Rejoice!
The takeouts are open now
by
Robert LaFrance
It is that time of year when those
of us (not me of course!) who enjoy eating at takeouts or fast-food places can
indulge in grease-filled gourmet treats that are terribly bad for us.
My friend Flug is one such person.
He has been known to sit in his car (a 1986 Gremlin) at a takeout for an hour
as he waits for it to open for the day or, in this case, open for the Spring.
I happened to be driving by Bernie’s
Takeout on Sunday afternoon when I spotted Flug’s Gremlin sitting there in
front of a snowbank that Mother Nature, or Bernie, must have forgotten to clear
out.
He looked at his watch. “Only
seventeen more minutes before I get to order my first takeout poutine of 2018,”
he grinned. “Only one thing better than poutine, and that’s rap music.”
I gave him my opinion of those
items, both of which rank on my scale of one-to-10 as somewhere in the low
minus quantities. I would say poutine, grease disguised as food, would be
around –3, and rap – which I refuse to call music – would be –238, give or
take.
Flug was happy anyway, even if I was
unimpressed. Just then Bernie’s daughter Ballerin came to the takeout window,
nine minutes before official opening time. She knew Flug was a valued customer.
He ordered poutine and more poutine as a side dish.
“What will you have, Mister
Newspaper Columnist?” she said.
“No poutine, I’ll tell you that,” I
said. “But I will have a bacon double cheeseburger just to be polite.”
**********************
Not to get too nostalgic here, but
as I think back to the ‘good old days’ after I had joined the work force and
could actually pay for my own food, I used to drink coffee. This was before we
all learned that coffee, like poutine, was not the best thing to put into our
bodies.
Whatever its health drawbacks, one
thing I remember about coffee is that there was only one breed of it – coffee.
Later on decaffeinated coffee appeared on the screen, but it still was only
coffee.
Last evening I stopped at a
restaurant and asked for a cup of java, as they say. I hadn’t drunk coffee for
years, but I thought I would have a cup. Boy, was I living in the past. “What
kind of coffee do you want?” asked the waitress, who looked about fifteen and
in violation of various child labour laws.
“Errrr…just coffee,” I said, “in a
cup.” She looked at me as if I had just failed a grade one math test.
“Well,
do you want a double upside down Keurig, expresso (she meant espresso), Mocha,
auto drip, or…” From there she went on to list a bewildering array of coffee
brands and styles in cup sizes from demi-tasse to 45-gallon drum. And then she
went on to outline the array of sweeteners and creamers; this took her two
minutes at least.
“Couldn’t I just get a cup of coffee
with a bit of cream, no sugar?” She looked confused, as if I had asked her to
design a Saturn rocket system from scratch.
“I have to go see the manager,” she
asserted. The manager proved to be an old guy of about twenty-four. He also
asserted. He said if I didn’t clear out he would call Security. I wondered what
he would call them and how long it would take for them to arrive. Perhaps
‘Security’ was that pimply kid flipping burgers on the grill.
I did manage to avoid ‘Security’, by
leaving. My first stop after that was a grocery store where I bought a small
jar of instant coffee, the kind that mother used to buy back in the 1960s.
Everything is so complicated now that none of us knows what is going on.
Poutine is alleged to be food and rap is alleged to be music rather than the
sometimes nasty poetry-to-a-beat that it really is.
*********************
Notes: One beautiful day last week
when I was uptown to get some lemonade and other supplies, like food, I
commented to half a dozen people about the nice weather. In every case their
reply was: “Yeah, but it’s going to rain tomorrow morning.” Every time. Are we
ever Canadians! I say ‘we’ because I was thinking the same thing whenever I
mentioned it.
Corporate advertising is always
amusing because they lie so much. One airline’s commercial asserted that its
top priority was its passengers. By the time I had stopped laughing, another
commercial had come on. A car company was saying that any one of us could lease
their luxury vehicle – about $46,000 – for a mere $401 a month for three years,
with a $6000 down payment. Looking further into the situation, I found that I
really could lease it for that amount, but if I wanted tires on and an engine
in the car it would be slightly more.-end-
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