Cruising the news this evening, I watched a story about the orange harvest in Florida and how that harvest is affecting the price of a morning staple of mine.
Orange Juice.
Back when the initial blows of the current ongoing pandemic were underway, I went to see a doctor for the first time in (unintelligible) years. He suggested a vitamin supplement along with high blood pressure pills and something called a statin. I decided to go one step further and have my morning pills with a glass of Florida’s finest. If I was going to be around for a few more years, I may as well eat (and drink) healthy. Right?
Until two weeks ago, getting orange juice was one of those “easy peasy” things I could count on. When I went to my grocery store of choice, the shelves containing a variety of orange juices was empty. “Supply chain problem,” I thought. Last week’s pilgrimage confirmed my diagnosis. There was plenty of orange juice available, so, I was back to purchasing my weekly container of orange juice.
Not so fast. Today, empty shelves, save for one container. Then there was the news report tonight. Wow. Who’d a thunk it?
Yeah, I know that most orange juice has a hint of orange color added to it to make it more appealing, and I am aware that the juice is processed from some sort of orange juice “slurry” made in a factory and shipped up north (or out west as the case may be) for consumption by people like me who make orange juice a daily staple.
I like the stuff so much that I wrote a book called “An Orange Juice Story,” combining a couple of stories I’ve told about my days living in Houston’s southwest corner.
The first involves an evening trip to the local grocery store to get supplies for the next couple of days. Soon after getting back to my apartment, I was annoyed by the buzzing of a helicopter in the general area. I went out on my patio, watched the helicopter circle for a while, and then thought nothing more of the sighting until the next morning. I switched on the news to find that less than five minutes after leaving the store, two men came into the store, robbed it, and shot the manager stone-cold dead!
The other story has to do with being woken up in the middle of the night by a drunken woman who was babbling about someone coming after her and doing her harm. It took me two hours to get the woman off cloud nine and get her to another complex, where she felt she would be safe. How she decided to come to my apartment out of all of the apartments in that particular complex, I’ll never know. What I do know is that it took her an hour and a half to notice that all I was wearing was a pair of underpants.
I also wonder why in the hell I didn’t get robbed or murdered in either instance. Charmed, I’ll guess.
Anyhoo, I combined both incidents into one cohesive narrative. The book, however, was one I set up by myself when I didn’t exactly know what I was doing. Small print with lots of white space on each page. It’s one of the reasons I don’t exactly promote that particular book.
During the meanwhilst, the price of orange juice has been going up by a considerable margin. I suppose I’ll see orange juice on the shelves again, but in the meantime, I’m already looking at alternatives.
V-8, anybody?
Be Seeing You!
bdharrellauthor 