Let’s All Stop Lying About How We Eat Croutons
Here is a thing I know to be true of you: when you buy croutons, you do not buy croutons to put in salad.
This is not an opinion. This is not hypothetical, an extrapolation drawn from my own experience. This is not a generalization. It is a fact. You — you, the reader, you! — are not buying croutons to put on your salad.
You are buying croutons for themselves. For their own sake, for their own buttery, oily, salty, garlicky glorious sake. That you might plunge your hand into the depths of the bag. That you might grasp at a fistful and shove them into your mouth, that you might chew at speed, aided by the strings of saliva that waited there, summoned by the mere thought of croutons. That you might chew until your jaw hurt, behind lips pressed shut in a secretive smile. That you might slide your tongue over the creases of your mouth, to find the crumbs, not to clean your lips but to seek out one final taste, that heavenly morsel. That you might brush the residue from your fingers onto the seat of your jeans. That you might smell like them all day.
There is no shame in this. For: we are all with you.
Yes! We are buying croutons for the satisfying experience forcing as many in our mouths as we can without choking. Of horking them down before someone sees. Of sliding the zip-lock shut again with a shifty glance at any passers by, speaking the chaste promise that the majority of the bag will accompany a green salad, with the almost-sensual knowledge that no you will not.
“A green salad.” Pah!
When I was a child, I spoke like a child. I saw things as a child does, and thought like a child; here is what I thought.
I thought that when my mother said that croutons were for dinner, when she hid them away in secret cabinet, when she refused to dispatch them to the tabletop until dinner was served and the salad was there.
“Croutons are for dinner,” she would say. “They are not a snack. We have snacks. There are other snacks.”
But now I have become an adult. I have finished with all childish ways, and I know that there are no Other Snacks. Don’t you understand? There is nothing! Not when there are croutons about.
As long as there are croutons in your cabinet, they are the Only. They are All. When I was young I thought my mother chased her children from the crouton bag because she saved croutons for the salad. Now I am wise to the world and its holy contradictions and I know she chased us from the croutons so she could have them all to herself.
She is not selfish. She is no sinner. She is human, mortal, beautiful. She is as I am, as we all are.
Is it a confession to state that which requires no penance?
I’ll confess anyway. Five years ago, I bought a bag of Chatham Village Sea Salt and Pepper Croutons at the Star Market across the road from the multiplex and, I, I slipped them into my purse under my sweater, and I brought them into the multiplex. A companion and I watched the movie and shared the croutons. And we laughed and we cried at the comedies and tragedies of the cinema, and when the credits rolled, and the lights came up, we searched the bag for just one more bite, and there was none!
We two between us had finished the bag of croutons in mere hours. And reader: I have never felt closer to god. I have never felt Paradise so present on earth. As if I had wings… no, I do not need wings! I need for nothing. I want for nothing. Not when my spirit was so light, so free, so untethered from this mortal earth of stone and clay and limitation.
Is there any greater happiness than that?
Is there?
