Selling Yourself a Bill of Goods

My nose starting running last Friday, when I was shopping on Park Slope's Seventh Avenue.  Upon reaching for my handkerchief, I found it was gone, and then I remembered, too late, that I had used it to blow my nose earlier that day while walking in Prospect Park, that I had placed it in the laundry and then neglected to put another in my pocket.  What should I do?  Surely a man of my advanced years to say nothing of my superb dignity could, in public, wipe his nose on the back of his sleeve. 

As it happened, I was standing in front of Yogo Monster, a shop that dispenses frozen yoghurt in various flavors and toppings. You serve yourself in the large containers the store provides, weigh it, and pay accordingly. Rescue was at hand!  I would just walk in and take a few napkins, walk out, and blow my nose.

I walked in, approached the napkins, and then paused.  How would it look for an apparently respectable elderly man to walk into a shop, steal a few napkins, and then walk out?  Well, I thought, yoghurt is only 49 cents an ounce.  I’ll just buy a bit.  I took one of the store’s huge containers (there’s only one size), and poured what I judged to be about a cup’s worth of frozen vanilla yoghurt into the container.  Over that I poured a generous amount of maple syrup.  After all, what could maple syrup weigh?  To my amazement, the yoghurt plus the syrup plus the container weighed about 7 ounces, but what the hell, in for a penny in for a pound, or in this case 7/16th of one. 

I found an empty table and chair, sat myself down, and slowly consumed the yoghurt, carefully distributing syrup onto each spoonful.  Nothing could be more delicious, especially at four in the afternoon, when such a treat was slightly disreputable.  And then I remembered a Helen Hokinson New Yorker cartoon, which shows two substantial middle-aged ladies standing in front of a patisserie.  One says to the other, “Let’s just walk in and see what happens.” 

Of course I knew what would happen if I walked into the Yogo Monster.  But for the half second it took to walk in, I fooled myself into thinking that it didn’t have to happen, that perhaps it wouldn’t happen, and that maybe I’d escape with only two napkins and without buying any frozen yoghurt.  This is known as selling yourself a bill of goods.  Life would be intolerable were one not able to do that from time to time.


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