Opinion: Alphabet chicken in the dark

So I’m standing in the grocery store on Saturday with the boy and we’re looking for Alphabet chicken for the grandkid.

She’s in that phase where all she eats is chicken, bread, Nutella and pretzels. 

Alphabet chicken, for the uninitiated, are preformed breaded chicken pieces formed into various letters. There is also dino chicken, which, you guessed it, is dinosaur forms and space chicken, which is moons and such.

She’ll only eat the Alphabet chicken. She claims it’s the only kind that tastes good.

I think it tastes like cardboard, but the kid is pretty good at reading, which is good to see from a 5-year-old. I gotta think the chicken helps.

We came home empty handed, because the power went out in the store.

Here’s what I learned this week: Grocery stores are extremely dark when the power goes out. There we stood in the pitch black frozen foods aisle when a voice rang out, “Everyone stay where you are.”

So we stayed where we were. It’s very hard to find Alphabet chicken in the dark and after spending a good 5 minutes in the frozen food aisle we felt our way to the front of the store, where a clerk was guarding the door.

I’d like to think that most folks wouldn’t simply walk out with their groceries, but it was also pretty tough to put stuff back. Sure, plenty of folks were using their phone lights to get around, but even then, it was very dark.

There was no way to check out without any power and while I assume they had a back up generator somewhere, it wasn’t coming on all that quickly.

So I set the one thing I had grabbed (a package of razors) on a shelf and held up my hands when I walked by the clerk.

“I couldn’t find what I was looking for anyway,” I said.

She nodded and let me by.

The grandkid’s mother went out and found some Alphabet chicken at another store that, too, had the power out, but also had a working cash register, so crisis averted.

Back at home we simply went into camping mode. I found my headlamp and since we have a gas stove and a wood stove, it was easy to cook supper.

The wife dug out some candles and we had soup and the grandkid her Alphabet chicken, cooked crispy in oil rather than nuked in a microwave as usual.

I suggested I might go to bed at 7 p.m. as I read a book after dinner.

It was kind of nice.

But then the power came back on and the spell was broken.

Everyone grabbed something electronic and looked at it.

I’m as guilty as the rest of ‘em, I must admit. There was a movie that I half finished and I wanted to watch the rest of it.

Such is modern life.

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It is with sadness we mark the passing of Sandra Wrightson. When I first moved here I can remember Wrightson pounding out Christmas carols at Ruder Elementary on the piano while the kids sang along. 

It was a good ol’ fashion Christmas program that I haven’t witnessed since. I didn’t know Wrightson all that well, to be honest. She retired shortly after I got here 26 years ago, but she seemed like one of those no-nonsense principals, where you didn’t have to be everyone’s friend, you just had to get things done.