Piggy Puffs & Sardines

[Some days I have little to write, but still I write, because I feel I must.]

Hub and I are in the grocery store. And we are on the prowl for something fat-laden. Hub gives me points when I suggest Piggy-Puffs. Oh yes. That would be perfect.

Seems like a grand idea because with pork rinds being the fundamental ingredient, we are confident there is no way a cardboard-clone could be struck. But doesn’t it go without saying that the principal comptrollers of healthy diets seem to have obliterated them. None can be found.

Could it be that for the kindly care and protection of non-educated heathens like Hub and I that fail to understand the principles of healthy eating, someone, somewhere has completely annihilated piggy puffs? Appears so.

So now we continue our prowl hoping to unearth something exciting. And that’s when Hub spots a lovely display of canned sardines. Like an unexpected magical vision. Same can, same color, same look as canned sardines have had since the beginning of time. We haven’t eaten them for years but we both remember how we mushed them up on toast with thin crisp slices of raw onion, when we were young and so broke.

We take three cans home and later Hub makes sardines on toast and offers me some. I am not interested, but he goes ahead and begins eating with sentimental and joyous expectation his so-long-ago, but still cherished in mind and memory, sardines on toast.

Now Hub, even in a completely objective assessment is a handsome man. But suddenly, his countenance radically changes.

His eyebrows are furled, his forehead knotted, lips curled, eyes glazed and tearing, cheeks caved in, and his mouth is moving in a slow agonizing manner. And amidst all that, with the look of a Gargoyle, his adam’s apple is bobbing up and down in jerking spasms. And when I look at him, I am quite certain that even piggy puffs made out of briskly dipped and fried toilet paper could not have wrought such a change.

“My God,” I say, “What are you doing? Are you sick?”

“No,” he says, “but as much as I hate the cardboard fat-free snacks they make nowadays, this is so much worse.”

“Then why are you eating it?” I ask.

“Cause I don’t want to waste food,” is his simple, but direct answer.

I am amazed, as I so often am by that unique species they call ‘men’. Why in God’s name doesn’t he spit them out? Why doesn’t he trash them?

I feel an agony of my own stemming from empathy and the sight of his miserable condition. Makes me feel I should kiss it all better. But I cannot, amidst such ugliness, touch those Gargoyle lips, or risk inhalation of that Gargoyle breath. Yuk, oh Yuk!

Hub bravely fights on, and eventually manages to force down the contents of that can without a retching return. After which, he rushes to the bathroom where he vigorously rinses his mouth and brushes his teeth.

He hasn’t completely recovered his good looks, but he is looking better when he turns to me and says. “They used to pack those little fishies in olive oil and that was good. But they just can’t leave well enough alone. Now it’s soy oil. Not because it’s better, cause it bloody isn’t.

And you know what else, Roberta? There just has to be a better way to torment one’s self. But right now, I can’t think of what it might be.”