I finally got some groceries today. When you’re on a visit, buying groceries is the first thing to go. Suprisingly, I don’t usually mind. However, this household currently consists of three guys and precisely zero women. I trust the culinary implications are obvious. Tasty as they are, a man can only eat so many reheated pizzas.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead, laugh. Bunch of female chauvinists.

So as I was saying, I took my Keep Yourself Alive Skills Deprived self to the grocery store. A health food store, unfortunately. Being totally unfamiliar with the area, I was hoping to run into a normal store first and save money, but the darn health food store came out of nowhere. I was cornered.

It will take me awhile to get used to paying disaster-area prices for plants I recently yanked out of the dirt. Apples were particularly expensive, some more than a dollar per apple. While you’re at it, why don’t you sell me organic life insurance? So much for the fruit plan.

I did get some food, but I still had a hankering for apples. Hankering is a fun word, and I’m glad I got a chance to use it. If I hadn’t worked it in like that, I would have had to just throw it between paragraphs or something, and that could have been confusing. It’s not often you get the craving to use fun words, but when it comes, it’s vicious.

Hankering. Man, I cannot get enough.

Anyhow, when I got “home”, I realized I had better take that walk I promised all my fitness fans out there. It was…well…without getting cheesy, let me say that if a neighborhood has enough land between houses, enough trees, and a golden evening sun, it’s not hard to discover God is there.

One house even had a garden. There were sunflowers, tall plants that were probably herbs…and apple trees. Apple trees, right there by the side of the road, with not a price tag in sight.

That farm must have done something to me, because I can’t picture my pre-farm self even thinking about going up to a stranger’s door and asking for apples. Maybe when I was gallivanting around Europe, but that doesn’t count. People will do anything in Europe. Look at Michaelangelo. If he was here, he’d have gotten a good steady job. Slacker.

Anyhow, so I did it. I knocked on the door. And a nice, late-thirties-early-forties woman answered. I think she was a bit surprised, and in fact those of you that chat with God might mention her because at first she went off on a tangent about how she’d recently had four deaths in the family. At the time, I was focused on apples, and I didn’t even realize she’d said that until long after I was gone. I guess if I snag her some prayers that counts for something.

As soon as she understood that when I asked for “a few” apples I meant “two or three” not “several bushels”, she was happy to share them. (The rest were for her and Gretchen, a woman at her church. Hi, Gretchen! Bet you thought I’d leave you out.) So there I was, strolling home with five free Golden Delicious and one more person to recognize in the eschaton. All in a Michigan suburb. It was a nice little adventure, more exciting in its way even than the two fender benders I witnessed today. Man, I hate that crunch…but never mind, I have chosen to chronicle the better part. Adieu.

Hankering. I can’t stop. Oh, wait, wait, here’s a better one.

Discombobulated. Wow. Say it with me, won’t you?

Okay, okay, sorry. Time to stop. You’re dismissed. Have a lovely day.

Bamboozle.