Hunting.

Today driving down a busy secondary highway in my mother’s old two-ton-Swedish-wonder I realized my disdain for cars and driving, exhaust and air-conditioned cabins and the lack of sidewalks Connecticut seems to provide. This morning I was forced (by all logical means) to get in the car to get bagels and lox and the New York Times. I could not walk to get my food. There are no sidewalks on the way to Shaw’s; never mind the fact I had to go to Shaw’s since there is no local bakery in which to purchase said bagels. The last ten months of my life have been spent, in addition to studying, looking for ways to transport heavy foods across city streets and now after so much hard work I was back in the car, cool and musically enhanced, carrying a few breakfast items for about three miles round trip. It felt wrong.
In my first apartment in Florence I would leave all excess baggage in the library lockers, put my books on the rear of my bike with a bungee cord and proceed to fill the backpack to the brim. I often weighed around seven or eight kilos. Then I would bike home, uphill, about three kilometers. Funny how my roommates never offered to drive me to the bigger and less expensive grocery store on the outskirts of town. I like to maintain the idea that they enjoyed seeing me struggle and sweat and look like an idiot. But in that first apartment I am not sure, looking back, what I really did for food. I think I must have eaten out a lot during that first semester, we were lazy and had fresh checks from financial aid.
Only during the second semester did the trips become interesting. I moved house and in doing so found myself closer to markets and to better grocery stores, but remember closer does not mean carrying heavy bags a few kilometers became too much easier. And I was poorer and eating at home all of the time. They became interesting above all however due to my pledge to get back to eating in a moral and sustainable way. In Florence shopping at the market is significantly cheaper than going to the store, therefore twice a week I would go to Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, burlap bags in hand, and try to find the mother of all cheese and the ripest tomato for my euro. In the end I always went to the same vegetable stand and they forced their blue plastic bags on me as if deep down I really needed them and they saw this need in my eyes, something about me said “give me plastic bags I will have nothing to do with when I get home because they are too small and inevitably have little holes at the bottom”, as if these blue plastic bags were better than my hippy-like cloth bags which I continued to carry in hopes that one day they would surrender. As for the cheese: as those who know me are well aware, I am a purist when it comes to cheese, I could work for the cheese officials, somewhere in a musky dark cave, trying to determine if there really is enough saffron in a particular pecorino. I always pay top-dollar for my cheese. I think more than once or twice I found my cupboard bare, leaving me with a romantic dinner of cheese and oh yes, cheese.
When it wasn’t cheese I could be found carting around large quantities of white beans. In the same cloth bags, heavily tilting my handlebars, the cans would clank and clatter. I would add salt, oil and tomatoes for a more inspired taste. Purchases at the grocery store, the good grocery store that is, which was about a ten minute bicycle ride from my house, were sporatic and became rather infrequent during times of stress. Mostly I found myself going only when we ran out of toilet paper or coffee, two items always purchased in bulk. Sometimes I bought water out at the good grocery store, always in one and a half liter bottles, always sparkling. One day I thought I had really tied the six of those bottles tightly onto the back shelf of the bike. I tied them down, put the other groceries in the front basket and sped off. All the way to the first traffic circle things were going so well, I was picking up speed and balancing in ways I’d never imagined. Then as I sped across the next circle, just as the light was changing to red the bottles fell. And five of the six were fine. The sixth did a little exploding all over a pair of women. They were not amused. The cars began to move towards me as I picked up the bottles and ran my bike over to the sidewalk. I tried again on a smaller road because everything was too heavy to hold up at once, but it was better than picking up the bottles and bags every two minutes. I made it home with everything and it felt so good to throw those heavy bags down on the kitchen table, I was exhausted, and I had made it through the hunt.
This morning there was no hunt. There had been no postmodern struggle. I drove a car to get things that a week ago I would have walked five kilometers for. I decided to listen to static on the radio and boycott the use of air-conditioning and in the end I did feel just a little more rugged, but equally as lazy.