Just now, I said to my wife, “Okay, I’ve got a call tomorrow night at 6, then we can do the grocery shopping.”

Her:  “What do we need to do the grocery shopping for?”

She starts to list all the food we have. At some point, I break in with, “We’re out of bread.”

She asks, “What are you going to use bread for?”

And that’s when I channel Mad magazine‘s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” It’s just hard to undo all that adolescent training.

• “What was I going to use bread for? Oh, make a sculpture.”
• “Fill my gas tank with it.”
• “Patch a hole in the wall.”
• “Attach strings and wear it as a mask.”

Finally, laughing, she says, “Okay, okay, that’s not what I meant. I mean, what do you need it for?”

I look at her crosseyed, because that’s the same question.

Finally, I explain to her that, yes, I am a bread eater. I admit it — I am someone who eats bread. She has somehow missed this over the past three decades, but it’s true and there’s no use hiding it. I am a consumer of bread.

Not only that, I eat bread in many different ways. Sometimes I will toast it and then put a spread on it of, say, butter or preserves — or both! Other times I will stick meat and/or cheese between two pieces of it, and may add mustard or some other condiment. I have been known to slide bread under an egg and eat it that way. Occasionally I will even stick bread into the oven with butter and garlic powder atop it, bake it for a little while, and then eat it that way. I’m sure there are many more ways that I eat bread.

“Okay,” she says. “We can go grocery shopping if you want to.”

“I don’t want to,” I say. “But we’re out of some things — including the bread.”

And then she tells me what else I could have instead of the bread. Evidently, we’re well-stocked on bread substitutes. Like, somehow, rice counts.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2020 at 11:39 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.