My grandmother was, shall we say, a bit quirky.  Last week I told ya’ll about the last time I saw her and her love of horror movies but that was just the tip of the iceberg.  Some of you know that my brother Bob is an author.  He’s written scores of children’s books but one of his earlier works was titled “Aunt Mabel’s Table” (It’s available on Amazon along with 31 others).  Although the book is fictional it is roughly based on one of my grandmother’s interesting quirks.

She was a child of the depression and it was her generation that made the sacrifices, suffered through the poverty, and made the mistakes (like the FDR ponzi schemes) that have brought us to where we are today.  Great sacrifices that saved the world but great mistakes for the “perception of financial security” that will eventually enslave us.  But I digress.  Grandma would never pass up a bargain.  And it had to be a REALLY good bargain.  Just up the street was a grocery store called Thorofare.  It was a chain that eventually was absorbed by another, larger company but, if I close my eyes, I can still see the aisles and smell the smells.

Every Saturday we would walk up the street and go shopping with grandma at Thorofare.  We would walk the aisles looking for deals but at the end of the last aisle there was always the best deal of all, a cart full of very odd canned goods.  They weren’t dented or damaged in any way, they were just all missing labels.  I’m assuming that either somewhere in the back room during the process of unpacking, or while the shelves were being stocked, or during the manufacturing process, the cans lost their paper labels.  This left the store with very few options.  They could throw them away, or they could put them in a cart and sell them for a dime.  Of course, a dime is better than nothing so there they would sit waiting for someone to take a chance.

We would stand there picking up the cans one at a time.  We would smell it, hoping that there was some remaining odor from the factory.  We would shake it, hoping that we could get a clue by the sloshing sounds.  Assuming there was a sloshing sound.  We would size it up.  A tuna can is different than a soup can is different than a vegetable can.  But in the end, it always came down to rolling the dice.  You might think it feels like a can of corn, smells like a can of corn, and you can visualize it as a can of corn, but ALPO isn’t a can of corn.

We’d load paper bags (there were no such thing as plastic bags) with the days treasures and wheel them home in a cart.  And with excitement, and a little fear, we knew that dinner that night would be “interesting”.  Grandma would randomly select several cans and whatever slid out after the top was removed was what we had for dinner.  It made for some odd combinations like mushroom soup and peas, or tomato paste and lima beans and, yes, there was the occasional can of dog food but, to my knowledge, she never actually served it to us!  When it comes to food preparation you might not like surprises but when you’re 7 everything’s an adventure.

Most folks like to think they’re in control of their lives.  That it’s all in a neat comfortable package.  But sometimes, life is like an unlabeled can, “you never know what you’re going to get”.  My apologies to Forrest Gump!