While working on the audio version of my novel Entertaining Disasters, getting ready for my summer class, Finding Your Voice, at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, and working on my second novel, Columbia Drive, I thought I’d share a timely passage on expiration dates. It’s adapted from Chapter 20 of Entertaining Disasters, “How to Make a Pie”:    

            I grab the container of ground coffee from the refrigerator and flip on the espresso machine, waiting for its green go-ahead light. I see the crumbled blue cheese tub for Saturday’s salad and remember to check the expiration date. BEST IF USED BY—I turn the tub in my hands, searching for the words. I don’t want it to be any bluer than is safe. I grab a pair of reading glasses to help locate the claim for its continued viability.

            If the government can require this data on packaging, why can’t the government require putting it in the same place on every package, and done in lettering large enough to read without glasses? IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK? By the time my expiration date is up, I will have spent months, if not years, standing in markets, scanning labels for this basic information.

            I now live by expiration dates. If I can find the latest expiration date for every product that needs one, my next trip to the store can be put off that much longer. If time spent at the table in the company of others is bonus time on Earth, then shopping and reading labels in the market is time begrudgingly spent. I worship youth as much as everyone else, only I apply it to perishables instead of people.

            Then Somebody comes home and blows my whole system. He can barely be bothered to open the refrigerator door, let alone look for expiration dates. If moved to actually investigate the interior of what he calls the “large cold cabinet in which you hide things,” he immediately ignores the refrigerator’s consumption timeline to eat the thing with the latest expiration date first or, worse, take something from the freezer, where expiration dates have little bearing, while fresh stuff decays. He’s supposed to take whatever’s number is up next. He’s supposed to know these things and pay as close attention as I do. But as far as he’s concerned, expiration dates are my problem. I’m the designated concerned party in this alliance because I’m the one who goes to the store.

            My diligence is born of an awareness of my own expiration date. According to actuarial tables and accepted wisdom, I’ve reached my half-life. Time is now as officially limited a resource for me as it is for that tub of cottage cheese. Shopping is a theft of time I must arrest and contain.

     My husband takes the opposite approach. He’ll dash off to a full-blown major supermarket, the scary kind with a bank of checkout stands like rodeo cattle chutes, for just one or two things we suddenly need desperately. I think he does this to deny time’s passing. It’s as if the more trips, stops, and distractions he crams into a day are proof of his access to a youthful fountain of disposable time. He is a Catholic—lapsed, yes, but still raised in the Church and educated at its schools. Catholicism is a mystery religion. I need full disclosure; I want to see my options clearly. Yes, that wine may be the blood of Christ and that wafer may be his body, but that wine’s eventually going to turn to vinegar and that cracker’s not going to stay crisp forever, despite what Catherine of Siena claimed.

            Unlike my mother, who refused to throw anything out, I am happy to relinquish; I just demand to know the appropriate time for tossing. I finally find the expiration date on the blue cheese. It’s a relief to know it’s good for another week. I make my espresso, sweeten it with a demitasse spoon of raw brown sugar, and take it back upstairs.

            The room spins gently from my pinot noir idyll. I lie back down on the bed with A Brief History of Time (176 pages to go), and my coffee, hoping to read myself back together and rescue this day, the last full one to fill with angst before my dinner party.

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