A TRADER JOE’S SUPERMARKET IN MANHATTAN
I saw Walt Whitman at Trader Joe’s the other day. “Good
call,” he said smiling as I placed two five-ounce cups
of Greek nonfat blueberry yogurt in my shopping cart.
“Delicious and healthy while only 130 calories.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “My stomach feels so good every
time I eat some and it doesn’t exit my body too hard
like an egg, potato, and cheese burrito nor loose as
chocolate candy bars or a bag of roasted peanuts.”
The Ancient Mariner from Samuel Coleridge’s poem
appeared. “Every year 8 million tons of plastic are dumped
into our oceans,” he said. “Plastics, plastics, every where
while albatross chicks with bellies bloated with
plastic bits are dying of starvation.”
Mary Oliver pushed her shopping cart over.
“Did you know,” she said, “during the course of
their lives the albatross, while traveling thousands
of miles on their migratory journeys, spend up
to five years in the skies without touching land?”
“What’s does Samuel Coleridge’s poem have to do with us?”
Whitman asked. “This store is too far from the ocean
and the plastic cup will most likely end in a landfill
after it’s thrown away.”
Dorothy Parker behind Mary Oliver said, “Whether thrown away
and ending in a landfill or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,
it will take centuries for a plastic bottle to decompose
after a few minutes gulp of a soda pop.”
“Thank you for this information, Ms Parker,” Whitman said.
“Obviously, we the consumers of America need to recycle
more and throw away less.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay was shopping with Dorothy Parker
“What good would that do, Walt?” she asked? “Globally we
recycle less than 10% of all the plastic we produce.”
“When I was a kid,” I said, “I’d walk to a grocery store with
an empty quart of milk glass bottle and pay only 10¢ instead of
15¢ if I hadn’t brought the bottle. I don’t understand why they
stopped making glass bottles you can use for deposit today.”
Pablo Neruda hearing us from a refrigerated counter,
dropped a package of Chilean sea bass in his shopping bag
and said, “Es muy facil, companero. By reducing labor costs
which comes with the washing and reusing of glass bottles,
food and soda drink corporations make greater profits
increasing size of landfills and ocean plastic garbage
patches than manufacturing glass bottles which can
be used over and over again.”
Whitman shook his head. “I noticed your sea bass was wrapped
in plastic over a styrofoam rectangle plate, Pablo,”
Emily Dickinson wearing a gray house robe over a striped calico
dress and walking in slippers passed by. “That’s because
they don’t wrap meat in paper anymore, Walt.”
Pablo Neruda was about to comment when
Thoreau rolled his cart by, “You mean to tell me
that for nearly 300,000 years we have lived without
plastics and all of a sudden, we can’t live without them.”
Allen Ginsberg walked in Trader Joe’s. “Hey, Walt baby,”
he said grinning!
“Hello, Allen,” Whitman smiled back.
“Do you still hear America singing?” Ginsberg asked.
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