Fundamental Jelly

Before I go any further into this post, I think a little explanation is in order.  What follows is the beginning of a short story I have been working on over the last few days.  When I first started this blog in late February I posted a couple of short stories but no one seemed interested.  Admittedly, I had few readers then, but it soured me on posting stories for a time.  Since then I have garnered a couple more readers, so I thought I might try it again.  I am not fishing for compliments, just let me know if this is something you be interested in reading—feedback basically.

The story is loosely based on a conversation I had with my wife when she was pregnant with our first child.  We were discussing baby names and someone mentioned not using a name that was used in a disease or body part.  Since she’s a nurse and I was teaching college physiology at the time, we riffed off this and got to laughing.  We soon forgot about it and named our kids, but for some reason I remembered this conversation the other day and thought it had the makings of a short story.  I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that I got some inspiration from my favorite doula and blogging pal Barely Knit Together.  If you are curious what a circle of Willis is, then you can read this from Wikipedia.  Since I write in spastic fits and starts, I may not fiddle with this story for months, so a completed story may be some time down the road.  Anyway, here goes:

Circle of Willis

             Lauren and I couldn’t decide on a name for our first child—the child she had carried for the last seven months.  We didn’t know the gender, we wanted it to be a surprise.  Over the last few months we had engaged in a sort of naming voir dire, someone would put forth a suggestion and the other would dismiss it out of hand.  We had reached an impasse; a third party, a baby naming arbitrationist, if you will, was needed to settle this.  It was decided that our best friends Paul and Amanda could perform this duty as they are both bright and witty and had been through this exercise prior to their daughter Alicia’s birth.  We invited them to have dinner on Saturday night and between the four of us hopefully we could hash this name thing out. 

            Of course, having people to our house for dinner required a better than average cleaning of the place.  The clothes mountain on the couch would have to be folded—finally.  You make the house look good and pretend you live like that all the time.  Everyone does this and we are not an exception.  Lauren was going to cook an Italian dish and I agreed to do some housework and the final grocery shopping.  I like the food shopping part the best because it’s more creative than the weekly trip for staples, cleaning products, and paper goods.  I get to pick the best looking vegetables, finest meats, freshest bread, and maybe something different or exotic even.  At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Lauren handed me ‘the list.’ 

            “We have some Merlot and a Cabaret, but you might want to pick up a Chianti or something,” Lauren said.

            “No prob,” I said and added it the list.  I watched her move gracefully around the kitchen.  She was one of those apple-cheeked women who look good pregnant.  Lauren liked being ‘with child,’ it made her feel special.  Her slightly angular but not bony features were filled-in with the extra weight she carried; it didn’t take much of an imagination to project how she would look in her thirties and forties and this I thought was pleasing.  She had also felt good during the pregnancy—no nausea, no projectile vomiting, and not many aches or pains to speak of. 

            “Oh, and get some good crackers,” she added.  ‘Good crackers’ was code for over-priced wafers with poppy or sesame seeds sprinkled on them. 

             There were three grocery stores equidistant from our house.  One of the stores had all the gourmet stuff but was the highest priced.  The other two markets had better prices on most things and even carried an unusual item or two that the ‘good’ store didn’t have.  Because of this merchandising oddity, pre-planning was key.  Say, for instance, you needed some whole annatto seeds to make arroz con pollo, only one of the stores carried that spice.  Having mentally scanned the ‘list,’ I decided on the second best grocery store because they had the best bakery. 

            I’m not really sure why, but I love walking through supermarkets.  The effect is massive.  The bright, humming florescent lights, the primary-colored packaging stacked high and deep, and shiny everything—Lewis Carroll couldn’t have imagined it, Vermeer couldn’t have painted it.  Most times I have a routine, I start in the produce section (it’s usually at one end) and roll back and forth through each aisle in a modified serpentine manner.  Modified because I have for years skipped the baby section and pet aisle.  Those two aisles have a kind of jurisdictional imperative about them because you only go to those sections if you have kids or pets.  Of late, I have made a few tentative forays to the baby section for observational purposes and have noticed that most people don’t browse or loiter much, they seem to know want they want and grab it.  I’m making mental notes on these shopping conventions.

            I found a cart with good wheels and wandered over to the produce area and pulled out the ‘list’ and examined it in detail.  A married couple in their late fifties stopped near me and conversed for a moment.  The woman was ordering her husband to return the hand basket and get a cart.  She said:  “Put it back and get a cart.” 

            I couldn’t hear want he was saying, he was mumbling.

            “John, just get a cart.”

            Mumbling again.

            “It’s more than you can carry in a basket.”

            I picked up the vegetables I needed and as I headed for the first aisle I heard John’s wife correcting him about the finer points of grapefruit.  I thought John’s wife might be named Edith or Dorothy or maybe some exotic Polynesian name with eleven vowels that roughly translates into:  ‘Woman who hates everything.’  Anyway, realizing that time would be a factor because of the dinner, I decided to forego hitting every row and just stick to the list.