English Morphine

It's even capitalized on both words, as if it is an actual formal item that one would include on a grocery list for shopping on a Tuesday afternoon. At first read, it sounds like a harder version of morphine that a regular user would have to ever so carefully titrate up to in order to tolerate. On second read, it sounds like the name of the next Placebo album.



Morphine would sound like muffins if you were speaking in a cloud or carwash. But the idea of the writer of this list expecting to pick up some English Morphine rather than English muffins lends to the magic of interpreting strangers' grocery lists. And that it was actually written as "Morphine" on the list means the only cloud this writer likely experienced was the pink one she felt before relapsing.

This list is clearly written by a female. The handwriting, vegetable items, decided periods on ends of items, and corrected writing... it just speaks female, older woman. Older woman because if you look at the handwriting - look at the way she moves from letter to letter... example: corn. See how the end of the c leads to the bottom of the o. The writing of this o is a sort of backwards approach to how children are now taught in handwriting (an o would start at the top rather than bottom). She actually uses an ampersand in her writing on the celery & milk entry. Many folks born after 1955 don't regularly use these in handwritten notes (however often still used in typed notes) unless otherwise formally taught.

And one more thing about canned corn: I have to give a high five to my English Morphine addict friend... canned corn is so much easier than ears of corn. Sure, ears of corn when schucked and grilled are so much tastier, but the volume of available good individual kernels of corn (for soups, salsa, etc.) that comes in cans makes it a pretty damn marketable item. Especially if the shopper is an older woman who doesn't have the time or strength (or teeth) to grill then slice off (or bite off) the grilled corn.

Heads of lettuce: not just one, but multiple heads of lettuce. Again, this speaks of an older individual who grew up in the Depression or perhaps more likely was raised in the Depression. She still eats plain lettuce and doesn't exactly see the value in other more expensive greens like spinach or mixed baby greens. And most other greens are now in bagged varieties, for which you pay much more per ounce.

Cherry tomato: I'm guessing this means a pint of cherry tomatoes, since it is singular. Have noticed that lovers of cherry tomatoes and grape tomatoes are often folks who eat their fair share of vegetables, and often had or have their own home gardens. Yep, old lady.

Mushroom: let's just pretend she is talking about the vegetable. I mean, I think the English Morphine will be enough.

Cucumber: another item on which you will see handwriting that is not part of what is commonly taught now.

Celery & milk: for some unknown reason, these two are on the same line. With a period at the end. As in this is a definite need. Not just celery and milk. But CELERY & MILK.

apples: perhaps she does have teeth capable of eating corn on the cob.

As far as the paper goes, it is noticed that it is ripped at top and she only uses the bottom half for her grocery list (as it is guessed that the top half was already used). Another point toward a Depression era kid, knowing to waste little and make the most of anything - including free notepads. This particular notepad makes me wonder if it is a woman who recently lost her husband due to old age and she is looking to sell her house that they happily lived in for the past 58 years. The pain that would come with such a change in life and loss of love would help explain her need for English Morphine.

the hidden magic of grocery lists

A single grocery could be regarded as sacred as a personal journal entry that a pre-teen girl might write under the cover of a baby blue checkered bedspread with flashlight in hand. If you write in the dark, no one will see. If you write in the dark with a cloak of bedding, not even the spying ghosts can see. A grocery list reveals intimate details of a person's life that even his or her closest friends and family may not know about the individual.

Your over-the-counter sleep aid, the detergent used to wash your favorite gym shorts, the microwave popcorn habit you could never kick, the food you feed your adopted puppy, the coffee you buy to brew at home because the food you feed your adopted puppy tastes better than your office coffee, and exactly what sort of texture (and perhaps scent) of toilet paper you prefer to wipe your ass.

The items on a grocery list hold only a fraction of the story of the person behind it.



What sort of paper it was written on...
Stationery with a schoolhouse and a Bible quote
Hotel letterhead
A post-it
On the back of some unrelated print-out
Personal professional stationery
Back of a business card
Back of a napkin
Torn off piece of paper
Typed out master grocery list with items circled

Handwriting...
Manic, serial killer, all caps
Looks like your grandmother's
Obviously inked by an engineer
Carefully drawn letters of a control freak
Inconsistent, moody, identity crisis, multiple personality... or collaboration of more than one person
Written in a rushed, diagonal on the post-it fashion

Editing...
Place an "X" next to each item once in cart
Scribble through with fierce anger
Strike-through once
Leave alone, no written indication of whether item was picked up or not
Edit multiple times before even making it to the store
Other non-grocery list related items on list (phone numbers, directions, etc.)

Spelling and grammar and abbreviations...
R-berries
Deoderant
Veg
Desert
Frozen brocoli
Snack's

Categories...
Items in parentheses
Items with question marks
Items categorized by store and/or aisle
Items with no specifics: white soda; lunch meat

And any accompanying quirks such as hearts to dot the letter i, budget analysis for grocery trip, an EKG, and individuals' names linked directly to a listed item... always good.

I have over 5 years' worth of collected grocery lists that I'd like to share. Hope you enjoy as I add them.

There was some sort of explosion. It came out and divulged itself like a starfish eviscerating itself for a meal. Except more colorful.

It was a disordered rainbow and reminded me of the old Print Shop graphic of layers of colors that slowly moved from the inside out as the computer fed the image to the printer that printed onto the paper with holes in the sides and perforations between each sheet. This is one of my favorite dreams as a kid. There are certainly more memorable ones, like the recurring one of the orange tiger chasing me around the tree in my family's backyard. That one lasted for years and it was always the same.

I used to keep a dream journal of sorts: a spiral notebook kept at my bedside that I wrote in when I awoke from a dream... whether 11:52pm, 2:28am, or whenever. Upon waking, I detailed my dreams and often drew pictures of the images in my mind's dreams (crayons were kept on the bedside table for this reason).

That practice has not been followed in years. Yet I still recall my dreams from each night's sleep every morning. And, somehow, my dreams have become so much more vivid with each year of age.

The two basic categories of dreams are realistic and non-realistic. The non-realistic ones are so damn detailed that I can recall each square inch of my adopted 8-armed monkey... the realistic ones are the ones that trick me.

My dreams are so vivid that the realistic ones are often confused with reality. I actually had to sit down in our VP's office and ask him about travel dates... I'd had a dream that he sent out an email (written in his verbiage) about us traveling to CA on April 12-16. I nearly booked that flight... then decided to check my email for the email I read in my dream... never found it. It did not exist in reality. He didn't send it.

Chewing on cords does nothing.

radio killed the sleeping star

I must have been about 5 or 6 years old. I asked my dad what made my ceiling fan turn, and just what he meant when he spoke of electricity. He went on to explain that the fan was powered by little green men on little green bicycles, and this was the power that ran the fan on a pulley system.

His plan worked.

I spent the next several years forgoing simplicities that I had never even considered before. I turned off the fan before going to bed (if I was going to rest, it was only fair to allow the little green men to rest), I turned off lights any time I left a room (so that the light bulb sergeant at arms could take a break), and I ate cold food (so that the little green aliens that powered the microwave wouldn't have to make special trips to my home to heat my broccoli).

However, the one thing I would not give up was radio. If I could only stay up all night long by listening to the radio, then I wouldn't die in my sleep if the house caught on fire.

This idea was abandoned when my brother burned our house down in late afternoon on a Thursday.

Since it happened once, it didn't seem likely to happen again any time in the near future. I got over the fear and got over trying to stay awake at night listening to the radio.

Yet, this did not keep me from listening to the radio during daylight hours. I still did feel guilty about it, since I knew that the artist was forced to go into the recording studio to belt out my favorite song just to let me hear it on the radio. I later forced myself to leash in my selfish listening demands and cut down on my radio hours. Musicians had better things to do with their lives than to just spend the day waiting for me to turn on the radio to hear their voices.

I think I knew more when I was a kid as I do now as an adult. At least, I had better ideas then.

I may never hear frogs croak again

I can only tie two types of knot on fishing line. Yet, somehow, I still became certified as a Master Angler by Texas Parks & Wildlife. It was at that training that I met Scott #2, quite possibly the craziest human that has ever come into my life. Good crazy. He'd wake me up in the middle of the night with his unusually large, excited eyes, saying things like, "Hey, get up! We're going climbing at Reimers Ranch in our underwear. I just finished packing. It doesn't open for a few hours, so we'll stop at the 24 hour Mexican place to have jalapenos and shots of tequila for breakfast." I also recall that he would order a bowl of cut lemons after every meal, then suck on each as if they were some magical little batteries that kept his mind blazing and eyes oddly, widely open for days on end. "Scott, you know that acid is harsh on your tooth enamel." "I know, but they're so good. Want one?"



Damn, I miss that guy.

So, once I started volunteering with TPWD as an angler educator, I chose to lead the topics of ethics and habitat for fishing day clinics. Some kids would produce chaotically colored and complicated underwater worlds for the rather simple channel catfish, while others would include in their drawings domestic staples such as a cozy twin bed in a quaint room with curtains and a desk complete with a charming little lamp (which somehow did not require any sort of electricity for its illumination) for their marine creatures.

It was during the ethics sessions that I came to realize the peace and innocence we as adults all too easily forfeit in order to gain convenience and selfish gratification. These kids lived in worlds painted with hope and laughter. The few precious moments I got to go behind their eyes and see life's glowing fireflies and croaking little green frogs on water lilies was refreshing, effortlessly captivating.

So, when I went to the salon yesterday, I was struck with fear and guilt that I may have done something to disrupt this enchanting world where frogs croak. Ruckus the beta had died.

As I found myself once again being placed below the alien mind reader that my stylist Amy calls a dryer, I looked next to my cushioned vessel at the small table with stacks of hair magazines, and it seemed to cry aloud for something with more vitality to hold than glued slick pages stained with strange coloring chemicals that held hairstyles seen nowhere but a fashion show. Terrified, I looked up at Amy, "Where is Rufus?" Amy corrected me, "Ruckus. He died." It was me. I did this. "Amy, how did it happen? That is awful news." Amy looked at me with what I imagined curiousity to my questioning of a beta that I had somehow channeled the alien mind reader powers to kill. "I don't know. It was a few months ago." Which neatly placed me in the time frame of the crime scene. I wanted to ask if they kept his fishbowl, if they'd had a funeral for him or if his tormented little body was let go in the Mississippi River (or maybe the Missouri River, since Amy lives in Illinois), or if they planned to get another fish so that the table wouldn't have to go through life with nothing greater to look forward to than more collections of pages of eccentric hairstyles. But I didn't ask.

My certification to teach maritime recreation activities should be revoked.

dogs we housed

Growing up, we always seemed to have an open-door policy when it came to animals. If it meandered onto our taxed property, we would feed it. This is not always a good thing to do with wandering animals, as one might belong to a devoted owner... and all we were doing was teaching it that s/he could find a meal at our home. Nevertheless, we did it.

Among stray dogs, we also had pet-store purchased pets. I had a fascination with hamsters that my dad allowed me to indulge in. I didn't like the idea of these furry little creatures locked up in a plastic cage, so I would let them run free in the house. This resulted in furrowed brows of my parents, and a few hamster fatalities.

In an effort to show them how much they were loved when they were forced to live in their little plastic cages, I would wait until everyone was sleeping, then sneak to the scary plastic cage and pluck my little fuzzy creature into the world and into freedom. I figured God made them fuzzy because he knew that they wanted to be cuddled, so I would take them to bed with me. Unfortunately, God forgot that I was a heavy sleeper... so, I ended up rolling over my fuzzy little friend(s) in the night. It wasn't long before hamsters went on the list of animals not likely to ever enter the house again.

Growing up in Louisiana and Texas, we rarely had the occasion to light the fireplace. But, with the combination of begging for a fire and 60°F weather, we were able to get a fire going one night. My dad opened the flue and found a charming little nest of chimney swifts. This immediately became more interesting than a fire. I told him that we had to keep them. All they knew was the chimney, and surely it would be much too shocking to let them into the wild. We had to keep them until the fire was gone, then they'd go back.

We got a cardboard box, and placed the nest of anxious birds into it. I talked to them for hours, and I really don't even recall if we had a fire that night. Even when there is no fire, a chimney just strikes me as a warm place... so, with this thought, I felt sorry for the cold little birds. I only had room for one, so I again waited for everyone to go to bed, then gently took one of the baby birds back to my bed. Surely a bird sleeping with a human in a human bed (rather than in a nest in cardboard box not in the chimney) would have a greater chance at life. Except that I rolled over this one in my sleep, too. The chimney swift family -1 was returned to the chimney the next day.

Seeing as I could not be trusted with small animals, my family moved on to dogs and cats. One of our first strays was a dog that appeared to be part pitbull. He came along, he ate well, and he seemed to like us. So, we had a family meeting on what to name the dog. We all wrote out our chosen names for the dog on pieces of paper and decided that the piece of paper chosen would be the dog's name. My brother's suggestion of "Boner" was chosen.

Years later, we adopted a greyhound. This has since become my absolute favorite breed of dog. He exhibited excruciating anxiety and bad breath. The GPA had named him "Storm." I demanded that we rename him "Greyhound." It stuck. This dog was so fascinating... he was more nervous than coffee, and he could run and play to no end.

My brother wanted a yellow lab for hunting. He found one, but failed to train her. This dog ended up being the most spoiled fat lab ever. Ty. She ate a slice of pizza on Fridays, followed by a scoop of Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla. She lived a very happy 11 years, and her passing still makes everyone in the family cry. She had such a laid back, easy-going personality... and, she loved everyone. The world would be a better place if there were people like Ty.

We had other dogs. This is not in chronological order.

Rex was a Doberman, and I think he had some intestinal issues. He was loved and caressed by all members of the family on a regular basis. And, a little more. Despite any family troubles going on, Rex always brought us together. However, he did seem to exhibit some digestion problems. When a dog farts, s/he usually just raises an eyebrow or two and waits for the audience response. When Rex would fart, he would moan and leave the room. As if the smell was so foul that even a dog should not endure it.

We had other dogs with other stories. Rest assured, all dogs were treated well (often better than the human children) while under the Gamble care.

equal pie

I went to the store today for kale and to stare at the doughnuts. Upon entering the store, I saw an elderly woman smoking a cigarette and sitting on a bench. She had lots of wrinkles. I reminded myself to use my wrinkle cream when I got home.

I had just dropped off my load of plastics and metals and glass at the recycling place, so upon my arrival at the store, I hurried to the restroom to wash my hands. Just before elbowing open the restroom door, I noticed a number of quarter machines. One of them held little plastic monsters made in China. I made a note to visit this coin-operated thing after washing my hands. I entered the restroom, and to my excitement, they provided foaming soap. It seems that public facilities are using this more and more. I like that. Something about it just seems more cleansing than liquid soap. The restroom was blessed with a white porcelain sink, so I was able to easily see my dirty suds rinsed away.

I went to dry my hands and noticed that the paper towel dispenser was not a sensor dispenser as I am used to at work. I had to touch the little lever to dispense a paper towel. I cursed myself for not dispensing the paper towel before washing my hands as I usually do. I dried my hands, then let out a couple more towels and washed my hands again. This time, I didn't have to touch a thing.

As I used the paper towel to open the restroom door, I was filled with excitement about the little monster quarter machine. As much as I do not like to handle coins, I dug into my purse in an eager search for two quarters. Found them. I put them into the machine thing, turned the lever, and was greeted with a little pink monster that looked like a bunny. I opened up the plastic capsule with a car key and smiled. I went back to the restroom again to wash my hands since I'd handled coins and that lever. This time, I thought to dispense the paper towels before washing.

I walked out one entrance/exit to enter the other entrance/exit. The second one is closer to the handheld grocery carts, and it's the entrance I pretty much always use, so I had to go out the odd entrance/exit and go into the regular entrance/exit to equalize things and cancel out my entrance to the odd exit. The elderly woman was working on another cigarette. She was sitting in the same position. I told myself that I shouldn't stare, but I did.

I picked up some kale and cursed those damn produce water-sprayers. Is that really necessary? What good does it do for the consumer other than to try to show just how "fresh" something looks? I have my own idea that it is done to add just an ounce or two of weight to per pound of produce.

Then again, maybe the produce has some sort of rinsing complex. I can understand that (even if it doesn't include foaming soap).

I'd done what was most important: getting kale. So, I moved onto gazing at the glazed doughnuts. On my way there, I was stopped in my counted steps by something I saw in the baked goods area. I saw a sign that read, "EQUAL PIE."

I frowned and looked around for an "INEQUALITY PIE," but I could not find such. It seemed all-too American. HEY! It's 2009, so let's pretend that there is no such thing as inequality... so need for an inequality pie.

I don't even know what an inequality pie would look or taste like, but I was upset that I didn't see one. I squatted down to see just what was so great about the "EQUAL PIE," and upon reading the ingredients, discovered that the "EQUAL" part was referring to the ingredients. "EQUAL," as in the artificial sweetener.

I left with a full basket of kale and a yearning for an inequality pie.