Wednesday, November 16, 1977

Psalm 20
Day 36.8

Got up medium. Dressed. Ate breakfast, sorted dirty clothes. Then went shopping. Came back. Cooked. This morning we went to Daitch Shopwell and Woolworth's. Pops went downtown to get fuel for the stove and for the heater. Aunt Sinah came and brought us library books. Then we ate. Put on pj's. Fussed. Went to bag. The Tin-Can-Man (Pops) brought us tins for our bag. Thank you, Mr. O, thank you.

We ate:

• Breakfast: 1 bowl oatmeal+honey
• Lunch: pnutbutter, brazil nuts, pnuts
• Dinner: lettuce (iceberg)+romaine lettuce+pnutbutter+garlic+chili pepper+honey+water dressing, fave bean+cabbage+wheatina+rice+string beans soup, 1 apple, 1/2 pear, pnuts,1/4 pbutter omelette

Hmm. My first thought was that a pbutter omelette must be pretty gross, but then I remember that South Beach Diet makes some chocolate muffin-type things that are flourless (carb-less). And they use primarily eggs. With ground nuts. But we did eat some weird shit. Weirder than what we ate in Jamaica. But I guess we were suddenly confronted with not being able to find the things we usually ate. It was a loooooong time before I saw green bananas in the neighborhood grocery. Now, you see them everywhere in New York, thanks to the West Indians, Hispanics, and now Africans. You may notice we shopped every day. Pretty much, this was because we didn't have a refrigerator, and so whatever we were going to eat that day we had to shop for. To my parents, this actually wasn't all that strange, since when they lived in Europe it was common to shop every day, as well.

I used to say that if I ever wrote my father's autobiography, I was going to call it "Egg crates and Tin Cans." That phrase would be the essence of this phase of our lives; living an every day life in the strangest possible way. Making weird food combinations. Using every day objects in un-every day ways.

Tin cans for example. The big, industrial ones that school tomato sauce or cling peaches comes in (or used to come in since everything is plastic now... I rarely even see cans that big anywhere, even in Costco). But Poppy found them someplace. Brought them home and washed them out. And we used them as legs for the bagasse board. Since the cans were big, they lifted the boards up off the floor to a fairly comfortable level. We used 5 per board; one at each corner and one in the middle.