The Dill Dealer

Grocery Store and I are currently in a bad relationship. I'd like to break up with Grocery Store, but I *need* things from it, so I can't make a clean break. We keep fighting, but I always go back for more.

Case in point, I needed some dill. I finished my exams before all my friends, so I thought I would be a good friend and cook dinner for them so they didn't have to take time out to cook for themselves. However the healthy dinner I planned required dill.

For those of you unfamiliar with wonderful Dill, it is a simple universal spice, common in summer cuisine. Or so I thought. I stood in the spice isle on my errand, and lo, there was no dill. I looked everywhere. I looked behind spices. I went up and down the aisle. No dill. This is simply not possible. Dill is the critical ingredient in my recipe -- where is the F*ing dill?! I re-searched the spice aisle. Still no dill. I was getting more and more frustrated and by my final pass, I was fuming.

Finally I just stormed out of the grocery store and drove to one in the suburbs. No dill there either. Are you kidding me? Does this part of the world have something against dill? Unless it's some mayonaisse based product or hot sauce, apparently Louisiana doesn't consider it a worthy spice.

By my third grocery store it had started to rain, and still no dill to be found, so I drove home seething. I thought about pulling over on the side of the road, letting the rain beat down on me and shouting "DILL!" with my clenched fist raised to the rain. But then, I'm not crazy.

No, I decided to take the sane, high road, I started calling all my friends to see if they had some dill at home, which made me feel like I was scavenging for drugs. Everyone was like "no man, I don't have any, sorry."

But then I talked to Big N, and she was like "Of course I have dill." I should have known that Big N would have the Persian-dill hookup. She had had the same bad grocery store experience, and consequently, had asked her mother to ship her some from the Persian stores in LA. We agreed that she'd send me the dill with one of our friends. When EZ arrived at my apartment he produced a full on kilo of dill, like he was a drug-mule. I am not exaggerating. I felt like I was in that scene in "Blow" when Pee Wee Herman gives Johnny Depp the giant bag of weed and says he doesn't deal in dime bags. The look on my face probably mirrored that of Johnny Depp: What the hell am I going to do with all that dill?!

The best part of this enormous bag of dill is that it came with a free packet of saffron. Which to quote Big N is, "worth it's weight in gold." I guess this is the Persian version of the free prize in cracker jacks. Buy one spice get another free other spice in your kilo-sized spice bag. Seems perfectly logical to me.

Good god, it's just so much dill. What am I going to do with it? I thought about divinding it up into smaller baggies, and standing at the end of the spice isle in my overcoat full of dill baggies. I could be the new dill dealer. "Hey man, you wanna buy some dill? It's real sweet stuff, it's amazing. You won't find anything like it here, man."

And then a slow deviously smiled crossed my face. It's my dill, and I'm going to hoarde it. And for the time being grocery store, I am free of you.