2002-02-15 - 6:41 p.m.
One of my greatest pleasures in this neighborhood is the food. Go check out my market, it's one of my favorite places in the whole world. I went this morning, to pick up pane rustica and sfugliatelle and the special spaghetti (fedellini) that my grandmother loves and can never find in her supermarket. It smells so good in there I want to cry. I want to reach over and hug the people behind the counters. It's jammed tight in there, no aisles wide enough for people to pass. You're constantly backing out to let someone else go by, or holding your basket aloft so you can squeeze past a display of $12.00 long stem strawberries. But the food is OBSCENE - and so are the prices. This is obviously not my every day grocery store, but some days $6.99 for asparagus doesn't seem so bad when you factor in the half hour of sensory pleasure you get, that total physical abandon in all that beauty and abundance.
Getting all dramatic about a grocery store, eh? Really, it's that good. The produce is all perfect, and the layout of that section makes me dizzy - bright red peppers and shiny green onions and bumpy rutebegas spill out of baskets laid on their sides, and the front table is piled with thin green asparagus in January, ridiculously perfect red strawberries in plywood baskets, giant baskets of white peaches and grapes. It's a sickness, I tell you. I bought 6 loaves of bread today. That's right. Six. I couldn't stop myself.
I bought coffee from the big wood bins, and grated Locatelli, and Italian pastries for my Nana. Prosciutto bread, and a chocolate covered waffle, and some radishes.It's irrational, this love of a food store. But going in there, even if I buy nothing, is like Christmas in the middle of the day to me. Maybe I need some hobbies.
I was walking to the Salv@tion Army on 8th Street, passing by the cleaners, when Evan motioned me in. He handed me a FedEx envelope - my contract and papers from my new job! So fast. So I went to the SA, went to B@lducci's, and came home to open it. I filled out all the forms, happened to have a spare photocopy of my passport on hand ( that, my friends, is definitely a first. Usually I'd have to run out and make a copy, causing me to get distracted and do ten other things before returning home, and missing FedEx. So I took care of that - got it today, sent it out today. Shockingly efficient. So now I'm going to get my nails done, and then going upstate - be back Monday.
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