Paper towels?
Good luck.
“Something weird,” said Wink, my wife, just back from the supermarket. “No paper towels. Not much toilet tissue, either.”
“I will handle this,” I announced and dashed to another store.
Shelves in the paper goods aisle looked horrifyingly Early Pandemic.
Two packs of Bounty remained — but not with our preferred half-sheet perforation; talk about heartbreak — and a few spare generic rolls. I grabbed the Bounty and one other.
“What’s with the paper towels?” I asked at checkout.
“Dunno,” said the clerk. “Have a nice day.”
But we do know, don’t we? It’s delta.
“Shortages and hoarding pop up as COVID delta surges,” declared a headline on Yahoo! News.
Let’s be fair. The wicked delta variant deserves only part blame. We own the rest.
“Did we not learn from last year at all?” asked a shopper in Nevada quoted by Insider, the online business publication. “I pulled up to Costco and they are out of toilet paper and water. These people never learn.”
Some of this relates to our sense of perfection and a panic reflex peculiar to the financially secure.
Those of us fortunate enough not to be strapped for food and rent are accustomed to comfort and convenience — non interruptus. Wi-Fi goes down, it’s a calamity. Dunkin’ out of pumpkin munchkins — why me? Mets let you down? Trade the whole team.
Often, we are impatient, entitled and inclined toward overkill.
I am no longer allowed by Wink, for instance, to sign up at the big, members-only discount stores.
Once, I came home with a dozen giant cans of plum tomatoes.
“Really?” said my wife. “You starting a pizza place?”
“Terrific price,” I said. “Couldn’t resist.”
“Half-mushroom, half-meatball,” Wink said. “And don’t burn the crust.”
“Just thinking ahead. You never know.”
“Hand over your membership card and step away from the shredder.”
Our parents would have roared.
They went through the Depression and World War II. What’s the emergency plan for bread lines and global conflict?
In a journal we found a couple years ago, my mother talks about payless paydays in the 1930s. “We’ll get by,” she said.
They did but not easily.
Hopeful and ambitious Brooklyn kids, Mom and Dad dreamed of a place on Shore Road many blocks and several income brackets distant.
They had in mind a view of the Narrows — Staten Island, exotic, on the other side — but settled for one bedroom on the third floor of my grandmother’s six-family apartment house.
Out the window passed not ocean liners and ferryboats, only occasional customers heading to the hand laundry and Bachrach’s drugstore. Complaints? Maybe, but not that I knew.
Sure, just another story of working-class struggle, but I wonder how Mom and Dad would have handled the pandemic.
During the war years, they saved every scrap. They’d tease out the “tinfoil” from my father’s Chesterfield packs and make balls for some undefined, anti-Nazi purpose. Mom kept soap ends in a jar on the sink — her idea of dishwashing lotion. They stoked the furnace in the basement for Nana and kept the ashes to spread on the icy sidewalk in winter.
“Shut out the light,” they’d cry if I forgot as, too often, I did. “You got stock in Con Ed?
By their standards, I am profligate. I try to conserve but use too much of everything — water, electricity, plastic wrap, “tinfoil.” I am working on bad habits, these and others, the task of a lifetime.
On the other hand, Wink is a sustainability hero. She uses paper cups twice. You can’t get her to throw out a glass jar or Amazon box. No morsel is too small for the designation “leftover.” There are enough tiny bites in our refrigerator for a Lilliputian smorgasbord.
Wink saves stuff the town won’t recycle and packs it up for our son in Kew Gardens because the city accepts just about everything. Conservation is her top contingency plan.
And she’s right, of course.
The paper towel shortage is not a big deal, just a sign of the times. If I find a store with ample supply, I promise not to buy more than my share.
“Use a dish cloth, spare a tree,” says Wink.
Mom and Dad are elsewhere, but someone still keeps watch.
