Post details: Food is the most important part of your day
Food is the most important part of your day
Tuesday, February 10th 2009
Sarah came in earlier today, at about mid-day. She had lots of shopping bags. She didn't put them on the ground, she put them on the counter where it was easier for me to get to them. I didn't have to bend over to pick them up. These shopping bags were different from the usual shopping bags. They were thicker and had more colours. The food inside was different too. It all looked the same as each other.
“Food is the most important thing in the world, Sharky. You can't live your life eating bad food,” said Sarah. I agreed with her. If you think about it, a huge percentage of your life is spent eating food. If you have bad food then you have a bad life. “I bought organic stuff where I could, but everything's vegetarian and I eat most of it so I know it's good.” We had a lot of fun putting it all away into the cupboards. Sarah wanted to throw my old food away but I'm not ready for that yet. I can still eat it when she's not around. Then she showed me the receipt for it. “I used my mom's card to pay for it but I promised her I'd pay her back by, like, the end of today.” I didn't understand the receipt. I thought it was maybe a typo or an error but I took it into my room and added up all the prices and it still came out as the same total. I gave Sarah the R100 I had for pizza on Friday and the R10 I had stored up for a tip.
“That's all I'm allowed,” I said.
“Sharky, that's not enough. We need more.”
“I don't keep the money any more,” I said. I think things were better back when I did used to handle the money. Stuff was cheaper, too.
“Oh Sharky, what are we going to do?”
“I don't know!” I said. I really didn't. I didn't want Sarah to get in trouble with her mom.
“My mom's going to be so angry!” she said and I felt even worse.
“Can't we take it back to the shop?” I said. The grocery kid has taken things back to the shop before. Sometimes he buys the wrong things.
“No, we can't take it back to the shop!” she said. I've never felt more awful. I looked around at the cupboards full of food that Sarah's mom bought but didn't want. I thought of how strange it all looked in its packaging. I thought of Sarah's mom just tearing the packaging apart and ruining the food because she didn't want it. “Where's your money, who keeps your money?” she said.
“The landlord,” I said, quietly. She calmed down when I said that. She knows that the landlord is cool.
So then she brought the landlord up here and she told him the whole story. He looked at me with his arms folded.
“That's a lot of money for some food,” he said.
“Food is the most important thing in the world,” I said.
“Can't you just take it back to the shop?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Please,” said Sarah, “He eats so badly. I just want to do this thing for him. The landlord sighed. It was a good sign, I knew. It meant that he was giving up. He always gives up when there are enough people looking at him hard. He went upstairs and came back with the money for Sarah.
“Oh hey, I thought you were going to write a cheque. That's a lot of cash!” she said when she got it.
“I went to the bank today,” he said. He's such a liar. I would have heard if he'd left the building.
Afterwards, Sarah was making me a new lunch with all the new foods. She wasn't upset any more. Everything was back to normal, except the foods, but that was the good part.
“Hey Sarah,” I said while she was at the stove. I was working a bit on my statue but my mind was on other things. “Don't tell Nikky that I couldn't pay, okay?”
“Sorry?”
“Just don't tell Nikky about this.” She didn't say anything for a while. She was chopping vegetables.
“Okay,” she said. I was glad she said that.
The food was pretty good.
