March 26, 2023
By Arthur H. Gunther III
In a world of super haba-daba lattes, designer donuts at $4.50 and your name written on the coffee container that you must pick up at another counter, it was reaffirming when this morning I reached for the salt shaker. It was plain Joe, plain Jane, really the best in the house. No-frills day for me.
Commodity shortages, staff shortages, greed and a sometime philosophy that making less of a product, charging more and having people wait so long for a car or anything now has the consumer bowing in appreciation. But today, at least, I will have none of it.
I realized that when I opened a kitchen cabinet and reached for the salt. Not the white stuff in a fancy container and marked sea salt from the Aegeans. Instead, I grabbed a highly recognized, classic salt shaker, the one just about all of us had on our mothers’ kitchen tables, the one filled with iodized table salt from the blue Morton’s container that displays a young girl under an umbrella. From our youth as well.
In an instant, despite the fact that salt can raise your blood pressure, I was in a sea of calm, not with sea salt, no pun intended.
I venture that it was the overwhelming simplicity of the salt shaker and its reference to simpler times for me anyway that I was calmed.
Enjoyed those breakfast eggs, I must tell you, salt and pepper and nostalgia.
The writer is a retired newspaperman. ahgunther @yahoo.com for contact.
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