Tag Archives: Local News

Today I was walking down the mall to get a salad from the Blue Ridge Country Store (across from the post office, beside Bagby’s sandwich shop, near the Pavilion), and I saw my cousin’s husband walking toward me with the telltale cardboard salad container, and for a moment we stopped to gush about how amazing the BRCS salad bar is. And how the same amount of awesome salad would cost you $15 at Whole Foods while it only costs you $5 at the Country Store. I said “Surely these prices can’t last,” immediately embarrassed that I sounded like an infomercial, and he responded “Maybe enough customers just buy iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing, balancing out those of us who want red bell peppers and spring greens.” We stood there thinking deeply about lettuce and we had a bonding moment, perhaps greater than any moment we have shared at all the Murray Thanksgivings and Christmases. Salad brings people together. It brings families together.

This will not be my last post about the Blue Ridge Country Store salad bar.

My neighbors just won $100,000 in the lottery! So now I have to remove my grandfather’s bumper sticker that says “The lottery is a tax on stupid people” and put up one that says “The lottery could have paid for my retirement if I hadn’t been so snobby about it.” [Love ya, Poppy.] I wrote down a bunch of tips for how to win, and now I’m going to start buying tickets every day at the liquor store. The next winner could be me! I think the chances of next door neighbors winning thousands in the same month are pretty high.

Since Darren has a real job, working full time as web designer, and I have a fake job that involves lots of lounge-work, I have become interested in perfecting our morning routine. He gets up around 9 to get ready for work, while I occupy myself with sleeping. Then he kisses me goodbye around 10 minutes to 10, and turns on my bedside light, asking me what I’m going to do today. “Shh,” I say. “I am sleeping.” Then I hear him dawdling around upstairs, and I want to impress him with my productivity before he leaves the house, so I stumble to the kitchen in my pajamas (do not pass Go, do not brush teeth) and tell him I am ready to work. Then he finds me reading the CNN and Page Six websites in my office in the dark, and again he turns the light on me before kissing goodbye for the second time. Then I may or may not go back to bed. Then later in the morning I email him explaining that my vacation ends tomorrow and I am going to buy a dry erase board where I can write out my daily schedule, and this will change everything. Then I go looking for breakfast ice cream.

Tonight Darren and I were driving to his sister’s house for dinner, when we both spotted an old man walking down the sidewalk. In front of him, at shin-height, he held a metal walker. It seemed to me that trying to walk while carrying a walker was just creating more work for the man, even though a walker is meant to make life easier for those with bad legs and hips. He was struggling not to kick the metal while he navigated the pavement, and honestly, the thing looked heavy. I am 26, and do push-ups, but I probably couldn’t carry a walker for more than a block. So what was this old man’s story? Was he trying to get downtown quickly, where he would ground his walker and begin limping behind it like a cripple, begging for spare change? Was the sidewalk too bumpy for the walker’s wheels, so he was forced to carry it? Was it a walker he found beside someone’s trash can, salvaged with the expectation that he would need it someday? Watching him struggle, I kept thinking of someone with a wheelchair perched on his head like a bucket, jogging along with the upside-down wheels turning in the breeze. Or someone strapping a bicycle to his back and sweating on his walk along a bike path. If I ever break my ankle, I am going to buy crutches, and instead of using them to take the weight off my foot, I am going to make stilts out of them and start training for the circus.

Dinner was really good. We had vegetables from Jennifer’s garden. Big props to Jennifer in case she is reading this. I apologize for the word props. The best part of dinner was when Harper stopped in the middle of her ramikin of homemade chocolate chip ice cream to tell her mother, “I like to lick you sometimes.”