Jingles and catchphrases float in and out of my mind like the tides of a hurricane. All day long I am humming one or repeating one, then another jumps right in to take its place. “Come on down to Robber Toyota where you get a steal of a deal.” or “You don’t have to hike, visit Big Mike’s Bikes.” Goofy stuff like that. Try as I may to get these things out and they just come back. Stronger and louder. Earworms. I gave up long ago. I just let them do what they need to do.
I’m known to beat things to death. I will repeat something that is funny or tell a dad joke so many times that it goes beyond cringeworthy. It’s downright annoying. Part of me enjoys it. Part of it is compulsive. It’s got to be hell to live with me.
My recent earworm is a slogan from a local restaurant. I am changing the names here because I don’t need a van full of fry cooks showing up with baseball bats. We’ll call it, Susie’s Garden Patch. I listen to the local radio station and Susie’s Garden Patch has a commercial practically every ten minutes. “Come on down to Susie’s Garden Patch, where every little thing is made from scratch.” Sounds pretty good to me. I like things made from scratch.
I have passed Susie’s countless times. It doesn’t look like a place where everything is made from scratch. It looks like any other greasy spoon dotted throughout the country. You can look at it and tell it’s the kind of place where if you’re wearing a jacket you may want to take it off before you go in. If you don’t, there’s a good chance it will smell like grease for a month. The kind of place that is probably going to have drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, and likely a water stain from a leak on one of the tiles. We’ve all been there.
Susie’s has been tempting me for a long time. Calling to me. There are never that many cars in the parking lot. Somehow they manage to pepper the airwaves, all day, every day with “Come on down to Susie’s Garden Patch, where every little thing is made from scratch”. How? Why? Do they really make everything from scratch? Impossible. But how would I know if I didn’t try?
For at least six months I have worked Susie’s into casual conversation with my wife and son. “What do you want to do for dinner?” “I don’t know…but I do know a place where everything is made from scratch!” “We’re out of milk.” “Really? I bet I know a place that has the freshest milk in the world!”. I’d imagine if there was a way to make electricity from eye-rolling, my Susie’s comments could have powered a small metropolis.
Well, today, Valentine’s Day, I got my wish. My wife got so fed up of the comments that she took me to Susie’s so she would never have to hear about it again.
It was everything I expected. Drop ceiling. Water stains. A few tables of elderly people eating rye toast in between phlegmy coughs and sips of coffee. I could feel the stare of my wife as the food came. The “I told you so” stare. I wouldn’t meet her eyes. I didn’t want her to tell me so. I wanted this to be the one time that I ran something into the ground and it worked out for the better. Then she took a bite of her food and said, “this is pretty good”. I felt triumphant. Then she took another bite and pulled a long, black hair from her mouth. No more triumph.
She gave the hair the benefit of the doubt. That can happen anywhere. We continued on with our meal. She again commented that it tasted pretty good. I was about to ask her if it tasted like it came from a garden patch or if it had been made from scratch when I noticed a hair on my plate. I thought about it and convinced myself it was also just a fluke but stuck to some toast that I was pretty sure was not made from scratch.
We got a to-go box. Paid. I debated in my mind if we’d ever be back. My wife really enjoyed it much more than I thought. Even more than me. The hairs. The hair threw me off. I have a thing about hair in food. As we walked out I didn’t have to debate any longer. My wife stopped and then suddenly jumped back. There was a little rack of free coupon books, and seated atop an ad for “Crazy Dan, The Muffler Man”, was a little mouse. At first, we thought it was fake but then it winked at us and went about its business looking for savings.
Magically, I have not heard the jingle in my head since. Happy Valentine’s Day.