Bread, Milk and Hurricanes

A nasty wind is blowing and it's coming from the increasing conversation about impending hurricanes. Here in the New York megalopolis (and there's a nice breeze of a word to start things off) we've already had what I thought I'd never see unless I married a farmer's daughter or I hopped a plane, landed in Chicago, and then drove for like two hours, stopped the car and waited until I saw a cloud that looked like what we New Yorkers have them put ice cream in at Baskin-Robbins-a tornado. One of these bad boys came through freakin' Brooklyn the other day, and when that happened, I thought about what every New Yorker thinks about at a time like that-bread and milk.

Don't ask me why, but this is what people tear out of their houses for when serious weather bites the Big Apple. And let me tell you, unless you really like black coffee and eating your peanut butter and jelly off your hand, make sure you get up early on a storm day in New York, and hit the dairy aisle. In most supermarkets, the management wisely puts these two staples close to each other, probably so they can keep the ensuing damage localized. They put up signs limiting purchases of milk and bread to allow enough for everybody, but I know Pepperidge Farm and Arnold and this Strohmeyer guy only speak to each other during meteorological catastrophes, so that they can coordinate how little of their product they're going to give the masses, just to heighten the frenzy and make sure everybody stocks up after they get over the shock of eating dry cereal. Meanwhile, the truck drivers at their various warehouses not making deliveries are busy having toast parties. Over at the dairies, the cows may be squirting away, but the end product is probably going into a giant milk bath that is making employees' skin very smooth while Staten Islanders who yesterday wouldn't drink it if you paid them, are hitting each other with their cell phones over quarts of fat-free, macrobiotic soy milk.

Now, I have been through a couple of snowstorms in my several decades in New York. I remember one a few years ago that blocked the windows of my ground-floor condo so completely, I thought I was in an igloo. But, unlike most people, bread and milk was not high on my emergency provision list, because a) I already had some, as I'm sure is the case with most of the panicked class and b) I didn't expect the storm to last for the next six weeks. I figured I might be able to survive with what I had, and if I did run out, that my entire nutritional balance would not be disrupted as a consequence. The strangest part of this is that "stocking up", the phrase all the newscasters use to describe why grown adults are tug-of-warring with loaves of country wheat, is self-defeating. Both items are perishable, and just like a new car, the clock starts ticking as soon as you leave the Dairyland display. So the day after the Storm of the Century, the sun is beating like Miami, and you're being nominated as Wonder Bread's Customer of the Month.

So when the hurricanes come, I'm taking the rational approach. Let the faint of heart run out for their bread and milk. I will check the boarded-up windows, and the flashlights and the batteries, hunker down and stoically endure the wrath of nature. All the while realizing it is the wise citizen who makes sure potato chips are on sale before buying 26 bags.