I came down with a cold this week, the kind of epic head-pounding, nose-geysering, throat-blazing, lung-honking cold that could cause a guy to get exiled from a shopping mall — or maybe even an emergency room. A lesser man might have buckled, but not me.
I just wanted my Mommy.
But Mommy has been gone these past six years, so I asked myself, “WWMD?” and I did my best to resurrect some of Mommy’s healing magic.
I drove to the local grocery store to buy a comforting box of Kraft macaroni and cheese — Mommy’s surefire remedy for restoring a soothing bit of sanity in a world gone mad with sinus-burrowing viruses. I realize that going out in public probably endangered the health and welfare of my fellow Americans, but sometimes a guy just has to man up and do what a man has to do. Especially if his Mommy isn’t around to do it for him. But I did my best to hide my symptoms from fellow shoppers to avoid causing a Purell-slathering stampede toward the doors.
But when I got to the pasta-rice-dry beans-spaghetti- sauces aisle, what I found caused my headache to throb so violently it surely echoed across the store and sent reverberations through the Jello-yogurt-pudding refrigerated case, like those water-rippling T-Rex footsteps in Jurassic Park.
Because although I found row upon row of Kraft products claiming to be macaroni and cheese, none of it looked anything like Mommy’s magic cold-comfort food.
There was macaroni with white cheddar cheese the hue of zombie flesh…
…or with ridiculous pasta wheels or spirals instead of elbow macaroni…
…macaroni with three cheeses… and then with four cheeses…
…low-fat… gluten free… Buffalo… whole grain… herb and creamy… organic… chipotle… jalapeno…
…Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shaped macaroni…
…and then Star Wars shaped macaroni with — I don’t know, maybe Death Star sauce….
Hundreds of boxes of ersatz Kraft “macaroni” and “cheese” stretching into the thousands, but not the real deal that I needed to nurse myself back to health.
And then, way down on the bottom shelf, I found it: a small clutch of maybe 20 boxes, marked “Original.” Gently curved elbow macaroni! Artificially flavored cheese powder the color of a school bus! Macaroni and cheese, just the way God and the good people at Kraft intended it to be In The Beginning!
With a grateful tear in my eye I picked up a box and headed to checkout.
On the way to the checkout line, I walked past the laundry soap aisle, where I always have to spend more time than necessary trying to find my original Tide among all the ocean-mist free-and-gentle Febreze-laced spring-meadow high-efficiency-formulation Tides — in both liquid and pod form.
I walked past the deodorant aisle, where my original scent Old Spice has been pushed aside by red-zone aqua-reef denali/wolfthorn/hawkridge scents — with or without antiperspirant formulation.
Past more aisles, stuffed to overflowing with cool-ranch fiery habanero Doritos with a drizzle of lime flavoring, or Double-Stuf yellow Oreos with mint and lemon crème, or pumpkin-ale chocolate-bock honey-porter beer….
And I had to ask myself: what has America come to? Is this really what our original founding fathers had in mind for us when they walked through the market in the square and went inside to pen the Constitution?
In this contentious election year, why aren’t candidates talking about the real issues we need addressed? I would vote for any candidate who would require grocery stores to have an aisle marked simply “Original” — a row of shelves containing every product that the store carries, but ONLY in its original formulation.
With all the originals in a single aisle, you could leave the rest of the store to the chipotle-flavored aqua-reef high-efficiency pasta-wheel gluten-free ersatz-loving masses. I’d be able to do a week’s worth of shopping in minutes if they had an aisle like that. And if I hummed a Beatles or Elvis tune while I shopped, I’m pretty sure any other “Original” guy in the aisle would be able to sing along.
Best of all, the rest of the unoriginal grocery-shopping world wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for old farts like us to rummage through the shelves seeking in vain to find products that are still made the way God and the founding fathers originally meant them to be made.
I vowed to make the proposal before I left the store.
But at the checkout line, as the sweet young clerk swept my box of original Kraft macaroni and cheese past the scanner, I knew right away that she was too young to understand — probably too young even to know what the original of anything tasted or smelled or felt like. She was chipotle-flavored aqua-reef high-efficiency pasta-wheel gluten-free ersatz America personified.
I looked at her nametag, but it didn’t say “Mary” or “Ann” or “Sue.” It said some unpronounceable collection of way too many vowels arranged as if they had been spilled out on the table and swept up randomly — a word that I assumed was her name. Her mother probably gave her the name proudly thinking that it was “original.”
But no.
“Did you find everything you were looking for?” she asked sweetly as she handed me my soothing little box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, original style.
I just sighed and nodded, because how does a sick old man with a feverish brain explain that what he originally came looking for was his Mommy?
