Bowel Scraper

 With the lack of ferries, we're starting to experience less variety on our grocery store shelves. There are still groceries there, although there are more and more gaps showing up. Today there was lettuce in the produce cooler. It had dropped two bucks to $6.09 each. I know it's ridiculously high, but at least they have it. It's hard to make a salad if there isn't any lettuce. Jan and I walked up to the post office last week and since we didn't have the stamina or the desire to walk all the way down to Hoonah Trading and then back home, we opted to shop at Brand X. The selection of cereal was a little thin. I didn't really want a bunch of sugar coated kids stuff in my bowl, and I'd already finished a box of Cherrios, so I decided to opt for the Shredded Wheat. I rather like the flavor, and it has the added advantage of lots of fiber. I'm not real sure what fiber is good for, but judging by the way that cereal sometimes catches in my throat on the way down, thus choking me, I'm going to assume that it does an equally good job of scraping it's way through my whole digestive system, thus making my large and small intestines clean as a whistle. I imagine that the way I've neglected and abused my body all these years, I would have to have three bowls of Shredded Wheat a day for six months or more to have any real impact. I would suspect that Triscuits, the shredded wheat of the cracker kingdom would have a similar effect. I guess I could have Shredded Wheat for breakfast, then wolf down some Triscuits for lunch and again after supper. Before you know it my bowels would be a thing of beauty. Years ago when we lived out at the farm, we didn't have any control over what we ate. We all ate together like some hippy commune, and the folks in charge of the menus came up with some doozies. I was reminded today of one of my first meals there- a hearty helping of bear liver mush. It looked as bad as it sounded, and tasted even worse. I got about half a teaspoon down my gullet before I realized that it wasn't fit for human consumption. I wasn't sure what I would eat if  I continued to live there; blueberry leaves and grass were starting to look like an option. At one point  we were eating wheat balls for breakfast. I didn't even know that you could buy wheat balls, but you could and they came in fifty pound sacks, like animal feed. Actually, they didn't have a bad flavor, compared to say, bear liver mush, but they were really tough to chew and they didn't digest well. They departed your body pretty much the way they entered, unless you had jaws like a lion and could break them down. I remember Jan feeding them to one of our kids who was still in diapers, and when she went to change her, the wheat balls fell out and bounced all over the floor like rubber cement. Eventually someone figured out that we could grind them like flour and it made a kind of pasty cream of wheat like cereal. I've mentioned before that there was one gal at the farm who had some kind of lower tract problems. She used to mix up a little bit of volcanic ash into a glass of water and drink it in an effort to get things moving I guess. Perhaps if she'd had some Shredded Wheat for breakfast her bowels would have been scraped as clean as a stainless steel pipe. In any event, I'm glad that there is still a little something to buy at the stores. The cereal I bought the other day was a whopping $8.00, but I guess beggars can't be choosers, and besides, it's probably a small price to pay for a sparkling clean colon.