Northgate

We have a house guest, visiting from Las Vegas.  Apparently, it’s very hot there this time of year, and she very much enjoyed sitting outside in the back yard in the hills of North San Diego County where the Marine Corps helicopters fly over every weekday evening between 5PM and 7PM, and tonight I thought I heard jets coming, but it was just two Ospreys ($71 million each in 2005) coming home for the evening.

We went to dinner at our new favorite Italian food restaurant, (no red and white checked tablecloths, no straw chianti bottles on the shelves, no bouncy violin and accordion music, just a big menu of great Italian entrees), and after dinner houseguest wanted to buy some dulce la leche to take back to her kids in Vegas, because she couldn’t find it there, so we stopped by Northgate market.

I had been in a Northgate market only once before.  I told you about that, remember?  The time I helped my friend out with a cash infusion ($60) then drove him to the Northgate market on the corner to buy groceries, which he usually rode his bike to except he had crashed his bike, and while I waited in the checkout line with a cart full of 89-cent frozen burritos, he went over to the alcohol counter and bought a liter of Popov, and I saw him point me out as his ride. I was easy to spot; taller than most of the customers and staff.

This time, when we walked into Northgate, the first thing I noticed was everyone was wearing a COVID mask.  We hadn’t even carried our masks in from the parking lot. Every other place we had been in in the 5 days since The Reopening had featured about as high a percentage of mask wearers as you’d see on a pre-COVID winter day walking in downtown LA. We hadn’t even recognized the wait staff at our new favorite Italian food restaurant without their masks!

We braved it, instead of going back to the car to mask up.  I know we weren’t getting dirty looks, but we were the only gringos in the store and I imagined people muttering behind their masks “titulado rico folla”, and plus we had to ask where they kept the dulce la leche.  I thought it would be in Bakery, but the bakery was closed, or at least unstaffed. The butcher suggested we look at the impulse bins by the register (fortunately, one of us could understand his Spanish), and there they were!  Houseguest bought 3 of every shape and size, while I picked up wrapped candy I recognized from my childhood and read the labels and said, “Oh, I remember that” and put them back.

Back at home we sat on the new cushions on the patio chairs and marveled at the good life.

The next day, the girls went to BevMo to pick up 6 bottles of wine that Houseguest’s store in Vegas doesn’t carry anymore, and to the strawberry stand, and we had homemade tacos for dinner and strawberry shortcake with real whipped cream for dessert, proving again that there are some things you just can’t get in Vegas.