Pistachios

RantWoman LOVES to travel. Right now RantWoman's travel budget just about covers her monthly bus pass, so RantWoman has to grab her travel opportunities any way she can get them. Hence Free Association Travel. Seize upon an object from everyday life and go where it takes you or where it took you in the past. Today's travel vehicle: pistachios.

One of the items in the latest $30 bananas market basket was pistachios. Pistachios were on sale, two packages for the price of 1. RantWoman LOVES pistachios. They remind her of a summer in her grad school years full of Mediterranean sand and cosmopolitan peregrinations around the capitals and other corners of Europe. Even if pistachios were not delicious and nutritious, they would make RantWoman think of Mediterranean beaches and chatter in foreign languages. RantWoman could be there in a flash; she should not have to face such temptations in the produce aisle. Or the dairy department, or some other place. Or the checkstand.

But there were mountains of unsold pistachios, entire continental divides of bags on sale two for the price of one. RantWoman really did not want to pay the price of a whole bag even though if the price had been posted at the per-bag equivalent, RantWoman MIGHT have bought two bags on the spot (or RantMom might have bought some too).

RantWoman first encountered the pistachios in the produce aisle. RantWoman was definitely tempted but she had already succumbed to the post-Snowpocalypse cranberry sale. So RantWoman resisted and she and RantMom went back to walking up and down the aisles and RantWoman went back to the Are You My Mother routine every time we got separated.

We shopped and shopped and shopped and shopped. RantMom bought enormous quantities of paper goods. RantWoman dodged another pistachio display somewhere in the back of the store.

RantWoman was saved from Acting Tall and Waiting Up Front only by the frozen food aisle. RantWoman opened one freezer to attempt one of her hobbies, Reading the Label. RantWoman was immediately accosted by a gravity flung frozen pizza. After putting the pizza back, RantWoman wandered down some reflections about the pointlessness of frozen food discounts with no room in the urban freezer.

Finally RantMom reappeared and we found a checkstand. Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. RantWoman THOUGHT she was going to escape without any more pistachio encounters. WRONG! There was another giant display of pistachios near the checkstand. RantWoman just gave up and succumbed totally to the lure of urbane European rootlessness! Now where will that Mediterranean beach sand be turning up next?