Celebrating a four-pack, one-ply miracle

I remember the day vividly, March 14, 2020, standing in a forlorn parking lot, in a strip mall I'd never seen before. A pall had settled over the earth. It was the first weekend of the pandemic, as we commemorate it. I'd hastily cut short a gloating cell call from my brother in Texas, who was lording over me a stockpile of toilet paper he'd just scored at Costco, a club for which I held no membership.

My sib, who deems his morning sit-down "the best part of the day," was ready to optimize the pandemic. For me, desperation was setting in.

At my neighborhood Whole Foods, Lunds, Target and Cub, the shelves were bare. Does Trader Joe's sell TP, I asked myself? Not being sure it was worth the detour to find out, I opened Google Maps and searched "toilet paper near me." All that came up were office supply stores.

So I started driving, over the river, through the woods, until I was nearly out of gas, kicking myself for not taking my uncle's advice and installing one of those toilet seats with a built-in bidet.

Eventually I spied a forlorn looking strip mall up and over a ridge. All that remained in it was one of those dollar stores, staples of rural America, where a dollar still goes a long way, they tell me.

As I walked through the empty, potholed parking lot, dodging flurries, I looked to the sky and cried out, "What can a man depend on — in these unprecedented times?"

Things inside looked bleak — no cleansers of any sort, very little shelf-stable food, and absolutely no toilet paper. I filled my cart with whatever I could find ... tins of deviled meat, frozen funfetti focaccia ("viva Italia!"), something resembling Spaghetti Os but with seafood, celery bottoms (two for $1).

I ran the numbers. If one was really disciplined — and could find some soap — a person could get 200 best-parts-of-the-day per roll. Like an episode of Survivor, but at home. In our household of 3.5, that meant we could perhaps survive for eight to nine months on Mackerel Os, allergen-free gelatin, and the miracle four-pack, which had appeared while I was checking the sodium content of the non-butter spread.

I held the treasure to my chest with the same sense of pride an early settler of our state might have felt carrying home a felled elk.

Tough luck! I thought, as I strode passed just-arriving shoppers — who probably drove over from Inver or Maple Grove — as they raced to the back of the store in vain, searching for what was buried in my cart under a camouflage of Easter-themed pet clothing.

I chose self-checkout, imagining some avaricious clerk might declare the four-pack damaged or expired and thus unavailable for sale. As I passed it over the scanner, I paused at words I had never seen before: "One Ply."

Wait, no. Hadn't the Minneapolis City Council outlawed this, along with menthol cigarettes?

I loaded my bags and made my escape, texting my brother a photo, to which he replied, "No, absolutely not, never. Our mother didn't raise Philistines." You haven't met my sister, but I digress.

Fast-forward 21 months. Though we're still living Pandemic Lyfe®, I'm trying to get on with it and have returned to my just-in-time household mentality. It took a while, but we ate through all the riced cauliflower, the White Castle Meatless Sliders, the rehydrated pickles ("for agricultural use"), and the unscented mini frittatas. The Davanni's party-size lasagna remains in the freezer because it is difficult to get 20 people to your home in a pandemic. And gluten.

Last summer I also decided to clear out my secret pantry in the furnace room, the place I had stocked away scarcer essentials, lest unscrupulous neighbors with guns come for my zinc lozenge cache, the mega-pack of Tylenol, hundreds of baby wipes and gallons of caustic cleansers, left to molder when it became clear COVID was in the air, not on your hands (elbow bump!).

And that four-pack of one-ply toilet paper.

Using skills gleaned in decades in journalism, I had been able — to my family's great acclaim — to source plentiful toilet paper throughout the pandemic. Two-, three-, even four-ply. We could "go like racehorses," to paraphrase an the old Anthony Bourdain quip, without a moment's anxiety.

While at work one day, a text arrived from my adult son, "what's with the toilet paper?" He came home to use our basement office many workdays.

"Pandemic sacrifice," I replied.

"How long will it last?"

A long time. A very long time. One-ply paper in a roll of 1,000 just goes and goes. More than you do.

I was surprised how large the roll remained after days of use. I thought of scheduling a colonoscopy. Or just the prep. I bought habañero hot sauce. I used it to blow my nose. I tried to interest the cat in it.

The last roll expired early this month, on the final day of Hanukkah, the Jewish festival commemorating the miraculous durability of a tiny amount of oil. I sensed a more contemporary miracle in my midst. I realized that my prayer of March 2020, had been answered.

My mind wandered back to that raw pandemic dawn, to a four-pack standing alone on a vast empty row of shelving, in a store I was never able to locate again. And I smiled.

We are alive, physically healthy, and I am not wearing medical underwear.

So let's raise a toast to these unprecedented times: As bad as things may seem, all things do pass.

By the way, I'm dead-set on using that lasagna. If you don't mind freezer burn, I can set you up with a square or two on New Year's Eve.