Worm will be two-years-old on Thursday. His birthday party is Saturday afternoon. I want to have cheeseballs as a snack at his party because he loves the scene in Alvin and the Chipmunks where Alvin dives into a bowl of cheeseballs. He has never eaten them, but I feel certain he will be delighted with them.
Wal-Mart does not have cheeseballs. Target does not have cheeseballs. A local grocery chain called Harps does not have cheeseballs. What happened to the cheeseballs? Has there been a cheeseball recall I am ignorant of?
Today I tried Dollar General. This is not the type of store I usually choose for my food purchases. The atmosphere in your typical Dollar General wavers between and eerily bright and cheerlessly dank. There are lots of colorful items and toys and candy, but the overall quality of the offerings just makes me sad. However, I felt the likelihood of finding second rate snack foods there was high.
I only found a bag of those new Giant Cheetos Cheeseballs. The idea of giving kids cheeseballs the size of golf balls and then turning them loose on my furniture didn't appeal to me. Plus the jokes I would be forced to make about the size of Chester Cheetah's balls would be inappropriate for a child's party. I did find some party decorations though, so it wasn't a wasted trip.
It was when I got to the register, that the cheeseball quest took a turn I hadn't foreseen. I mentioned to the cashier that I was having a hard time finding anyone who carried cheeseballs. She said they did have cheeseballs on the bottom shelf of the chip section. I explained those were giant cheeseballs. She had no idea what I meant by giant, so I grabbed a bag for her to feel how big they are (I'm really not that busy, remember?). She took the bag from me and began to palpate the enormous balls (yes, I purposefully left out the word cheese to make that sentence dirty). It was then that I noticed her fingernails were at least three inches long.
I was disgusted, yet fascinated. Of course I asked if they were real. I knew they were, but forcing her to claim them felt vital to me at that moment. I said, "I bet you get asked that a lot." She said she did and then added that for one week she charged 25 cents to everyone who wanted to ask about her nails and then donated the money to the March of Dimes. I asked, "How much did you make?" She said, "$15.50, I must have answered 100 questions that week." I said, "62."
She looked at me like I was Rainman and said, "Really, seems like it should be more?" Then the guy behind me pulled up the calculator on his phone and confirmed that 62 was correct. He chimed in, "Wow, you did that in your head, are you some kind of math freak?"
How is knowing third grade math weirder than having fingernails that look like this?
By the way, someone told me Sam's carries cheeseballs. Stay tuned for a Worm goes to Sam's story tomorrow.
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