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Gently With Love

This morning, January 6, 2025, after a stint of writing and a bowl of granola and a bit of piano playing, I set off for town in our little red Prius to shop at Corners of the Mouth, a small yet splendiferous worker-owned grocery store occupying an old two-story former church in downtown Mendocino.

We live a mile from town. When I used to write for a regional publication with a much larger readership than my blog, I referred to Mendocino as “a village” on a few occasions and several readers took umbrage with my use of the noun village. They complained that Mendocino was not a village, but a town. Nor, they said, was Mendocino a hamlet. My use of the word village, they opined, was proof of both my ignorance and my annoying (to them) tendency to needlessly romanticize life.

*

Now this mile we live from town goes downhill on two-lane Little Lake Road all the way to the village and therefore climbs uphill all the way home. I drive this mile at about thirty-miles-per-hour on the downhill, except in the school zone wherein I go twenty-five. By local standards this is quite slow, though the road passes close by many houses and I feel it is courteous and safer to drive at non-freeway speeds here.

Alas, the fellow who got behind me this morning on my way to town felt my notions of safety and courtesy were bollocks, and he let me know this all the way to the village.

I don’t know who the fellow was. I didn’t actually see him because the windshield of his enormous pickup truck was tinted gray verging on black. This monstrous vehicle, easily five times bigger than our little Prius, was black and had a rumbling engine that got (I’m guessing) seven-miles-per-gallon on a good day. The impatient fellow (I assumed the driver was a fellow, though I suppose he/she/they might have been a woman or a trans person) got right on my bumper and revved his/her/their humongous engine at me all the way down the hill, with the occasional loud beep thrown in to startle me, thus rendering the one-minute trip to the coast highway most stressful for little old me.

Normally when I am accosted automotively by such misguided persons, I pull over and let the bullies pass. But this morning the usual pull-over places were occupied.

So. After those sixty arduous seconds of downhill racing, I reached the stoplight at Highway One (the only stoplight in Mendocino) and the light was red. So I stopped, as is the custom, with the huge black demon breathing down my neck, and when the light changed in my favor I started across the intersection only to have the behemoth close to within inches of my rear bumper with horn bellowing, as if the driver expected me to pull off into a ditch or crash into the brambles rather than hold him up for another second.

Finally, he/she/they turned left before we reached the diminutive commercial district of our hamlet, and I breathed a sigh of relief to be done with the unhappy soul.

However, the unhappy soul wasn’t done with me. He/she/they had only turned off Little Lake Road in order to race down narrow side streets in hope of beating me to the one and only main intersection in our berg. But I got there first, turned right, and the giant truck shot through the intersection and nearly plowed into my rear before he/she/they swerved into the bank parking lot and left me alone to go another hundred feet where I parked in my customary spot across the street from Corners.

*

Unnerved by my encounter with the dangerous dolt, I walked to the post office, mailed a letter, got our mail, and returned to the Prius where I left the mail, grabbed my two baskets, and crossed the street to Corners — the village peaceful and calm in the absence of the legions of visitors who descend upon the village most days of the year now.

In Corners, I found the shelves overflowing and the worker-owners their usual friendly delightful beautiful selves. I was about to bring my brimming baskets to the counter when I noticed the man behind me was only buying two items – an avocado and a little container of quinoa salad – and I suggested he go ahead of me.

He acted as if I had just given him the gift of eternal life and happiness, so profuse was his thanks. Moved by his gratitude, I mentioned there were both ripe sale Avocados and not-so-ripe regular-priced avocados and he said, “I know. Thank you.”

Then as he was being rung up, he turned to me and said proudly, “I grew up surrounded by avocado trees.”

“In Santa Barbara?” I guessed.

“No further south,” he said, his pride seeming to grow. “My great grandparents planted the very first Haas avocado trees in southern California. So I know my avocados.”

“Wow,” I said. “How wonderful. In my opinion there is nothing so good as a perfectly ripe Haas avocado.”

He nodded knowingly. “But I’ll tell you. In Harvest (our hamlet’s BIG grocery store) many of the avocados have deep thumb prints in them from idiots testing them for ripeness and ruining them.”

“I would never do that,” I said, horrified by the thought of such behavior. “I heft them gently, but never press on them.”

The man lowered his voice and confided, “My grandfather used to say, ‘You want to touch an avocado as you would a woman’s breast. Gently and with love.’”

“Got that right,” said the checker, grinning at me.

And I thought, Is this the greatest grocery store in the world, or what?

*

Driving home, no one behind me, I cruised along at a delightful fifteen-miles-per-hour and arrived home in a marvelous mood, eager to make a big bowl of guacamole.

fin

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