Load Up the Cheez-Its

Hi. In lieu of a real post tonight, I shall say instead that it is lots of fun to sift through sample size toiletries at the drugstore or Target. I like buying them. They're only one dollar and they last pretty long and you can try how you like something before buying big size AND they actually last long enough, which is better than buying big and having it go cooties on you. Plus, you can't get tired of it because it's just the right size not to get tired of before it's gone. Yeah, I like it.

I also like Dial soap. It's my all time new favorite. It started a whole year ago, when I took my preteen nephew and his equally preteen friend to the grocery store. See, we all stay in a house in Montreat for one week every summer, in June. The highlight of the vacation for nephew and friend is going to grocery first thing and buying one or more of every piece of junk food in sight, which is PA-LENTY, let me tell you. This event is forethought thoroughly, weeks in advance, junk food multiplied by two, please, no REAL food allowed. The boys know how to get the job done. And they get it done FAST. I'm still in produce examining every peach, and they are back in a snap with overflowing cart, ready to get the show on the road and go stash their stuff and map out a plan what they should eat first, second and last. It's a science, they have it down. Of course, before they can do that, since rolling a cart through town probably wouldn't garner the exact types of looks they want from girls, oh, they'd get looks, I have to finish my list, which is long and frightening. So they roll eyes and groan, and I have to send them off on missions to facilitate getting out of the store before week's end. On one such occasion, I sent them off for bar soap. I'm all crazy by now, so I don't instruct as to what particular brand of soap, Just SOAP, please. Well, the friend picked up Dial, the blue and white swirled bars. My turn to roll eyes because Dial is not what I use. But I use it that week. I am refreshed by it that week. I love it that week. I go home and buy some more. It's cheap, it makes me clean AND it makes my bathroom smell like the bathroom in Michigan, which leads me to believe my grandparents used Dial. Aren't you glad you use Dial? Yes, I am. Of course, lately I can't find blue and white swirl Dial so that means I have to contact Palmolive or whoever manufactures Dial, which I really don't know, but Google should fix that in a jiffy. So, I will always remember nephew's cute friend, who introduced me to the best soap, one of the little pleasures in life.

Oh, those boys are more a delight than just piling up a grocery cart and assuring Mayfield Birthday Cake Ice Cream and Sunshine CHEEZ ITS stay afloat into the next century and beyond. Next, when old Fuddy-Duddy KEM FINALLY has her few flawless peaches and organic cream, they beg to do self-check-out. Oh, the fun begins. And we are the last ones ever to do self-serve as the self-check lanes are taken away right away right after our turn. Whoever thought of those anyhow? And I love how my sister, who actually took them to the grocery this year and deposited the boys in Montreat and then had to go home, love how she left a stack of towels for them on a coffee table in their little upstairs TV lounge, the towels they walked by hundreds of times each day because this balcony was on the way to everything else and the boys are into everything else and besides. When it came time for me to locate the destinations they'd flung their wet bath towels (aunts have to stay on top of these things), I searched their room and bathroom and came up empty. Well, there was one little sad hand towel hanging on a rack in the bathroom. I thought it looked heavy and sorta beat. When I felt it, it was obviously holding every last drop of water from two post-bathed boys. You gotta love it.

There were other delights, but my brain is not pinpointing right now. It's trying to track but not quite making it, you ever been there? I KNOW there is a specific thing I want to recall, I sorta see it in my mind, vaguely. I kind of have it in grasp, but not just quite. And that's as far as we get. Won't be the first, won't be the last time with what I call "the elusive float." It used to be so concrete, so locked in, what I want to remember. I'm learning to give up quickly on these futile search and rescue memory safaris. Because they are just that, futile. The only true hope, of course, is letting go and MAYBE the brain will voluntarily pop it up. As a little present. Probably at a most inopportune moment, but I'll take it.

Nephew FUN,
KEM