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Recent News... Just for Pope Gregory... |
2005-03-01 - 3:15 p.m. How fruit got me a pilot�s license Anyone else hate the fruit stickers? One of the few things I�ve actually *done* in the past week is go to the grocery store. Even I, with my fondness for soup and crackers, was desperate for some real food and fresh vegetables. Nobody scold me. I only went cause I had to go the pharmacy anyway. So begins the dangerous adventure of going to the grocery store while hungry without a list. All the POINTS club gurus can scold me, because this is the road to perdition. I love the produce section. I love the variety we are treated to year round, and I love the occasional new products, like the grapple or grape-apple. Look�s like a Gala, but it�s package says it tastes like a grape. Doesn�t say what kind of grape, and I think the marketing people should�ve rethought the grapple appellate since it sounds like scrapple to me. I have fun in the produce section. You can ask Nia or Nikulai. But I hate the aftermath. You come home with all these beautiful, fresh fruit and immediately you have to bruise it by peeling off the code stickers, yes, those gummy things that tell the cashiers to punch code#3452 for �Fuji� apples and #3453 for �Gala� I found more white in my hair this week, so I�m allowed to say this � In my day, we had to learn to identify fruit. Perhaps one of the things I left of my list was �Have been a teenage grocery store cashier.� I worked in the Food City just below my high school to make enough money to pay for my flying lessons, cause I was too stubborn to let my parents pay. I had quite an argument about it with my government teacher/bible school teacher, James David, who passionately believed students shouldn�t have after school jobs; they should concentrate on being students. He had to shut up when I did it, got my pilot�s license edited the newspaper, and still graduated both second and third in my class (which is another long story, cause all Southern stories have a tangent in the middle.) Every week, the cashiers had to take and pass a produce test. The manager pile up a basket of random goods, and we had to correctly identify and ring up the lot. Oh, yes, we were supposed to punch code #3451 for �Red Delicious� apples, but there were no stickers on the fruit to help us. No, we just had to actually learn something and identify fruit. What did I learn? Granny Smith apples are always flat on the bottom, like your granny. Delicious apples have big crowns at the base, because they think a lot of themselves (mealy, unappetizing, oversold, misnamed Delicious apples.) MacIntoshes, if you look closely, have variations in their red skin, fleck of white, that mark them. I�m probably the only person in America who, when the big Hollywood star named her baby �Apple�, thought �which kind?� Of course, most people didn�t grow up seven miles down the road from the yearly �Apple Festival.� It just ticks me off that, because today�s grocery store cashiers aren�t taught their produce, I have to peel stickers and bruise my fruit. I have got to get out of this house soon. Being sick sucks, and I have failed in my nefarious plans for Cuan�s birthday. � � � 
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