Boblet: Of Composting, and Other Rot

            It’s now official:  No one listens to a word I say!

            My adored friend Mary, who swears she loves Bob’s Little Acre and never misses a single one, told me on Saturday she had bought a composter.  It was fairly pricey but she felt confident it would do the job because it came highly recommended by another friend of ours.

            Who – get this – also swears she reads Bob’s Little Acre.

            For crying out loud, folks!  What do you think I’m doing, sitting here in the mud blathering on just to hear myself talk?  

I know that not even the most devoted Bob reader will agree with every little opinion espoused by its narrator, not even BLA’s abiding message, which is that gardening is something you do, not something you buy.

But strictly from the perspective of thrift, shouldn’t people at least remember that  I’ve written not one but two columns testifying to the utter uselessness of commercial composters?

The first column I wrote was about my early experiments with composting, when I had a secret lust for one of those barrel composters advertised in the back of gardening magazines.  The second was years later, when someone had actually give me one, having become disgusted with it himself.

That composter never composted anything – or at least, nothing I put in it ever composted until I gritted my teeth and emptied it, maggoty and rancid, onto the ground, where hay on top and worms on bottom eventually did what they have been doing for millions of years.

We still have the damn thing, sitting out in “Jerry’s Little Acre,” the Tobacco-Road motif section of our yard given over to my husband’s detritus, about which I nag him bitterly and without effect and over which we may eventually divorce.  He says he’s found a new sucker – I mean, given the composter to another gardener – and is just waiting for an opportune occasion to deliver it. 

Meanwhile, it sits there useless and unattractive and going nowhere, so durable and eternal you wonder how in hell anybody ever got the idea that heavy-duty industrial-grade plastic was a suitable medium for organic decomposition.

Well.  I begin to sound a bit shrill, even to myself.  It shouldn’t surprise me by now not to be listened to.  I am married.  In any case, I have given myself the satisfaction of reposting my first compost article below, as well as the second column which I don’t believe I have ever put on this blog site. 

I don’t suppose anyone will pay any more attention than they did the first time.  I expect everyone thinks I am just talking a lot of rot.

END

ANYBODY WANT TO BUY A FABULOUS PATENTED COMPOSTUMBLERÒ?

ANYBODY WANT TO BUY A FABULOUS PATENTED COMPOSTUMBLERÒ?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “Cadillac DeVille, ’05, White.  Loaded.” 

That, in 8-point type, on a tiny scrap of newspaper, is what I read one sunny morning in August.  I cussed.

            Not that I’ve got anything against Cadillacs, and not that I’m ungrateful, at my age, to be able to read 8-point with the naked big browns, if only in bright sunlight.

But the scrap of paper shouldn’t have said anything at all.  It shouldn’t have even been a scrap of paper.  I had just pulled it from my fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ, where, according to the user’s manual, it should have turned into “nutrient-rich, sweet-smelling compost in as little as 14 days.”

It had been two months.

In the past, all my compost had been made using the stodgy old-fashioned method – step 1, empty kitchen garbage onto dirt, step 2, walk away – and it had never been perfect.  It had little white flecks in it that were still visibly eggshells, and sometimes tiny colored ovals where I’d forgotten to take the tags off fruit.  So heaven knows, I had no unrealistic expectations about compost.  

But it shouldn’t try to sell you a Caddy.

The ComposTumblerÒ is a vented barrel suspended on a raised framework, with a crank that you turn to make it go round and round.  The idea is, the motion mixes and aerates the organic matter inside, magically transforming kitchen garbage into “black gold.”  If you have ever flipped through a gardening magazine, you’ll have seen glossy ads depicting the ComposTumblerÒ being smilingly cranked by an impossibly clean gardener looking smug and scientific.

In 2005, I wrote in this very space about the fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ.  Composting is the province of dirt and worms, I wrote, not of revolving plastic barrels.  With withering sarcasm, relentless logic and a bewildering array of Shakespearean references, I concluded that if you were dumb enough to buy a fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ, you were too stupid to garden and should probably take up cross-stitch.

            But of course I always kind of wanted one.

What can I say?  I’m no more immune to advertising than other mortals, and it looked so scientific. 

            So I was thrilled when I was given a fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ by someone who had been dumb enough to buy one.  It might not work, but what was the harm in trying?  

            Avidly, I read the compost recipes in the user’s manual.  I tried to measure out just the right amount of a useful but unlovely substance produced by my neighbor’s horses.  I soaked newspapers.  I added kitchen garbage, then I turned the crank 40 revolutions per day, looking smug and scientific.

Result:  A perfectly legible car ad, slightly smeared with horse poop, and a sore shoulder. 

What was to be done?  My philosophy is: if at first you don’t succeed, stalk away and drink a beer sullenly.

            Problem is, when I stalked away, I left the top off the fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ for a day and a night.  If nature abhors a vacuum, it purely loves a barrel full of garbage with the top off, so next time I checked on my nutrient-rich, sweet-smelling compost, something long and evil was in there wiggling.

            I consulted the user’s manual.

            What I needed, I decided, was bulk.  The more decaying matter in the barrel, the greater the heat.  The heat generated by a full barrel, said the manual, was enough to kill weed seeds; if so, I reasoned, it would also kill long, evil wiggling things.

            So I mowed my nation-like lawn with the bag attached to the mower, stopping every 37 seconds as the bag filled to dump the grass clippings into the fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ.  Then I added water and turned the crank, looking scientific but possibly a little less smug.

            Result:  Two sore shoulders.  The barrel was now so heavy, cranking took both hands.  And the odor!  Despite the advertising, I had never really expected my nutrient-rich compost to smell like Chanel, but now turning the barrel took even longer because every time the ventilation hole came slowly around to nose level you had to stop and vomit.

            What to do?  My problem-solving methodology can be found above. 

When I could finally bring myself to approach the barrel again some weeks later, the mass inside had compacted.  Cranking it, one felt that a fat person had gone in there and died.  It was crank, crank, crank, THUNK, crank, crank, crank, THUNK, as my “black gold” shifted like a body in a car trunk.

            I knew what had to be done and I did it.  Two weeks later. 

Anyway, finally I gathered my courage.  Teeth gritted, eyes narrowed, knuckles white on shovel, I opened the lid to break up the mass.

            And shrieked girlishly as tendrils of black slime slid from the lid into my hair.  Then dropped the shovel and ran like a hare as I saw what was inside.

            The long evil things were not dead.  They were now longer and more evil.  They were in there coiling like pythons. 

And that’s where matters now stand with my fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ.  I may have to hire somebody to deal with it for me, possibly an exorcist.  Or I could just move.

Compost is a matter of allowing organic matter to decompose.  The function of technology is not to help things decompose but to stop them from doing it.  That’s why they invented freezers.  Compost has nothing to do with technology.  It has to do, like everything else in gardening, with dirt.

That was my advice in 2005, and this time I will take it myself.  So don’t be surprised if you open the classified section of this newspaper and see, in 8-point:

“Fabulous patented ComposTumblerÒ, ’06, Gray.  Free to a good home.”

Oh, I almost forgot: 

“Loaded.”

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

A Richer Dust: Wherein Bob Discusses Compost

This was one of the earlier Bobs, appearing in 2005.

A RICHER DUST

BY ROBIN FORD WALLACE

Shakespeare wrote:  “Men have died and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

This is a gardening column and will, thus, not unduly burden itself in arguing whether men do, in fact, die for love, or women, for that matter – though we are remembering a movie called Lady Caroline Lamb in which the last line was the lady’s maid lamenting, “She died of a broken ‘eart!”  We were not unwilling, at that point, to bid Caroline adieu, having never taken to her in the first place and in any case having finished our popcorn .
No, what interests us is the worms.  When we place our kitchen waste outdoors, cover it tastefully with mulch, and submit it to the digestive processes of worms (who are, presumably, ravening impatiently about the garden in hope of amorous fatalities), it becomes compost, the crumbly black stuff that is to the organic gardener what gold was to the alchemist.

Composting has existed in nature for a couple of million years, anyway.  Trees shed their leaves, which decay, making the forest soil into beautiful, black, friable stuff that you would hook for your garden except for problems of transport and the fact that the rangers would nail you. 

Little creatures die and add their tiny carcasses to the organic mix.  Bigger creatures, too.  The poet Rupert Brooke wrote patriotically, and rather too prophetically, of his possible death in World War I:  “There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed” – meaning Rupert, I’m afraid – “that is forever England.”

Dear me.  Here one has set out to discuss compost and one finds oneself not only frothing on about Shakespeare and Rupert Brooke but remembering that Lady Caroline was one of Lord Byron’s mistresses.  Well, if darling Rupert could write so romantically about being compost, surely we can permit ourselves to wax poetic about its virtues in the garden.

Most gardeners will agree that compost is superior to chemical fertilizers.  Not only does it add nutrients, it improves the texture of the soil.  Furthermore, compost costs nothing to make and it’s a convenient way to get rid of the salad from two weeks ago currently evolving into new life forms in the crisper.

Nor is there much disagreement about what to put into your compost pile:  All foodstuffs except meat, which is said to bring rodents.  So:  Coffee grounds, turnips you bought last January, the bread that is growing festive blue spots, the lentil loaf for which your family’s palate was insufficiently sophisticated.

Some materials take longer to compost than others.  Eggshells are so hardy one wonders at times how chickens get born.  And though some gardeners believe in composting paper coffee filters, we have found them dauntingly durable.  And peanut shells?  To expand upon our poetical theme:  Intimations of Immortality.

There is also consensus that layering your kitchen waste with mulch aids the composting process and that it keeps the compost area easier on the eye.  So:  Grass clippings, hay, leaves.  Throw a pile of autumn foliage on that yam casserole with the miniature marshmallows and forget that it ever happened.

Where there seems to be disagreement is how, precisely, to make compost.  Order one seed catalog and you will for the rest of your life find your mailbox crammed with ads for ingenious devices to manufacture “black gold.”  Wooden crates, wire mesh, bins made of square hay bales. One composter on the market consists of a barrel with air holes punched in it suspended between two poles, with a crank.  The idea is, you put your biodegradables in the barrel and every day you spin it around with the crank, looking smug and scientific.

We will, in the interest of honesty, admit that in our credulous youth we wanted one of these so bad we could taste it.  Not being able to afford it, we attempted to home-make a facsimile, consisting of a huge metal trashcan that we punctured with our Swiss Army knife, filled with rotting food, and then rolled around the yard, looking half-witted and vaguely inbred.  Result:  Well, we don’t imagine the expensive kind worked, either.

There are pundits who advise you to water your compost, turn your compost, buy additives for your compost.  Reading such stuff, we cannot imagine how these people find time to garden or hold down jobs.

In reality, we find that all one needs for composting is nature and Mr. Shakespeare’s worms.  Dump kitchen waste in a spot close to the garden, cover it with hay, repeat the process until the pile is a few feet high, then leave it for the worms to deal with.  You’ll have crumbly, wormy compost sooner or later, depending on the season. 

If you find yourself agitating it and watering it and buying it toys, it may be time to take up another hobby – cross-stitch, say, or writing poetry.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Boblet: Poop, The Sequel: An Addendum to The Sewer Opus

Poop:  The Sequel

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This is why you have a blog!  I was just bursting with things to say in this week’s Radio-Free Robin column about sewers (below), but no matter how tight a ball I rolled the universe into, I couldn’t squeeze in everything I had to say in my outside limit of 950 words.  So here, at no additional cost, is an addendum.

            I conceived the notion of writing such a column in the first place because I wanted to explain to news readers – assumin’ I’ve got some – why I keep raving on and on in the Sentinel about the county’s sewer projects as if they were the most important thing in the county:  They are. 

One of the major perks to being an underpaid, under-appreciated local news reporter is that, sitting in those county commission or tax or water board meetings that everybody else finds so boring, one really does sooner or later pick up an idea of how the world works.  And the world works on these boring concepts no one normal cares about, like you can’t have a lot of people living in one place without some way to handle the poop.

Then you’ve got the way communities pay for these things.  Most people understand the basic notion of taxes but I imagine they’d be astonished if they studied up on these bond issues.  Bond issues are basically the way governmental bodies borrow money for public projects.  But lately it looks to me like there’s a trend of doing it to back up private projects or in some cases just out-and-out pay for them.  I won’t carry on much more about that because I’d rather talk about poop, but I hope to God the water board is smarter than I am.

            Now.  Poop.

            One of the tenets I started out with was a linguistic revelation:  The presence in English of the words “hungry” and “thirsty” bears witness to the sad truth that people have sometimes not had enough to eat or drink.  But the absence of words denoting a need to do No. 1 or No. 2 attests just as eloquently to a more uninhibited history of toilet habits. 

Though there are of course adjectives etymologically related to these functions, they do not in fact describe a need to perform them; rather, they refer to abstract and largely negative qualities.  The obvious conclusion is that our ancestors never allowed pressure to build up long enough in those departments to require language referring to the frustrated need for relief, but went ahead and “went” wherever and whenever, whether alone or in company, possibly without interrupting their sentences.

Now, the second point I wanted to make:  You will note how increasingly Victorian the last couple of paragraphs became.  Please observe the progressive increase in syllables and the rather spinsterish use of the semicolon.  This tendency is due to the fact that I am a girl writer not a boy writer, and I am talking about poop.

Mr. W. Hodding Carter, who wrote the book my sewer column discusses, is a boy writer, and possibly boy writers should not be allowed to write about poop at all!  Bless their hearts, no matter how old boy writers get they still cannot seem to resist bathroom humor. 

            All of Carter’s lurid descriptions of the most luxurious new toilets and all of his tasteless references to “floaters” and the like I endured with some pain and will not perpetuate with further comment.  But I did plan to share Carter’s delving up of the ribald 16^th–century musings of Rabelais’s literary monster Gargantua, translated from the French, concerning his experiments on what to use in place of toilet paper, which, one gathers, had not yet been invented.

“Once I did wipe me with a gentlewoman’s velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament,” the monster begins.  “Then a hood, and a neckerchief, then some earpieces of crimson satin, but there was such a number of golden spangles in them .. that it fetched all the skin off my tail with a vengeance.”

Gargantua raves on in this vein, and Carter faithfully follows him, for some pages.  He tries out a page’s cap and then a cat, which turns out rather worse than the spangles, and cures himself by next time using his mother’s gloves. 

“After that I wiped me with sage, with fennel, with anet, with marjoram, with roses, with gourd-leaves, with beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine-tree, with mallows, wool-blade …with lettuce and with spinach leaves.”

I am just excerpting Carter’s excerpts of Rabelais here, mind you.  I am leaving out a lot and I expect he was, too.  “Then I wiped my tail in the sheets, on the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras hangings, with a green carpet, with a tablecloth, with a napkin, with a handkerchief, with a combing-cloth; in all which I found more pleasure than do the mangy dogs when you rub them.”

And on to the animal world:  “With a hen, with a rooster, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag ..” 

Finally, after pages and pages, he settles on the warm neck of a downy goose as being the optimum to his purpose.  Great stuff, and I really did plan to dress up my column with sprinkles of it (“with mercury, with parsley, with nettles, with comfrey…”) but I just plain ran out of room, as I am doing here again.

But I cannot conclude without pointing out that, being a girl writer, I had never come across that bit of Rabelais even in my college years, though – for reasons I no longer remember – I am a girl writer who majored in French.  It just goes to highlight the fundamental differences between the sexes regarding certain delicate matters, and to underscore the wisdom of avoiding discussion of them in mixed company.

END

A Certain Unbeautiful Substance: Of Sewers and the Social Contract

This I wrote as a "Radio-Free Robin," or quasi-political column, not a Bob, for this week's Sentinel.

A Certain Unbeautiful Substance:  Of Sewers and the Social Contract

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Once I was looking at some artist’s conception of a Civil War battle, noble-looking generals on noble-looking horses in a green field under a blue sky, when suddenly it struck  me that, in real life, with that much cavalry the place must have been absolutely oozing in horse poop.

That’s an unromantic view of history but not a patch on what you will find if you read, as I just did, W. Hodding Carter’s book Flushed:  How the Plumber Saved Civilization.  Carter’s portrait of Western society before modern sanitation oozes with a different species of poop altogether.

How did your narrator, a garden writer so Victorian she refers to herself in the first-person plural, become involved in the study of what I’m pretty sure her garden writer avatar would refer to as “a certain unbeautiful substance that is, however, useful in horticulture as a soil amendment?”

Well, anyone who reads the front page of this newspaper will remember that in Dade County we have two ongoing water board issues, Canyon Ridge and Brow Wood, that are enough to keep a local news reporter’s mind firmly in the sewer. 

But it’s more than that. 

People sometimes ask how I stay awake covering county commission meetings.  They’re missing the glaring truth:  Local government is the nuts and bolts of democracy.

Similarly, waste management is the most basic requirement of collective living, which is to say why people consent to be governed in the first place.  These tea partiers who bellow they want government out of their lives, what do you suppose they’d be bellowing if there were fluids swirling around their ankles more objectionable than, say, tea? 

My guess is it would be something along the lines of, “There oughta be a law,” or “Help!” notwithstanding the absence in the Constitution of a single word pertaining to poop. 

In the country, of course, we take care of these matters ourselves, latterly with privately-owned septic tanks, formerly with more rustic accommodations.  Really, depending on how far one lives from one’s neighbors, one could get away with nothing at all, though I must say my own apertures seal shut with a little noise – snap! – as I type the words.

But when people gather in greater concentrations, poop looms larger as a social issue, as Hodding Carter’s book shows us, sparing few details.  To begin with, what, pray tell, do you suppose castle moats were really for?

Yes.  Moats were circular cesspits, and if you swam one to rescue a fair princess you’d probably die of a disease before you got across.  (And if you did get there, she’d probably say “Ick!” and push you back in.)

But cities were much, much worse.  In Paris, householders would empty their bedpans into the streets with the thoughtful if euphemistic warning, “Gardez, l’eau!”  (“Watch it, water!”)  In London, the warning was anglicized to “gardy-loo” and is possibly the reason the English still call a bathroom a loo. 

But this was Western civilization, home of the free market, and it wasn’t long before the trade of “nightman” or “gongfermor” arose to make a buck off the situation.  These nocturnal entrepreneurs collected the unbeautiful substance – which came to be called “nightsoil” – and carted it out to the country to sell to farmers as a soil amendment.

As London grew, there were more people and more “nightsoil.”  Cesspits were built and overflowed, and eventually it seemed sensible to cover up the streams and rivers, build houses on top of them and dump raw sewage into the water.

Result:  an unbelievably polluted Thames, a tainted drinking water supply, cholera epidemics, infant mortality approaching 50 percent – and in 1846 the covered Fleet River exploded from methane buildup, taking three houses with it.

Advocates for the poor had been demanding that the government do something since the 1820s, but the English autocrats didn’t act until they were affected personally.  It was the Great Stink of 1858, when the air in Parliament made members vomit, not the cholera pandemic of 1849 that decimated the population, that finally kick-started London’s sanitation push.

            Now let’s move across the globe to Asia, where the great Ganges –

(Here I cannot help telling you that when I came across the word “Ganges” in a crossword puzzle and asked my husband about it, he male-answered without pausing for thought that it was an embarrassing health condition, as in:  “My Ganges is swoll up so bad, I cain’t hardly zip up my britches.”)

– where the great Ganges, the sacred river of India, is more full of poop than a family-values Republican with a mistress in Argentina.  But the lack of sanitation is more than just a disease vector in India; it is also the instrument of social injustice.  How do you suppose the Untouchables got to be untouchable?

Yes:  Poop.  Someone was needed to carry it out of the crowded villages, and thus the caste was born – a caste that was to be treated with shocking unfairness throughout the millennia because of the despised labor forced upon it. 

The Indians are even now working on this problem, and Carter quoted Prime Minister Nehru as saying: “The day every one of us gets a toilet to use, I shall know that our country has reached the pinnacle of progress.”

In Dade County, sewers are seen as the key to growth, attracting not just new residents but desperately needed industry.  The question is not whether they’re necessary but who will pay for them, and the answers proposed may strike you as being full of a certain unbeautiful substance useful in horticulture as a soil amendment.

A humble substance indeed, but one which seems, nevertheless, to be at the very heart of the Social Contract.

END

What About The Ench?

            When my friend Madelyn got married she wrote me the most wonderful email.  She'd married her longtime feller and they had done the thing quietly in a government building.  But this was California, San Francisco in fact, so even the no-frills civil ceremony took on a certain sparkle.  Mad’s brother happened to be in town and attended so they had the family element, and just when she had started to wonder if they shouldn’t have added a religious component of some kind as well, who should come in but some Buddhist monks?  Perhaps they were applying for a permit of some kind, but this being San Francisco maybe they had just sensed from the air that somebody needed them.

            Anyway I have digressed from my point, which is how happy she was.  She wrote something like:  “And suddenly there we were, in San Francisco getting married, both of us grinning like idiots.”

            Years later another couple of friends got married, this time with a big sloppy wedding in a pasture so everybody could watch, and as the vows were read I could see the same uncontrollable happiness shining from their faces – they were both of them grinning like idiots.  I was so pleased for them I cried a little.

            But it was only last night that I experienced that same unstoppable, uncontainable, stupid-making joy for myself.  I was so thrilled to be living in that particular minute in that particular place that I realized I was grinning like an idiot.  I was exalted and exhilarated and ecstatic and –

            – walking into the Ingle’s Market, which had been closed for four months after the tornado.

            All right.  There’s probably a little more to it than that.  It was the day after the torrential rains of Labor Day, which had turned the air so unseasonably cool you had to wear a jacket.  I had just trotted around Cloudland Canyon for the first time since the summer got so hot.  The leaves had already turned color and started falling from the drought, so it was like finding the door into autumn.

            I like summer and dislike winter, but I loved the pseudo-fall!  It hadn’t been cool enough to run since maybe June but now I was jogging along like the Russian Army, and the weather was so bracing even my 12-year hound dog – I usually leave her at home now for the long hikes – was able to keep up. 

            Then when I was through I was able – finally! – to pop into my pet grocery store at the foot of the mountain to pick up what we needed for supper.  It was one of those moments when, instead of wondering how on earth I ended up at the ass end of nowhere, I remember I’m living at the throbbing heart of the universe.

            Plus Ingle’s has added bulk goods in big clear containers like at Earth Fare, so you can buy raw almonds by the ounce …

            Anyway, it’s embarrassing to be so happy about a grocery store, but I’m old enough now to understand you take your happiness where you find it.  Here is a “Boblet” I wrote last Friday, after the Ingle’s had reopened on Wednesday.  

O FRABJOUS DAY!  But What About the Ench?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            I met a neighbor tonight in the Food Lion.  He had a basketful of groceries and I only had three items which I was carrying in my arms.  Gallantly, he insisted I go first.  I let him persuade me, put my three items on the counter, then practically threw myself on the floor and commenced to twitch and drool as I went into full-blown Apology Mode.

“I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” I said.  He looked at me in amazement, wondering no such thing, but I had started now and couldn’t stop until I’d confessed to killing Kennedy.  “I mean,” I said, “I’m an Ingle’s loyalist, and now after all these months Ingle’s is open again and here I am at Food Lion.” 

He looked at me, stunned with boredom, but I rolled relentlessly on.  “See,” I said, “I was having dinner with my husband across the road and I remembered we needed these few things and I didn’t want to drive all the way down to Ingle’s and anyway I’ve already been in there earlier today.”

I was feeling guilty about being in the Food Lion because in Bob’s Little Acre I had keened so loud about missing Ingle’s after the tornado closed it down that the Ingle’s dietician from HQ in Asheville got to hear about it.  She left a message on the BLA blog saying not to lose hope, the store would reopen by the end of August.  That struck me as such joyous tidings that I put it on the front page of the Sentinel that week as a news brief. 

Then this week, with the store’s grand reopening on Wednesday, I made them let me in on Monday and I got the manager, Dewayne, to pose for a picture in front of one of the new self-checkout stations.  (I already have plans for a feature called “The Agony and the Ecstasy:  Dade Meets the Challenge of Self-Checkout.”) 

Anyway, I wrote a short news piece and when Ingle’s reopened on Wednesday our newspaper in its box by the store’s front door carried the headline that Ingle’s was reopening on Wednesday. 

If you are reading this in a big city somewhere and have started feeling embarrassed for me that the grocery store figures so large in my pathetically circumscribed life, please be assured that the rival newspaper in town carried the same headline.  Also let me point out that though I did begin the article by typing, “Excitement has mounted to fever pitch,” I made judicious use of the backspace key before hitting the Send button.         

But back to my neighbor and the Food Lion:  Finally, from the glassiness of the man’s eyes, I realized he might have spent the past few months paying attention to something – his job, his family, American Idol – besides my news and opinion writing about Ingle’s.  He didn’t care why I was in Food Lion.  So I took pity on him and began talking to him instead about the time I’d apologized to a woman I knew for having met her coming out of the Wal-Mart in Tiftonia. 

By that time he was just standing there like a pillar of salt, smiling here and there pleasantly though it could have been gas pains.  I think something in him had died.

Later, walking out to the parking lot, I realized I had apologized for something that needed no apology to somebody who didn’t want to be apologized to, and then I’d compounded the gaffe not only by apologizing for apologizing but by ranting on about past apologies. 

I’ve recently passed through a period of intense misery and in reaction undergone what in another person might have counted for a religious conversion.  I’ve tried to become warmer, less bitter and easier to get along with.  Putting my three items in the car and driving away, though, I realized I was just as slobbering a sociopath as ever.

And you know what?  I didn’t care!  It was Friday and I’d just had a good dinner and INGLE’S WAS FINALLY OPEN AGAIN.  Nothing, not even getting caught at Food Lion, not even an epiphany of my unworthiness to breathe air, could detract from my sheer joie de grocery store.  It was as if the last little hurt place from the tornado had finally healed over.  Ingle’s was open, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

            Which is when I remembered:  the bench.

Even though, four months after the tornado, the Sentinel in the paper box outside Ingle’s had finally been changed out from the April 27 edition that possibly nobody on earth read, to the Aug. 31 rag with the glad news detailed above, supposing you put two quarters in the box there was still no place to sit and read the glorious prose contained therein.  The bench was gone!  

            Not that I ever sat on the Ingle’s bench that much, but it was important to me.  Somebody must have been selling advertising on it because it was festooned with the names of local businesses.  But somebody else had very carefully, very meticulously, removed the first letter of every word, so what you read was:  ENEVA’S ESTAURANT,  I think maybe OORE’S UNERAL OME, but the one I particularly remember was ONY AND ELLY EATHERS’ OOFING. 

I expect maybe my sense of humor is fairly basic but that always just killed me.  I remember dozens and dozens of time I’d stop by the Ingle’s on the way home from some awful meeting where somebody had hurt my feelings, or from some dreary day that had demonstrated to me the utter futility of going on, and I’d see ONY AND ELLY EATHERS’ OOFING and practically pee myself all over again.  There is nothing like ONY AND ELLY EATHERS’ OOFING to cheer a girl up.

So that is my point in this Boblet:  All is NOT QUITE perfect in paradise.  Local residents, join with me in agitating Ingle’s to bring back the “ench.”

And out-of-towners, thank God you have omething etter to do.

END