Dear friends, I found this little vignette inside one of my old notebooks. I don’t remember when I wrote it, but it doesn’t really matter. Some themes are timeless, ageless, endless. Apparently shlepping is my idiom, and always will be. The following was written after I had taken a friend shopping at the farmer’s market with me, and had shown remarkable restraint by only buying 20 pounds of fruit and veg and then shlepping it all home on the N train.
“How can you live this way?” she said with dismay, as if I were selling crack to schoolchildren, or starring in the rankest, most degrading of skin flicks. I knew what she meant, though. I had asked myself the same question the day last summer that one of my bags tilted to one side, and before I knew what happened, $30 worth of apricots, cherry tomatoes, Rose Fir potatoes and Elephant Heart plums bounced merrily onto the tracks. Not having the energy, patience or cash to go through all that again, I cried almost all the way home. At about Astoria Boulevard, I finally started to smile, thinking of subway rats eating my produce and then becoming too fussy for the fast food scraps they usually live on. I imagined them coming across a half-eaten peach and asking “is it tree-ripened?” in the voice of Paul Lynde as Templeton the Rat in Charlotte’s Web.
In the end, I guess it’s a matter of picking our poisons. Someday I will not live here anymore, and I’ll have to drive to a supermarket, much as I did when I lived in Honesdale, and as I sit behind some Canyonero, unable to see the traffic light in front of me, I’ll wonder, why do I do this? How can I live this way?