Mine is grey.

Supermarkets and I haven’t been on good terms since about 1975 when I was deeply traumatized by a “Safeway” supermarket at the age of 16. It was my first real job. I had harvested various berries before that, which required that I get up totally way too early and moreover paid not by the hour but by flat of berries harvested, which really sucked, and I had worked at my uncle’s pizza parlor, a job I resigned from voluntarily, I remember, after it became obvious even to me that it was going to take me longer to adjust to the concept of “work” than was fair to my uncle.

Safeways was hiring a bunch of boxboys and other people for a new grand opening. Bagging groceries is stupid, and I soon observed that the smartest boxboys gravitated to other tasks, like stocking shelves, or pretending to do so, and straightening cans and bottles in the coolers, etc.

Which left me to bag groceries.

That may not sound like a traumatic job for a sixteen-year-old, but since that year saw the celebration of the sesquicentennial of Washington State, management decided it would be neat if we all wore coonskin caps.

Every shift, I lived in dread of meeting someone I knew.

Then I got let go, for one or both of two possible reasons. Basically they simply had overhired for the initial grand-opening rush, then fired a few. I was probably put on the list either for lack of enthusiasm or because I had declined to join the union. Normally I am pro-union, but they wanted me to pay dues of like $100 for a job that paid about $300 or 400. So I was like, “Do something about this coonskin cap and I’ll join.”

American supermarkets are big and scientifically laid out. Walking through one, for someone not accustomed to them, is not only a brain-busting sensory overload – so many products! Such a wide selection! – you can also hear the psychologists and architects and management consulting about where to put which product, and how best to display it. “We’ll put the pharmacy near the entrance, because that way you don’t have the old people clogging up the aisles with their little electric tricycles, and the bright sugary things near the cash registers, and more bright sugary things at the end of every aisle, etc etc.” Supermarkets are totally brilliant, they are a science and an art.

Since I’d grown up around them, it took Alpha to make me aware of their power to overwhelm. Early in our relationship, we lived in Seattle for a year and she went to a supermarket to buy cinnamon. She unfortunately forgot the word “cinnamon”, and had to go up and down every aisle, past millions of versions of various products, looking for spices, and then once she’d found the spice aisle (about 40 yards long, seven shelves high) she had to look at every can, jar and envelope for a label with a picture of something like cinnamon.

She came home and had to lie down for a few hours with a cool washcloth on her forehead, and never got her cinnamon.

Where she came from, they still have mom-and-pop stores. Our village has one – a “supermarket” that’s been around for about a hundred years, and is still owned by the family of the original owner. Such stores are beginning to die out here, as they died out in the States long ago, but they remain fairly common. If you run out of money, you can run a tab if they know you.

Recently they built a real-live supermarket in a nearby town. You can even get products their to cool pseudo Mexican food and pseudo Asian food, and one flavor of Oreos in small packages and two kinds of peanut butter (chunky and smooth). But the store is maybe one-quarter to half the size of your average American mega-super-market.

And it’s not open 24 hours a day, only from like 8 to 8 or something, and you bag your own groceries (which I do with a professional flair).

And it carries, usually, only one or two versions of each product, usually the generic store brand, and one name brand. Like, you want cornflakes, there is about 15 feet of shelf space with ten different cereals, including generic cornflakes and Kellog’s. On our visit to the relatives, we went looking for cornflakes. The cereal aisle was about 70 yards long, the width of the entire store, anyway, and had sugary cereal products on shelves from floor to ceiling, in various sizes, shapes and colors. Hundreds of options. We finally gave up before locating our plain cornflakes.

[Insert crackpot rant about how a wide selection of a limited range of products is not the same thing as freedom of choice]

At any rate, it was overwhelming, a little sickening in its excess. But I’m just stating the obvious again, aren’t I.

It rained hard yesterday (flooding in nearby parts of Austria, road closed locally for flooding) so the tortoise is in the office with me today. She’s currently biting my feet, in fact.

Our cleaning lady had sort of a nervous breakdown recently (not our fault, I don’t think). The tortoise has been walking in circles around the perimeter of the room and rooting about underneath the desk. She’s collected so much dust on her feet it looks like she’s wearing little fuzzy booties.

American cuisine has a poor reputation here in Austria, and certain regions seem to go out of their way to live up to this reputation. Seattle, however, is not one of them. I mean, okay, there is bad food in Seattle too, and plenty of it, but there is also good seafood, which we craved, living in a landlocked country as we do; and good Mexican food, and good Asian food, and good pizza, all of which are hard to find here in Austria.

So anyway, I went to America looking forward to eating Mexican food. And mass quantities of Oreos, with milk. And I did. The Mexican food was good. My sister cooked some delicious enchiladas. I gained 10 pounds during my 2 weeks over there, and most of it was from those enchiladas.

I also got the Oreos. We will be devoting another post to American supermarkets, but I have to mention here that Oreos – those little black (with white filling) industrialized, standardized round cookie simulacra (bearing as they do no relation to real cookies) that I never especially liked when I lived in the United States (they taste to me like dirt mixed with sugar and a little cocoa) but came to crave when I moved away – now come in a variety of versions: Regular, “Double-stuff”, reduced fat (!!), peanut butter and, I think, mint.

I bought one each of double-stuff and reduced fat, but the latter only by accident as I had meant to buy the peanut-butter ones to gross out Alpha, who does not like peanut butter.

We also enjoyed eating bagels, which are hard to come by here in Austria, although there is allegedly one baker somewhere in Vienna who makes them. Blueberry bagels with butter; poppyseed or sesame seed bagels with cream cheese, lox and sliced Walla Walla sweet onions. We ate blueberry toast too, slice after slice of soft, sweet bread incredibly dense with blueberries. And large cups of strong coffee, and various sorts of cinnamon rolls.

We ate various things. We ate, and ate, and ate. I guess because we were guests and everyone wanted to make sure we got enough to eat. They pelted us with food from the time we woke up until we went to bed. We ate at picnics, at nice restaurants, at little holes in the wall, and we ate takeout. But no one hardly ever cooked. My sister cooked the great enchiladas and a few other things; my mother cooked bacon and eggs, once, I think. The rest was dining out or taking out. Or potlucks. On our last day in the States we visited some friends for a barbecue, and they had cooked everything from scratch, including an apple pie, and we were greatly comforted.

Here in Austria, we (or my mother-in-law) usually cook dinner every day.

The refrigerators I saw, at my sister’s and my folks’, were about twice the size of ours here (which is large by Austrian standards, but not huge) and packed absolutely full of stuff. Beverages, food, leftovers. They were so full you had to be careful opening them and taking stuff in and out. When we were visiting my parents, my mother got up at night to get something out of the refrigerator and a jar of pickles fell out and broke her toe. She acted as if it were no big deal, apparently it happens to her a lot.

Alpha and I went out to dinner at a nice restaurant outside Seattle one night and it was pretty good, but also expensive. Eating out here is a bargain by comparison.

We also went out for breakfast with some of the old relatives one morning for all the usual stuff like pancakes and eggs, bacon, biscuits, etc., the kind of breakfast food we rarely eat here. If they eat breakfast at all, Austrians seem to prefer chocolate cake, or maybe toast, or maybe just coffee.

New shoes at the Shoe Project

Alpha: Does real good with English. At times hard to shut up, in fact. Like, when we were at my sister’s house, and one of my favorite cousins was visiting with her family, and we’re all sitting around the table talking, and Alpha for some reason (I missed that part, as I was spacing out for a few seconds apparently) starts explaining how she’s the masculine one in our relationship, and Mig is the feminine one, and even cooks, and even paints his toenails. And I’m all, Hang on, the girls paint my toenails when I drink too much whiskey on Christmas and pass out.

Beta: Beta is thirteen and didn’t talk much this trip but she was able to speak English just fine when required to and I’m all proud of her.

Gamma: She is five and I speak English to her at home but she always answers in German so I wasn’t sure. But after two days in the States she was speaking English with her cousins. All the other kids were her age, from 2-7, so she had a better time than Beta did, I think. Gamma started out using, first of all, imperatives, like, “no kicking!” and “get out of my room!” and “come here!”

When we came home, she even continued speaking English, but only to me and the cats.

The main road has been widened. It’s like four lanes now with sidewalks. It was only two lanes, no sidewalks when I grew up here. So a lot of the big trees that had grown along the street are gone now as a result. Fewer fields, more strip malls.

The developers have blacktopped the gravel road leading back to the house as well. The field seems smaller, but it’s not. Well, the trees along the road are missing, and the wild cherry tree is gone. And all the redwoods dad planted when I was about 2; he used to drive a lumber truck up from Northern California, hauling redwood lumber to Parr Lumber in Portland and I always assumed he brought those trees up with him. He might have, but he could’ve just bought the seedlings at a nursery here. I’m not sure.

Jesus, the cedrus deodara in the front yard is enormous. What is it, 70 feet high now? My folks drove it home in the Volkswagen Bug when I was little. Anyway, Beta, this is the house your dad grew up in.

Over there used to be a nut orchard. Wild grapes grew there too, and we’d build forts and eat the grapes we could reach, which were usually sour. If you were lucky you’d find a few sweet ones. And there were cherry trees too, left over from some orchard.

We won’t get out of the car. The grass sure is high. It looks like it hasn’t been mowed since the arson fire. Looks like the front door is open. Yeah, the front door is open.

Anyway, this was my old neighborhood. If the developers can get it rezoned, there will soon be a Target right here.

Goodbye, house.