Monday
March 5, 2001
Noon time

Last night (Sunday) I stopped into the local Rhode Island food store (Stop and Shop in Hopeless Valley) to get a few last minute items before the approaching snow storm arrived.  Since the local and national weather forecasts were hyping it as "the biggest storm since 1966" and "Massive" it seemed prudent (as Papa George Bush might have once said) to have some supplies on hand.

My short stop soon became something else entirely as I ended up looking at the shelves in the market.  Some areas had been picked clean as if a swarm of Biblical Egyptian locusts had descended.  Potatoes - nary a spud. Milk - a few quarts left in the half acre space.  Eggs?  Maybe a dozen cartons left.  Bread? A desolate scene with 50 feet long, 5 foot high shelving completely empty. Barren.  Gonzo!  Forget it.  Bottled water?  Long empty stretch except for a few 6 packs of the half pint sized variety.  Meat was low but there was plenty of sea food on ice.

The motivation for writing this short commentary comes from visiting the fresh vegetable section.  Bananas were completely gone.  Just 24 hours earlier there had been a big shipment of severely under ripe dark green bananas sitting there; the kind that anyone who knows anything about the variety of bananas we get in New England normally avoids scrupulously.  Bananas so under ripe that they are to your teeth what shrieking fingernails slowly and painfully dragged down a blackboard are to your ears.  The whole under ripe pile was gone!   I expect a run on appropriate medications to counteract eating large quantities of these once the storm gets over.

There wasn’t a round head of iceberg lettuce to be found either.  There were green and yellow beans on the floor.  The floor either looked like there had been a bean fight 20 minutes earlier or like the Great Tribulation had occurred and their owners had simply Vanished as they were piling the bagless handfuls of beans into their shopping carts.  I sure hope it was the former. . .

And then, suddenly, I saw the oddest thing of all (given that we have a Republican Administration in Washington and Rhode Island is the national capital of Democrat_ians. Since Republicans don’t like_em, the Dems keep lots on hand.)  All the Broccoli was gone. Every green head. Not a shred, not a stalk, not a leaf; all gone.  A big open expanse in the display.  Just the remains of some green unopened broccoli flower buds here and there to show what had formerly been there.  Broccoli?

All the polls and surveys I have read indicate that when the storms of life bear down on us we Rhode Islanders do the state constitutionally mandated thing and immediately go buy up all the milk and bread available.  In New Jersey they fight over snow shovels; here we go "mano a mano" over milk and bread.  I’m talking Duke City.  It’s serious folks.  For those of you don’t live here: if a native Rhode Islander is stopped in a routine traffic stop within 24 hours of a pending storm and is found to have no milk and bread in the car the officer must automatically jail the offender pending a court hearing.  No excuses and no bail. One Strike and You're Out.  So, I understand the lack of milk and bread . . . But, broccoli?

Looks like this is the first report of a brand new trend.  Despite this Monday afternoon’s massive accumulated snow storm yield of 1" of ice and no snow, I’m wondering about only one thing: Broccoli?

Ray