I knocked over half a quart of deep yellow paint this morning. It was a moderate mess—the paint was thick and I had just washed the floor, so I was able to scoop quite a bit back into the can before washing it all up. There have been worse messes—the day the coffee pot exploded all over the kitchen; the dropped half gallon of salad dressing in the walk in fridge at the grocery store where I worked after college; the quart of primer that exploded all over my bookshelves, leaving my books still marked 30 years later. But the biggest mess I have ever seen was the cauliflower cheese soup at Ceres on winter afternoon.
I was carrying a 2 gallon metal insert of just heated soup over to the steam table. It was the middle of lunch. The counter was packed. There was bread all neatly packed for delivery under the racks. People were hungry; they liked the soup; they wanted more. I slipped. The soup went up into the air and came down…everywhere. It was all over the floor. It went up the walls and the glass of the big fridge. It splashed onto the phone. It covered the neatly packed bread. It dribbled onto the counter. The floor became a skating rink in the middle of the lunch rush. I grabbed the dustpan to begin to scoop up soup, slipped, and the dustpan flew over the counter and landed in…someone’s soup. She was not amused; it took all of Chris The Boy’s considerable charms to settle her down with a new bowl, extra bread, and desert. The chaos was worse than the day a mouse decided to visit the front of the store and Jeffery announced its existence, loudly, to one and all.
We did get it cleaned up and the bread went out on schedule. But cauliflower cheese soup, because of its texture, its scent, and its slightly oily constancy, created the biggest mess I have ever seen.
What was yours?
My personal biggest mess was the day that I managed to find myself in front of a bus stop at 6 am on the way to little old school. From there I was suddenly covered in a slew of disgusting street water from a passing nearby truck. I persevered through the long bus ride afterwards and managed to trek to the school establishment. The next tragedy occurred when (post changing into an extra shirt that I had stored in my locker ) I found myself the VICTIM of a cup of Gatorade poured over my head. Finding myself now sticky and also covered in street water I sank against my locker and began to weep. My biggest mess indeed.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest mess was that fateful summer afternoon in which somehow I found myself drinking several glasses of red wine at 11am with a number of elderly antique store owners. I’m wearing a white summer dress and getting a little tipsy and just as I’m about to leave and get on with my day, somebody makes a little joke and in my utter enthusiasm I underwent a slight jolt and ended up spilling the contents of the glass all over myself and my pristine summer dress. I left the shop, stained and despondent, and failed to ever get the stain out
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