The Fear Of Being Milkless

As winter approaches, the shelves are being stocked…

What a queer and delightful sight! Nearly the entire population of our tiny town rushes to the local market like a pack of lemmings to strip the shelves entirely of milk and bread. What brings about this strange activity? A calamity of biblical proportions? An imminent nuclear attack? Permanent Covid lockdown? No. In this small corner of the world, it is the mere mention of that four letter word – Snow.

I am not exaggerating here. When the weatherman predicts even the slightest chance of a dusting of snow, people here run to the markets and stock-up on milk and bread. I’ve often mused as to why milk and bread? Are they thinking of waiting out a blizzard making bread pudding? As crazy as it is, it is also very comical to watch.

But the fun doesn’t stop at the local markets. No indeed. Entire shopping malls shut down in the face of less than a half an inch of the white stuff. Schools are automatically closed for days or even weeks, assuring our under-educated children remain so. To be sure, somewhere in the distance there is a bedraggled old woman shrieking, “Run for your lives – the chariots are coming!”

Yet in the midst of this circus-like activity, every under-skilled driver sooner or later decides they must venture out of their warm garage and give their car a chance in the destruction derby. It’s not that the roads are impassable with such light snow, it’s just that our local drivers here in North Carolina are about 90% from up north where they tend to be a little under-skilled when it comes to driving or down south in Florida where snow is just a Christmas theme. The results are as equally entertaining as the run for the roses in the milk aisle. There is something devilishly funny about seeing an old douche bag with a Brooklyn accent slide into a ditch with her Cadillac four wheel drive utility vehicle and then utter that she should have bought the bigger model.

It is the fear of being milkless that drives this frenzied behavior. Having lived in the Italian Alps where 8 to 10 feet of snow is normal, I can only shake my head in disbelief and wonder what these poor souls would do in a real snow storm.

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Read author Allen E. Rizzi’s latest books available at Amazon.com