[1749 J. Cleland Memoirs of Woman of Pleasure II. 133]
The football moms fix lunch for the team on away game days and last week the team moms tasked me with contributing a gargantuan salad. Since Matt and I are still getting by with one frying pan and two saucepans, none of a size to cater to the multitudes, this struck me as an exceptionally considerate assignment. Then I dashed into the Commissary Tuesday, made a beeline to the lettuce/spinach case, and found . . . nothing.
Only slightly daunted, I returned to the Commissary the following day and the bin still looked like the Home Depot battery and flashlight display the day before a hurricane is expected to blow into town. In a word, empty.
Back to the Commissary for the third time, an hour before closing on Thursday, I was alternating Hail Marys and my favorite mantra ("I lead a charmed existence, I lead a charmed existence, I lead a charmed existence"). Six bags of dark green leaves and 15 heads of pale green leaves, not unlike the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, were waiting in the bin. On closer inspection, the dark green leaves were labeled "Collards" which might taste like spinach but why take that risk with those pale green heads on offer. Whether I bought iceberg lettuce or cabbage I can't say because the labels simply promised "marked-down produce."
A lady in my knitting circle - more on that another time, snort - credits the produce shortage to another tropical storm brewing somewhere between Hawaii and Japan. Ships tied to piers, she explained, can suffer expensive dents and dings during a storm so, to protect the taxpayers' investment, the Navy sends the ships out to sea where they are supposed to stay out of the storm's way. When these port-emptying storms crop up between scheduled replenishments of a ship's larder, the supply officers are compelled to raid the Commissary.
That Cleland person who coined the expression "any port in a storm" back in the mid-18th century was apparently not a sea-faring kind of guy/gal.
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