. I polished it off the hummus then ate a few more crackers to wash it down.

I pulled out a hard boiled egg and slathered it with spicy mayonnaise. It wasn't much food, one egg, but it was just what I wanted, protein with a little flavor.

Protein. I was in the mood for protein. I grabbed a handful of cashews and ate them slowly before I grabbed a second handful.

Some people only eat when they're sitting at a set table, not me. I stand at the counter for most meals. But this wasn't a meal, it was just a quick taste before I headed out. 

An apple would be a healthy snack. I ate it while I wandered around the house thinking about things I would do over the weekend.

I returned to the kitchen for a glass of water and then remembered I had some frozen fudge that would round out my pre-dinner snack. One frozen peanut butter fudge square. It was a perfect snack. Smooth. Cold. Sweet. I finished it off with a glass of water then reached for another fudge square and then one more.

In driving to New Paltz to meet my friends, I realized I wasn't hungry. It was strange to have no appetite at all when I'd eaten lunch hours ago. 

Why wasn't I hungry?

Oh, right. The snack. That's right. I ate that pudding. Oh, and the hummus. And as I drove I realized my after work snack reminded me of that children’s book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

In that book the caterpillar eats everything in sight then turns into a butterfly. Unfortunately my eating rampage had nothing to do with transformation; I ate because it was there. How could I defend my grazing habit?

I would not be eating at the restaurant tonight.

Sigh.

Hot lemon water is my go-to drink when dining out. My friends arrived at the restaurant before I did and had my special drink waiting for me. I let them know that I already ate.

“You already ate?” Julie asked “when you were meeting us for dinner?”

I nodded and sipped my hot lemon water as my friends ate bowls of spicy Thai food that looked a lot better than old dip and leftover pudding.

The lemon water had a strange taste, but I didn't think much about it. We've come to trust water, haven't we? I'm a peasant: tap water is my drink of choice, since I don't care to drink water out of plastic bottles.

I watched my friends eating and swore off snacking for the rest of my life.  

On Monday morning when my weekend already seemed like a dim memory, my alarm sounded and the radio blared the news: New Paltz’s water supply was tainted with an unknown substance that made the water taste bad.

I sat up in bed and shouted at the radio, “What?” so the announcer would know to repeat what he just said.

They couldn’t figure out where the contamination came from or what it was. I wasn’t surprised that others noted the bad taste, but it never occurred to me that the bad taste might be something concerning.

I drank three glasses of that hot water with lemon.

Three.

Really? I drove all the way to New Paltz to drink water and now we find that it was tainted?”

Did I have any symptoms of poisoning? Not yet. Nothing.

Governor Cuomo closed the state university in New Paltz and sent the students home, which is hopefully far enough away where they might drink fresh water, but not too far away that they might suffer great expense in the escape.

Wait. Really. Was I poisoned in drinking that water?

A few days later the source of pollution was noted: petroleum leaked into one of the town’s reservoirs.

I googled “Petroleum poisoning.” There was a lot of information about washing gasoline off your skin, but I couldn’t find anything about drinking three cups of warmed petroleum with lemon.

Luckily the only side effect I felt was the gagging feeling from thinking about drinking poison at a restaurant.

It's strange timing, my new distrust of water, because I just bought a reverse osmosis water filtration system for my house. Sure, the water tastes dead, but dead water is better than petroleum water, amiright?

If you see me carrying around a water bottle with my home-filtered water, you’ll know why.

"We're going the wrong way." my friend, Lynda, said.

Ron looked at his phone.

Lynda walked in the opposite direction. "Come on." she said. "This way."

We were headed to a restaurant Janine chose from a list of gluten-free restaurants on her phone.

I walked next to Lynda and said, "This isn't like you..."

"What?" she asked, checking the map on her phone as we crossed the street.

"You're the one navigating with your cell phone?"

She laughed.

"You don't understand." I said. "Ron is a big IT guy."

She laughed harder.

Ron said, "Good thing Lynda is here."

We laughed.

"And now Lynda he's probably going to offer you a job." I said.

"Yes." he agreed. "You're chief navigator."

We all laughed.

Ron and I were friends in Denver and I hadn't seen him in a year and a half. It was great catching up. It's no wonder we kept getting lost because we had so much to say.

Jeanine was hungry and stopped in front of a restaurant with small tables.

"Here." she said. "Let's eat here. I'm tired of walking and they have food."

We all agreed that finding a restaurant with food was a good idea.

The waitress sat us at the end of the bar where we sat in tall chairs with short backs and faced each other.

Jeanine and I both ordered the shrimp tacos because the waiter highly recommended them. The waiter put a plate with two tacos in front of me. Ron asked if they were gluten-free, just to be sure. The staff went into a flurry of being careful.

They returned the tacos to our table, but had divided the tacos onto two plates. Wait, did they think we wanted to share one order?

Nope. In that restaurant, Alta in New York City, one $15 order of shrimp tacos means you get one taco. Total. That's all. So it wasn't "Shrimp Tacos" on the menu. It must have said, "Shrimp Taco."

One taco?

I took a bite on my miniature taco that cheese melted onto the sides with greens over the cheese. The shrimp was cooked perfectly with a touch of spice and bits of guacamole and cilantro. As I went for the second bit I thought it might be the best shrimp taco I'd ever eaten.

Yes. The best shrimp taco ever.

At the end of the meal we were still hungry.

We walked to the rice pudding store where they had every imaginable flavor including Rocky Road, Mango Coconut and Old Faithful (plain).

Ron and Jeanine got rice pudding. Lynda and I stopped at the ice-cream store and got ice-cream. We headed back to Lynda's son's apartment where she was dog sitting.

We ate our treats.

Later our friend Adam joined us and said he was famished. We were all ready for more food.

We found a Vietnamese restaurant that

2/9/20 Neighbors

2/9/20
Neighbors
by Holly Winter


An older woman by two decades rearranged her produce on the counter at Adams grocery store so I could get my groceries out of my hands. I thanked her for her kindness.

She looked at what I was buying and said, "You're going to make garlic cauliflower."

I laughed and told her she was right, even though she wasn't. I've never been particular about who's right and who isn't right.

While she was checking out she asked the young man bagging groceries if the puma on his t-shirt was for a sports team.

He very politely told her that the puma was for a shoe brand.

She looked back at me and said, "In my time there weren't so many things to remember about sports teams."

I said something about not being able to remember sports teams, either.

She said, "I grew up in Queens, NY, on the same block as Jackie Robinson. He was my neighbor."

I perked up. "That must have been so cool, to watch a neighbor become the most talented ball player in the world."

"That's why he became so great," she said. "because he knew he had the neighborhood behind him, caring about him."

I said something about how cool that must have been, to have a community of people caring.

She stood and talked for a minute about the neighborhoods of long ago, then left.

I asked the two young men if they knew who Jackie Robinson was. The cashier turned towards the register and busied himself. The bagger said, "Yeah. I know who he is. I'm into baseball."

I thanked them as I gathered up my food, thinking about neighborhoods and how people care about those who live next to them. I barely know my neighbors where I live, though we do text from time to time important things like, "I got a piece of your mail, again. I put it into your box." or "I'm leaving for six weeks. Here's my sister's phone number in case something goes wrong with my house."

When I grew up, if someone new moved into the neighborhood, it was a cause for celebration. My mother always baked a cake that we children would deliver, hoping the new neighbors had unpacked a knife to serve it so we might share it with them.

We were constantly borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor or talking about the weather or worrying about the water running out due to the lack of rain.

Housing has changed in the past fifty years and there are more people living on smaller lots, so neighbors are often taken for granted and/or seen as a nuisance for their loud car or crying children. I Wondered what children today are missing out on, by not living in a caring community.

I thanked the boys for helping me buy my cauliflower, and the bagger said, "What a day, meeting someone who knew Jackie Robinson!"

Maybe it's ok that we're taken by different things, me by a sence of community and the bagger by a sense of fame.

Whatever we think, time continues to march forward.