Fly in the Ointment or Bakery Case

With the frozen rain receded, I needed to venture into the cold to get a newspaper and potentially a roll for a hamburger.  Tasks which would fill anyone's Sunday afternoon with delight, but life being what it is, sometimes you need to handle the mundane tasks as well.  With the car safely ensconced in the garage and hill behind my apartment complex a crazy Q shape currently one lane where there should be two, I decide to take a walk.  The convenience store is but two blocks away and an easy walk, even in the worst of conditions.

Of course, arriving at the convenience store, I see nary a roll for sale in the store and convince myself, it is perfect weather for a six block walk to the grocery store.  Now, aside from the closed gas station where no one shoveled and the icy path leading to the grocery shrouded in the shadows of a rickety wooden fence, the walk was uneventful.  The path gave me pause, because I was concerned about falling on the slick, shattered ice.  Surviving this, I entered the Stop N Shop I'd been to many times before.  Newspaper identified, primarily for the lining of a guinea pig cage, I move to the bakery section. 

Behind the previously shattered door, identifiable by the cracks and tape along the hinges, stands a whole host of baked goods.  Removing a bag from the roll, which I dropped on the floor and to be quite honest gave me pause, because we seldom think where something was before we use it, I take one of those tissue paper and look at the kaiser rolls.  Almost selecting one, I spy onion rolls, which are always hard to find, but always add flavor to any sandwich.  I move in, selecting an onion roll and while contemplating a second, I spy it.  A bug, a fly more correctly, small and black, going about its business walking up the wax paper lining the onion roll basket.

For one fleeting second, I nearly convince myself that it is only a bug and not likely to impact my life or impart any illness to me.  However, this quickly fades as no apocalyptic event has impacted the ability of other stores to provide me sustenance and I leave, vowing never to return...inside my head.  Which is true.  One bug is not a problem, but where there is smoke, there is likely a colony and more correctly, a failure to keep sanitary conditions in the store.

So, despondent, I walk all the way back to the initial convenience store to at least procure the necessary newspaper.  Inside, I find not only the newspaper, but kaiser rolls previously unseen by me in the store.  Had my eyes worked correctly and allowed me to identify and purchase the kaiser rolls, I would still be willing to shop at my local Stop N Shop.  Fortunately, my own failings allowed me to learn something important and perhaps saved me from a worse fate later on.

Were I a spiritual man, I would say it was god's will that kept me safe.  Fortunately, there is neither a god-fearing nor a spiritual bone in my body, so instead I have a story worth telling due to my own incompetence.