On the scale of misdemeanors, this has to be as harmless as it gets, but it’s still worth a word, perhaps a meal if you have the ingredients, and something to savor when you’ve had your fill.
Now that I sit to write of it, I’m surprised by how infrequently I see it. I’m in a supermarket at least once, often twice a week. I may not get much, but I take my time. That’s no doubt because, despite going in with a list, I keep an open eye and stop to consider items that catch it.
That makes me prone to change my mind about something I already have in my cart, which results in one of the very few temptations into petty evil that I have been able to resist all my life. In fact, and perhaps as atonement for many other petty crimes I do commit, I will take a box or jar or bag someone else has left with the bananas in a far corner of the store and return it myself to a shelf five aisles away.
Recently, I was pushing my cart down the aisle of paper towels, napkins, and toilet paper bulging from shelves on both sides. I was done shopping and was in the aisle only because it was empty and would quickly get me from the back of the store to the cash registers.
Ahead of me I spotted a blank space on one shelf about eye-high. How could I not look in? I hit the brakes. I was looking at a jar of salsa. Oh, the memories!
This Merrimack Valley boy from the Eisenhower years didn’t know what salsa was until he found his taste buds in a Mexican restaurant in downtown Minneapolis of all places. I was in my mid-twenties, and it took me another thirty years to discover it wasn’t just for snacks. That’s when I stopped at the Shawsheen Luncheonette in Andover for breakfast.
With a snug and most colorful interior, and with advice both whimsical and provoctive–The biggest danger to our future is apathy–served on small frames on the walls as food for thought, Shawsheen’s menu offers “Eggs Fiesta.”
Not the first time I ordered something just so I could say a name out loud. When it was “Beer-Battered Fish & Chips” at a Cambridge brew-pub long ago, I blasted those Bs like fists into a punching bag, and my embarrassed daughter hid under the table. But with fiesta, one can only smile.
Hash browns, topped with eggs as you like them (once-over for me), then topped with salsa, and toast (rye) on the side, it more than lived up to its name. Shawsheen became as frequent a stop as my ever-changing routes allowed, and I’d say I was there about once a month until about ten years ago. Always ordered before the menu arrived, but I’d take it to read for entertainment purposes only.
Maybe a year later, I wondered if I could try it at home. Hash-browns seem out of my culinary reach, but I guessed that the frozen potato patties might satisy as a substitute. They did. Eggs from a farm-stand always do, and I found a medium salsa, the same brand that I held in my hand in the scene that begins this flavorful story.
For a few years, it was what we would now call my “go-to” breakfast. Then came the Covid quarantine, and I indulged in labor-intensive potato pancakes. Since then, I’ve gone from lazy-boy cereal to sweet-tooth cantalope and cottage cheese to apple-cheddar omelets to Greek omelets to anything-about-to-expire-in-the-fridge omelets. Salsa was gone from the fridge and off my shopping list almost as soon as the toilet paper crisis left America in a mess.
Six years later, there it was surrounded by toilet paper in a space all its own. And then there it was in my hand. And then in my cart. Veered over to the aisle of cereal and returned the Cheerios, turned into the dairy section and found the frozen patties before going to check-out.
Eggs? No! Only at the farmstand.
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Mouth of the River 