Remember when one of the worst parts of the coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis was a lack of toilet paper available in many stores? Talk about your simpler, more innocent days, as the pandemic’s toll approaches 110,000 deaths in the USA and too many people still don’t take it seriously or believe in one of the many conspiracy theories about it. But I want to keep one entry of “Dispatches from the Time of the Virus” a little lighter, so here is the story of toilet paper and good things coming in large packages.
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| It's a beauty, isn't it? |
Sometime in April, I was planning on buying some toilet paper during my weekly grocery shopping at Wegmans on Amherst Street in Buffalo. While toilet paper shortages had begun to be reported, in Buffalo and Western New York, it was mostly a shortage of two-ply toilet paper and in packages of 4, 6 and more rolls. My lovely wife Val and I live and own our home in Buffalo’ Elmwood Village/West Side neighborhood; the house was built in 1900, and it still has a good amount of its original plumbing, so we are a serious single-play household. When you combine that with my anal nature of never wanting to be low nothing’s like toilet paper, we always have several rolls own the house, and I probably get itchy when we get below six rolls on hand.
Wegmans and most grocery and department stores I have checked established policies early on of allowing only one package of toilet paper per purchase; with single-ply toilet paper sold only in single rolls (or so I thought), as I found out on previous occasions at Wegmans, I had to buy one roll a week and hope our usage didn’t surpass that. There were even a couple weeks when Wegmans had no single-ply rolls for sale. I was hoping for four or six packs of one-ply to be sold, but never saw them. So, this week in April, I went down the aisle where the toilet paper was stocked, and saw they had a display of single roll, single-ply, and grabbed one.
Suddenly, I heard angels, looked up and to my left, and there, on the shelf, was…a display of about 15 packages of 20 rolls each of single-ply toilet paper. It was the best I had felt after seeing something unexpected since my sister-in-law Tricia pointed out my wedding ring at the bottom of the deep send of a swimming pool at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas the day after Val and I got married there in 2002. I may have actually thrown the single roll of toilet paper back on the shelf before I grabbed the package calling me and got in the checkout line. I knew that it would be its own package in the shopping cart and the car on the drive home, but I forgot that the previously largest package of toilet paper ever in our house was six rolls. Even though we have a cupboard with shelves above the toilet in our half-bath on the bottom floor of our house, I soon found out that there was no way this package would fit on any of the shelves, even after I rearranged things. So, the sizable package was placed next to our bullet garbage can in the kitchen, where it remains, until we use just a bit
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