{"id":34634,"date":"2025-12-07T13:41:52","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T19:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=34634"},"modified":"2025-12-07T14:24:41","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T20:24:41","slug":"two-memories-from-one-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/07\/two-memories-from-one-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Memories From One Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

The post and the comments at Neo’s place entitled When the only lettuce was iceberg<\/a> led me to some reflections.<\/p>\n

In my home, when I was growing up, we used to have salad with dinner most nights, and that salad was iceberg lettuce and a few tomatoes and cucumbers. With Wishbone dressing. There was no thought of any other kind of salad until years later.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We didn’t have salad every night because we were poor, and probably because my mother was not much of a cook and my father’s, erm, not ready to be married<\/em> ways meant he was not home that often for dinner. Was he? I don’t remember having dinner as a family when I was young. Sometimes, when he brought some game or, erm, poached<\/em> dishes to the table. But not every night. But, yeah, if we had a salad, even into my college years when I was living in my father and his I’m a little more ready to be married this time<\/em> wife, salad was torn iceberg lettuce with some tomatoes or onions, maybe cucumber.<\/p>\n

Memory one-and-a-half: In those days, I was working as a produce clerk in the early 1990s, and the grocery store in transition where I worked had only a couple types of lettuce. Mostly iceberg, but a narrow assortment of red leaf, green leaf, endive, and maybe some Boston\/bibb lettuce. We had almost as many selections of cooking greens, but it was a store in transition, and not on the way up. The produce section of the lesser grocery stores offer greater selections now, and I pity the poor checkout clerks who have to become familiar with that many more mops of foilage.<\/p>\n

Memory one-and-three-quarters: One of the commenter mentions:<\/p>\n

And as a post scriptum, I had a friend who wrote a hilarious essay for a newsletter about what a delicious treat he would make with a head of iceberg lettuce:<\/p>\n

He would cut it in half, and holding one half in his hand, over a kitchen sink, he would cover the open side of the head of lettuce with catsup and devour it by the bite, adding new catsup when he had taken a bite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Back in those days, a head of lettuce was relatively cheap–like thirty-nine or forty-nine cents ($2000 in 2027 dollars), and I would often just take one for a snack. I’d salt it if I had salt available, or just munch on it as-is. It caused quite a sensation when the wife of the famously literate Swedish mechanic<\/a> asked me what I was eating as I traversed her back yard to the famous Iron Maiden fan Dave<\/a>‘s house.<\/p>\n

“It’s a head of lettuce,” I said. And she recounted the story to my family and Dave’s family several times, incredulous. But in those late teen years, anything that filled the belly was a boon.<\/p>\n

Memory two: Another commentor replies:<\/p>\n

Catsup? I rarely see that spelling. Is it a regional thing?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah, gentle reader. I myself held onto that spelling long into the 21st century.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Commentors on my Facebook post indicated I was wrong. But, in my defense, the Dillon’s grocery store had this on its signage even then. Of course, Dillon’s is gone, replaced by a King Cash Saver (briefly) that has turned into a Red Racks and auto parts store (I have been here long enough that I can talk about what things used to be, and sometimes natives don’t even remember).<\/p>\n

I’m not sure how I spell it now. I don’t have course to write it much, and I’m never the one to add it to the shopping list. But I’m probably still on team Catsup.<\/p>\n

So how many memories did Neo’s post trigger? Two, or four, or more?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The post and the comments at Neo’s place entitled When the only lettuce was iceberg led me to some reflections. In my home, when I was growing up, we used to have salad with dinner most nights, and that salad was iceberg lettuce and a few tomatoes and cucumbers. With Wishbone dressing. There was no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34634"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34639,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34634\/revisions\/34639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}