The Larry David of Sussex County

It's sometimes a juggling act to think up paintings and columns at the same time. I had a running list of ideas for awhile, and usually something will come up or happen to churn the windmills of my mind. I get my best ideas when I first wake up in the morning, after a night of my vivid dreams following a melatonin chew.

If you've ever seen the HBO sitcom called "Curb Your Enthusiasm," you have experienced my favorite character, Larry David. Always irritable and attracting trouble like a magnet, he views humanity with a jaded eye. He says he's not like that in real life, but I have a feeling he is.

Shy as a teenager and overwhelmed by my schoolteacher mother, I observed, but didn't fight back. It's really a trial to have your mother in the same school building, as I did for all 12 grades. She would sit at the big teachers’ table as students filed into the cafeteria, watching me like a hawk to see where I sat or what I ate and if I looked "popular."

I was always on a diet of some kind, and would gaze solemnly at a jello or fruit cup while I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck as she chewed a huge sticky bun, her red-lipsticked mouth churning like a washing machine as her hair bow bobbed with every bite.

Grace Millman, the cafeteria manager, was a wonderful cook! Braised beef was one of her best dishes, and oh, how I dreamed of it. I sniffed its mouth-watering caramelized aroma as I slid my tray down the metal rungs of the line to the cashier, who would always ask me why I only had a jello. One day I actually got the beef platter, looking guiltily over my shoulder to see if my mother’s eyes were on me.

In college I was free at last! Some 3,000 miles away, I gained the so-called freshman 15. Metal-handled dispensers spurted delicious bubbly chocolate milk like Vegas slot machines releasing winning coins. I confessed my sin. Busted! To my mother, drinking milk was as bad as drinking alcohol!

When I returned home for summer "vacation," she took me to a doctor in Dagsboro who dispensed diet pills with an ice cream scooper and said that by Labor Day, I would be beautiful. It was that autumn when I found my voice and became an artist. Now that I am a writer as well, it is acceptable to have an opinion in words.

Life is full of crosscurrents, but it is best if one can look at them with humor and write about them later. Interactions for me usually happen around the old thorn in my paw – food. The grocery store, a palace for consumables, is a hotbed for incidents. There was one woman there in customer service who really had it in for me. She sported a fractious look, and I should have known better than to tangle with her.

One time, and this was well before the pandemic, I bought a bag of onions, not remembering how many I had at home. It turned out that I had a few too many. It was summer and I didn't want to waste them, my bid toward good citizenship, so I returned them in their netted bag. They had only cost $1.49 back then. The woman at the customer service counter seized them and said I was not helping the environment and was guilty of harming the world food chain. "Then give them back to me!" I demanded. She refused, saying they weren't mine anymore. They remained in the trash can, which didn't look too dirty to me. It was full of her papers looking rejected and the bag of onions looked wasted. I've noticed on subsequent visits that she's now stocking shelves, a job for which she's probably better suited.

During the height of the pandemic, things got very tense in the paper towel aisle. Primeval survival instincts came out in customers and they maneuvered shopping carts like bumper cars at Funland! People from New York City rode the carts roughshod while bragging on cellphones that they had scored a 12-roll pack of Bounty in Milton, Delaware, winning "the lion's share at Food Lion."

Then there was the person ahead of me at Rita's who wanted to taste 10 samples and finally bought four quarts to be scooped out on a steamy day. I remember Larry David having this same problem at a yogurt stand on one of his shows. At least it isn't in the glare of the Milton Consolidated School cafeteria in 1966, where I faced a fruit cocktail or cup of cottage cheese on a leaf of lettuce instead of a sticky bun.