After the Salad

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I dream of salad bars; spinach and red peppers and pickled beets and croutons, chunks of feta cheese and marinated mushrooms and a variety of creamy oily dressings. I think salad bars may be gone for good. It seems like a bearable loss, for sure, considering what others are losing and considering the losses all of us are sustaining: a sense of the inevitable, the natural, the normal and the belief in a future that bears resemblance to a past.

Still though, I think of the salad bar and crave its easy luxury. Veggies plucked from the ethers, chopped by fairies. The dressings poured magically into labeled cruets. The waxy, cardboard to-go boxes, stacked and waiting for the likes of me. All of the salad bar’s offerings somehow filled and refilled, and the surfaces wiped clean so that I never once had to think about the kind of labor that goes into a system maintained by many for the ease of some.

These days I make salads at home, clumsily and with very little grace. I have to concentrate hard at the market to remember to buy red peppers and feta cheese. I don’t much like chopping vegetables, so my salads look sloppy and rushed and sometimes I eat open-faced peanut butter sandwiches instead. I think I am starting to understand the immutable correlation between engagement and reward. I understand so much more now.

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Your thoughts?