Grey's Journal:
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Two weeks ago, I found a package in the mailbox for me from my father. This was unusual. My father normally sends me a prodigious number of letters filled with mail for me directed to his house in the states or articles he clipped from newspapers he thinks might be of interest to me. But a package is a rare event. I took it to my room and opened it to find golden treasures inside. Peeps! Glorious peeps! For my non-America readers, peeps are the best Easter candy ever produced in America. Peeps are marshmallows shaped to look like baby chickens and covered in yellow sugar. Sweet enough to raise blood sugar to lethal levels, they are simply delicious. The Just Born Corporation pumps out a billion of them a year. 700 million of which are consumed by Americans during Easter. That's 2.7 peeps for every man, woman and child during the holiday. I was so happy to see them that I exclaimed out loud in my apartment to no one, `Oh. My. God. PEEPS!' before greedily tearing into the package and devouring them. One of the strange things about living in a foreign country is forgetting about the little details of your previous life. Only the day before receiving my peep package I described to my Nigerian and Kuwaiti flatmates what American Easters were like as a kid: a giant rabbit who, though mammalian, lays eggs for children to find, a big dinner of lamb, and boring church services that you are supposed to buy new clothes for. But, I had forgotten the most important part: consuming one-hundred yellow peeps over the span of perhaps five days. Most of the time, I've forgotten that I've forgotten these details. I didn't feel like I was missing anything when I was talking to my flatmates about Easter. The only time I am aware of a memory hole is when I'm in the supermarket. I wonder up and down the aisles, looking at the bland selections of food while trying, unsuccessfully, to remember what American foods I'm hoping to find. The only thing I know is missing from the supermarkets here is not a specific product, but an entire flavor: purple. I understand that purple is not really a flavor but, everything in America that is the color purple (Jell-o, Ice pops, Skittles, gum) tastes the same. They taste purple. Bite into something red and it may taste like apple, cherry, strawberry or even watermelon, but purple is always consistent. People tell me (and packages declare) that the proper name for purple is grape. This is a lie. Purple is no more grape than it is plum, eggplant, or any other similarly colored fruit. On my first trip to the supermarket, when I was newly arrived in the country, I wanted to get some purple jelly for my toast. However, all I could find was strawberry or cherry. I stopped a passing employee for assistance. ``Excuse me, but where is the purple jelly?'' ``Huh?'' ``Some people, well most people really, call it grape jelly.'' ``What?'' I mentally cracked open my new American-English dictionary. ``Oh I'm sorry, I meant purple... er... grape jam.'' The attendant gave me a quizzical look, as though I had asked for lettuce flavored jelly. ``We have grapes in the fruit section,'' he replied cautiously. I sighed. At first, I thought it was just my local supermarket, but since then I've searched food markets far and wide, never finding purple jelly or purple anything. After my father sent me the peeps, I heard a rumor that there was a store selling American food in St. John's Wood. Straight to Google I went. After a few moments of trying keywords, Panzer's on Circus Road came on screen. I glanced through the inventory, once again making cries out loud to no one of ``Goldfish!'' and ``Fluff!'' Unable to wait a moment longer, I grabbed my coat, my trusty London A-Z and was out the door. Three underground lines later, I stood outside Panzer's. I paused, savoring the moment and imagining the rich cornucopia of foods from my homeland that I would soon enjoy. It was not to be. I entered and found the American food relegated to a sad little corner of the store. Foods that in a supermarket would be aisles apart (pancake syrup and saltines) sat uncomfortably close to each other looking uneasy. There also wasn't, I noticed sadly, anything purple. Something else was amiss: the packages were subtly wrong. They looked how I would have drawn them from memory if asked: broadly correct but lacking in detail. A package of Ritz crackers, for example, was a red box with yellow, circular crackers on it but that was all. I knew elements of the design were absent even if I couldn't recall what they were. The Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were labeled `Reese's Cups' dropping the two most important words down to the subtitle `Milk chocolate with peanut butter centre'. Center, I noticed with a frown, was spelled `re'. Knowing that it would end badly but proceeding regardless, I bought a box of Ritz crackers, Reese's (Peanut Butter) Cups, and a Hershey's Bar and went into the nearby Regent's Park to try my goodies. I found a nice spot to sit, near a Japanese-style garden. On a curved bridge a newlywed Japanese couple was getting their photograph taken. The man looked very happy but out of place in the tuxedo while the woman seemed impossibly small in the billowy wedding dress. I had been in this same garden two years ago on a trip with my mother, I suddenly remembered, and there had been a newlywed Japanese couple getting their photograph taken on the bridge then as well. I'm willing to bet there is always a Japanese couple getting their photograph taken on that bridge. The spot is just too perfect to pass up. If I married a teeny-tiny Japanese woman, I have a good idea what the wedding photographs would look like. I turned my attention back to my food and opened the box of Ritz. They were jumbled together in a plastic bag, not wrapped like coins in bankrolls in brown wax paper as they should be. The first bite removed my last hope -- they were dry and tasteless. Similar disappointments were found in both the Reese's (Peanut Butter) Cups and the Hershey Bar. When I was on my way over to Panzer's, I imagined a fleet of international cargo ships traveling across the Atlantic -- their decks piled forty feet high with boxes of Goldfish Crackers and canisters of crunchy peanut butter -- but now I knew the truth. Closer examination of the package revealed that some place called Jacob's in Liverpool actually made the crackers and licenced the Ritz trademark from Nabisco. I sat on the bench, a sad American expatriate, eating the ersatz food of my culture and fantasized about getting into the import business. |
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Copyright © 2004 Wellington Grey  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. |
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