Succotash for Eighteen

Finally coaxed out of my small town retreat, I crossed over to the mainland today, back to the wider world of traffic jams and huge stores. Sounds trivial, but I needed some coffee and wanted another of those big two pound bags of Starbuck’s Cafe Verona. I can buy that particular coffee here at the beach, but only in twelve ounce bags, and at what I call a criminal price. A few weeks back my sister brought me one of the big bags which come from Sam’s. She offered to take me there today for coffee or anything else I might want. It was a first experience for me. I don’t have a member’s card for the store, so wasn’t familiar with the Sam’s experience.

Interesting. Is there another country in the world where this kind of giant scale buying goes on? I wonder. Oh, I suppose you could shop at Sam’s and buy nothing more than a small engagement ring, or a cell phone, but from what I saw, most shoppers had carts filled with ten pounds of meat, six pounds of cheese, twelve pounds of Halloween candy, and six of those giant cans of succotash, the ones that serve eighteen people and could give an elephant a concussion if you bounced it off his head.

I’d better not point fingers, though. I had no giant cans or trick or treat chocolate, but my own cart was not exactly empty. I found the coffee, but then got all looky-feely about a lot more. If I’d had my friend’s pick up truck and a forklift, I would have made a small dent in those shelves rising twelve feet from the floor. I had neither, so satisfied myself with less—LESS being in this case definitely a relative word.

As I waddled out to the car with my purchases, my sister suggested we get gasoline, at the Sam’s station set off on one edge of the Rhode Island sized parking lot. I was planning on buying gas later, because it’s always cheaper inland. The past two weeks have seen gas prices at the beach heading for the moon. The price at Sam’s was twenty cents a gallon cheaper than anywhere in my area.

I was feeling kind of buoyant with all the bargain buying at Sam’s, and we topped it off with lunch at my new in-town favorite, Habanero’s. Tacos, enchiladas, guacamole and their homemade chips and salsa. I like Mexican food so much it’s a wonder I don’t move to Mexico.

But at the end of it all, I gotta say, the time spent with my sister was the best.

Photo note: The four pounds of Seckel pears I bought at Sam’s looked pretty in the Japanese bowl.