There are a couple of things that are constants in my life.
One is that every time I heard about a breaking news story, the tumblers in my head start clicking and I try to boil that down into a pithy couple of words that could stand as a Page One lead headline. It's what we in the business call a 'Black Line' or, as aficionados of my favorite newspaper movie of all time, 'The Paper,' might remember, The Wood.
The other is that this habit annoys my wife to no end, especially when it concerns a fairly serious topic that rolls off me as just one more story.
There is another area where disagree.
Shocking, right?
She is a stickler for keeping things clean, especially around the kitchen.
Her husband is not.
Remember, this is the guy who still scrounged a couple of Thrasher's Fries off the counter when orders a cup in Rehoboth Beach.
I'm not especially careful when handling meat, which sends her into conniptions.
Usually, this is reserved for summer, when I'm handling the grill.
She follows me around with Clorox wipes, while I am licking my fingers after placing a steak on the grill.
She is not amused.
This week those two worlds collide when I broke the news to her about the recall of romaine lettuce.
To be honest, I actually thought about not telling her, but I knew that if she ingested any romaine after the warning from the feds, she would never forgive me.
We had actually had romaine salads the night before.
Romaine is all my wife buys, despite her husband's constant plea for just a plain head of lettuce.
She was dismayed at the news, and then immediately tossed the bags of romaine that remained in the fridge, and started the process of cleaning out the bin where they were stored, and of course all the countertops in the kitchen.
I tried not to snicker in the background.
All I could see was the potential for a headline:
ROMAINE CALM!
My wife did not see the humor.
Nor was she especially thrilled with my next offering:
LETTUCE PRAY!
This morning - now that we have all tossed all that perfectly good lettuce - the feds are saying it's now OK to eat romaine again, so long as it's not from one specific area in California where they believe the eColi problem was located.
That, of course, provides one more headline:
SALAD DAYS!
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