Too Clean a Carrot

They're closing my supermarket. It wasn't a perfect supermarket, but then again, I'm not sure what a perfect supermarket is. Mine is being closed because they built a huge new one a few miles away. I'm not happy about this at all. It's a few miles out of my way, for one thing, but it's also the huge newness that bothers me. I know that the first time I'll go in, I'll stand there and look around, awed by its pristine immensity. Miles of polished metal and gleaming glass, aisles of racks stretching away toward the horizon like a hall of mirrors. I know it's meant to be a vision of limitless abundance, a kind of paradise where everything I want is on offer, but frankly, in places like this I look at myself and suddenly it's like a spotlight snaps on and everyone can see my frayed pants cuffs and other imperfections. And everything is just too beautifully arranged—an unusual complaint, I know, but honestly, you go to the produce section and everything is laid out with such severe symmetry that you daren't touch anything for fear a scary-mom archetype will swoop down on you and scold you within an inch of your life. (I'm imagining a nine-foot fire-breathing bat-winged Martha Stewart type of entity here.) They'd have fresh carrots there, unbagged, with their green stems still on, but much, much too clean. Those carrots are scrubbed until they seem to emit a faint orange glow. You could contemplate them all day and never realize that they were once in the ground, you know, where all the dirt is.

I remember first going into the old Acme something like 15 or 16 years ago, when I first moved here. It was standard fare, the produce only just OK but due to improve soon. What struck me was that they had an espresso machine that served you perfectly acceptable espresso in a paper cup for a quarter. A quarter! I had just gotten a new job after a long period of underemployment that had me fairly deep in debt, and I had no money for luxuries. But I could afford espresso if it was only a quarter. And I remember thinking that you could certainly live a good life on the cheap, if you were willing to work at it. Can't afford to go out to eat and have steak au poivre? Learn to make it at home! It's easy and costs less than you'd pay for a pizza. I lived that way for years and to a great extent still do.

Anyway, there's a supermarket conveniently on my way home that's charmingly called Zingo's, and it's also charmingly old-fashioned. The food is stored on racks that look scruffy and downmarket, the kind of racks you assemble at home to store things in your basement. The produce is jumbled up casually, the way a bunch of kids will throw themselves onto a couch. But it's good produce. The selection and range of things really is very good. I went to all the gleaming new supermarkets a long time ago, looking for wooden matches, and it was only at this old-fashioned place that I finally found them. I don't want to have to buy one of those five-dollar butane wand thingies every time I want to make fire. I just want to light a match, thank you very much, and I like supermarkets that make this possible.

But enough of my paen to the imperfect. Frank Moore Colby said it better about a hundred years ago in a book called Imaginary Obligations:

Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin.