Nona's 10k Macaroni...

Location – Burlingame Albertson’s

Date – 12/31/06

Time – Noon

Setting – Looking for lunch.

I approach the deli stand, remark to myself – but still out loud, and in a bad Steve Irwin voice – “krikey, look at all the goodies Jim.”

No word who Jim is at this point.

I stand for maybe 30 seconds looking at their seven sandwich selections. A short, kind-eyed woman approaches from the meat cutter.

“Oh, sorry, didn’t even see you there, what can I get you?”

“Don’t know yet,”

“Well, let me know, we’ve got all the meets, fresh sliced…”

“Mmhmm, how about the BBQ chicken strips one, without red onions.”

“Oh,” she says, as she turns to look at the menu. “I don’t have that one.”

“Hmm.. ok…” I eye the salads, macaroni, garden and otherwise.

“How about…”

“A Caesar?” she interjects, thinking I like caeser salads.

“Hmmm… no, how about one of the macaroni salads…”

One, the Albertson’s Elbow Macaroni Salad, is 2.99 for some portion. Probably “liter.”

The second, with pasta that looks like little wristbands, is called “Nona’s Macaroni Salad,” and its $1 more. But so much more stylish looking.

“Are you Nona?” I ask as she spoons what I think is her namesake macaroni salad variety.

“What?”

“You, are you Nona?”

“No, we just have the two kinds.”

I paused, because that comment didn’t make any sense, especially given my 3-word simple question.

“No, its called Nona’s Macaroni Salad ($3.99/liter) are you Nona?”

She finally gets it.

“Haha, no,” she laughs. “It’s funny how they name foods isn’t it?”

In retrospect, it’s not funny at all.

“Yeah,” I reply. “Like, what guy’s girlfriend made that salad for him like, 20 years ago, and then he started a company and named the version after her.”
She laughs, not having expected this much to someone who should have been crushed by the lack of BBQ chicken with no red onions. I wonder if she DID have red onions…

I continue.

“But see, what they don’t tell you is that Nona has totally moved on from macaroni salad,” I say, with a hand flourish. My hands have come out of their respective pockety apartments.

“Haha.”

“Yeah, she graduated from making macaroni salad and got into tech. Now its ‘Nona’s Tech Stock picks,’”

She laughs more.

“Yeah, Nona is SO beyond macaroni salad,”

By this point she’s weighing my lunch, it’s a full $4.39 worth of Nona’s Macaroni Salad, the stuff that made her famous before she put $1,000 into Google.

“But her legend lives on.”
With one final click of a button, my lunch is ready for me to take home in its cute little clear plastic tub, and its cute little…

She starts wrapping it in saran wrap, no lid apparently.

“I’m out of lids,” she tells me.

“It was a hard year for lids,” I reply, she doesn’t respond.

She hands me my lunch and says “There are sporks in the basket near the meats.”

“Sporks? You have sporks? You just made my day!”

I grab one and leave to pay.