Category: daily life

Fritz-Udolph and the Silver Bolt.

Fritz-Udolph was awakened every night at 3 AM for two months by hard and rhythmic banging noises.  During those two months, he listened to that noise with wide-eyes and clenched fists while he lay in his bed.  He grew angrier by the night.  Finally fed up and disgusted with not knowing where the noise was coming from, he got out of his bed one thunderstormy night.  He slipped into his bright yellow chinoiserie silk robe printed with brown swallows and white magnolias.  He straightened his collar as he looked in the mirror and tied the belt into a sharp bow, slipped into his fur-lined leather slippers and started walking around his apartment.

He switched on the master bathroom light.

“Bang, bang, bang!”

He looked inside the sink cabinet and in the linen closet.  The noise wasn’t coming from anywhere in the master bathroom.  He stood in the bathtub, quietly listening for a long while.  He bit his lower lip and moved quietly to the guest room as his antique cuckoo clock chimed the quarter hour.  Of course, the banging continued.

“Bang, bang, bang!”

He slinked down the hall to the guest room.  The noise wasn’t coming from there, either.  He slid into the guest bathroom, stood in the shower stall and quietly listened.  He vaguely heard the banging but still couldn’t discern its origin.  He cleared his throat and rubbed his bearded chin.

Fritz-Udolph popped his hands into his robe’s pockets and tiptoed to the kitchen.  He flipped the light switch.  A couple of fruit flies from the bowl of ripening bananas flew past his face.  He grabbed a brown banana and ate it in three large bites.  Now the cuckoo clock chimed on the half hour, and there was more banging, this time a little louder and with a different tempo.

“B-bang, b-bang, b-b-bang, bang, bang!”

But the noise was too far away from the kitchen to come from there.  Feeling his face growing hot from anger, he tossed the banana peel into the garbage can and swatted five fruit flies as he closed the garbage can lid.  He marched into the living room.

“B-bang, b-bang, b-b-bang, bang, bang!”

The noise wasn’t coming from the living room, either.  “Strange,” Fritz-Udolph grumbled.  He stuck his head into the front hall closet and pushed aside his woolen capes and coats.

“B-bang, b-bang, b-b-bang!”

“Ah, ho!  There it is!” he exclaimed half-aloud.  “There it is coming from the next door!”  The cuckoo clock chimed on the three-quarter hour.  He rubbed his short grey beard, bit his upper lip and chewed on it for a long while.

“Bang, bang, bang!” the thuds echoed.  “Bang, bang, bang!”

Fritz-Udolph stood in the closet and listened.  “It is from the next door!” he thought.  “I will get the woman for this!”  By the time the cuckoo clock chimed four, the banging suddenly ceased.

“That’s it!” he grunted.  “I will show her, that infernal woman at the next door.  I will put an end to her discourtesy to me.”

The next morning, Fritz-Udolph called the management company and complained about his next-door neighbor.

“I tell you,” Fritz-Udolph shouted in his heavy German Swiss accent.  “You people must; I say MUST! put an end to my neighbor, Ramona, banging at three in the morning.  This has been going on for the two months.  I tell you, it is the hammer she is using.  I will not tolerate it.  I did an engineering study on this in my home country for a secondary school project, and I concluded no one could possibly bang all night long, ‘specially at three in the morning!  It is im-poss-ible!  It is the work of the succubus, that is what she is!  She will not seduce me, that Ramona, according to my proven engineering project!”

On the other end of the phone, the property manager smiled and half-giggled to herself.  She knew Fritz-Udolph didn’t make any sense, he never did, and that was par for the course.  She asked Fritz-Udolph if he had talked to his neighbor, Ramona, about the banging.  It was the better option, she explained, for opening the lines of communication between neighbors helps to foster goodwill.

“No,” he screamed.  “Why should I do that?  It is your job, fräulein!  Your job, not mine!”

The property manager rolled her eyes, took a puff from her joint, and promised she would contact his neighbor, which she did.  Through some investigation, the noisy problem was discovered.  It actually was a loose bolt from the fan that moved the air in the garbage room.  The garbage room was between Fritz-Udolph and Ramona’s apartments.

It turned out that Ramona never heard the noise because she was a heavy sleeper, and she slept wearing headphones.  She much preferred sleeping to the sounds of waterfalls than the noisy mechanics of the building.  Fritz-Udolph, on the other hand, was a light sleeper.  He could hear an ant crossing the grassy yard.

Fritz-Udolph was unfazed when he was told the noise was a fan bolt.  The building superintendent tightened it, and the noise was quelled.  Fritz-Udolph never apologized to Ramona for accusing her of something she didn’t do, nor did he feel remorse.  He was F.U., of course!

Fritz-Udolph’s complaint may have been addressed, but the way he handled it did little to cultivate even the thinnest thread of neighborly benevolence.  He passed Ramona in the hallway with theatrical grunts and mutters, while she, worn out by the whole affair, slipped past him with the quiet skill of someone avoiding a monster.

In the end, the whole episode left Fritz-Udolph with a lesson far quieter than the banging that had tormented him: life among neighbors requires patience that begins not in the hallway but in the heart.  What he mistook for another’s intentional rudeness had been shaped mostly by his own assumptions, his grand conceit, and his own certainty marching ahead of charity.  Yet, he never learned that peace within shared spaces depends on the intelligence to extend goodwill before judgment, to listen before accusing, and to soften the noise within before blaming the noise without.  He continued to accuse Ramona and other neighbors of deliberate peccadillos against him, and he continued to act with a haughtiness that only the most conceited of snobs could assemble.

 

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Rotting Fast and Faster.

A Lesson About the New World.

There was a time, not so long ago, when I would buy a head of lettuce, a bunch of tomatoes, and a box of mushrooms, or other kinds of fresh food.  They would last for a week, maybe ten days before any initial spoiling would show its ugly face.  Nowadays, that head of lettuce, bunch of tomatoes, and box of mushrooms will start spoiling three or four days from when I brought them home.  It goes for much of the produce I buy now.  Sure, the “fresh by” date might still be two weeks in the future but spoil they must.

What a rotten new world we live in!

 

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The Sheriff of Decibels:  The Man Who Heard Too Much

A Lesson in Consideration.

I once wrote about the Sheriff of Decibels, a neighbor from a high‑rise condominium where keeping to oneself was the unofficial building policy.  Everyone did keep to themselves, and life was blissfully uneventful, until the night he, Mr. Wigg, called to inform me that my television was “too loud” and preventing him from sleeping.

Now, I had been living at that condominium for years; he was living there long before I showed up on the scene.  So, this was a surprise out of nowhere.

That phone call became the overture to a recurring performance, a kind of neighborhood opera in which he played both the aggrieved victim and the self‑appointed enforcer of silence.  After a few of these episodes, I began to wonder whether sound was truly traveling through the walls or whether he simply enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a well‑timed complaint.  After all, the room with my television didn’t even share a wall with his bedroom; it butted up against his butler’s pantry.  And I hadn’t turned on that television for months by this time.

The irony was rich: I could hear his television, too, but only when I passed his front door.  Talk shows, game shows, the full audio spectrum.  Yet it never occurred to me to call him and issue a noise citation.  I assumed he was just living his life, the way people do when they choose communal living over a cabin in the woods.

Then one afternoon, as I walked down the common hallway, his door cracked open an inch.  “Pssst!  I can hear sounds from your condo,” he whispered, as if delivering classified intelligence.

I turned to look through the sliver of darkness.  Only Mr. Wigg’s lips were visible, and the darkness behind him was black and infinite.  I told him flatly that nothing was playing and kept walking.  For a moment, I wondered if he stood in his butler’s pantry with a cup pressed to the wall, listening for enemy war plans.  The image made me laugh.

There’s a particular fatigue that comes from dealing with neighbors who are both hypersensitive and oblivious to their own habits.  It’s like being lectured on etiquette by someone chewing with their mouth open.  You could point it out, but it would never land.

I concluded that the issue lay not with me but with his imagination, or his hearing aids, or him pressing his ear against our common wall.  Who knows?  I kept living my life at a normal volume, unbothered.

Then one day, everything came to light.  When my best friend was walking down the hallway coming back from the garbage room, he bumped into Mr. Wigg.  The spoke awhile, and the true of this “noise” matter was discovered.  It appeared that we and Mr. Wigg have the same brand and model of television.  Through the wonders of modern technology, the sounds from our television come through his speakers.  We have heard his television sound come through our speakers, too.  And what about our television turning off by itself?  Well, it also is apparent that his remote and our remote affect the other’s sets.

Therefore, isn’t it better to find the source of a problem before claiming someone of malfeasance?  It could all be an innocent technology glitch.  Mr. Wigg wouldn’t have been aggravated, and I wouldn’t think of the situation as silly.

 

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Loose Trash and Looser Rules.

When I lived at the Sage Pointe Condominiums, the truth was simple: there were no real rules.  The Declaration contained only a handful of vague guidelines, none of which carried penalties, financial or otherwise.  In practice, nothing had any teeth; no bite.

What we did have was the Infractions Team, a small group of older ladies who enforced whatever they personally disliked.  If something offended their sensibilities, it instantly became a “rule,” and the offending neighbor was told to cease and desist.  Their grievances ranged from the trivial to the absurd, such as declaring certain bumper stickers on residents’ cars to be violations simply because the messages clashed with their unholy beliefs.  Those errant residents were then threatened with legal action.

Meanwhile, these same enforcers stored their own holiday decorations, bicycles, and medical equipment in the common-area closets with complete impunity. They walked their dogs off the leash.  They grilled pork chops on their balconies with open flames.  They filled staircases with their potted plants.  No reprimands.  No consequences.  No surprise.  It was the classic Rules for Thee and Not for Me dynamic, and everyone knew it.

One of the few written directives concerned garbage disposal.  For years, printed signs were taped to the garbage-room doors in the underground garage.  They instructed residents to place all trash in securely tied plastic bags and to dispose of furniture and large items privately, never in the dumpsters.

As the buildings filled with more residents (there was an ebb and flow with the population), the dumpsters began overflowing just two days after pickup.  At a homeowners’ association meeting, a member of the Care and Upkeep Team scolded the community for tossing unbagged trash and furniture into the dumpsters.  The remarks were recorded in the official minutes.

A couple of weeks later, I went down to throw out my own securely bagged garbage.  I glanced into the dumpster, and there it was.  A mountain of loose junk: files, hanging folders, workbooks, an American flag, Navy memorabilia, and other unbagged débris.  Because the book titles were visible, it was unmistakably the personal clutter of the very same Care and Upkeep Team member who had lectured everyone else about dumping unbagged garbage!

It was a perfect illustration of the deleterious culture at Sage Pointe: rules for thee and not for me.  Others were expected to follow the posted guidelines.  Certain individuals, however, exempted themselves entirely.

They were special!

 

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Another Whiff that Crossed the Line.

And then there was the unmistakable contribution of The Weede Family, whose fusty skunk aroma drifted through the hallways with the determination of a creature lazily seeking freedom.

I have lived in buildings that had friendly doormen and fresh flowers in the lobby, and truly dedicated cleaning crews that cleaned and deodorized a couple times a week.  When I lived in one of those large mid‑rise buildings, the kind with long hallways, welcoming vestibules, perpetually humming vents, there was a cast of neighbors who could each produce their own documentary, for everyone had such pleasantly interesting lives to tell.

However, when I lived at Sage Pointe Condominiums, there were odors of marijuana, tobacco, and perfume that were thickly layered and ever evolving on every floor and in the lobby.  That condominium association was immensely different than all the rest.  Life there was, indeed, never dull, particularly if you had a sensitive nose or didn’t care how dirty the common areas were.  Speaking of the common areas, the walls were always dirty with oil or Cheetos® dust, the common hall carpets were never cleaned, the lobby walls were a patchwork of rinky dink Spackle® repairs and paint that never matched.  “They” never wanted to repaint the entire walls the proper way.

In today’s essay, I’m introducing you to one of the more fusty aromatic residents, The Weede Family.

They lived on my floor and at the far end.  One would never think that the odors from their wing would reach way down to my wing, but they did.  Whenever I opened my front door or stepped off the elevator, I braced myself.  I never knew what stench or invisible cloud would greet me, or what new olfactory assault would come barreling toward my unsuspecting nose.

The fetid odors were unmistakably marijuana.  Not just one kind, but several, and one would never know from one day to the next what strain they’d be smoking.  The worst was the kind that smelled like dead, rotting skunk.  Sometimes that stench was mixed with cheap perfume, and it was enough to suffocate a maggot.  Truthfully, I was surprised I never smelled it in my own condominium unit, but only out in the hallway.

By the time I learned to recognize their specific bouquet and the shifting medley of strains that was each more pungent than the last, I also learned something else: in a building like ours was, no door was ever fully closed, no hallway ever truly empty.  Scents travelled like rumors as they drifted, settled, and rose again when you least expected it.  The Weede Family managed to turn our peaceful corridor into a living, breathing testament to that truth.  Their skunky, dank fog became part of the building’s strange ecology, and a reminder that even in the most ordinary mid‑rise building, the air itself can tell stories you’d never believe unless you smelled them yourself.

 

 

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The Mark of Mordechi.

There were always dirty spots on the hallway carpets and in the elevators when I lived at Sage Pointe.  At first glance, they looked like the usual suspects, perhaps greasy take‑out containers leaking through flimsy bags, or perhaps the aftermath of a dog with poor timing.  Whatever their origin, the stains remained year after year after year, since no one on the board of directors ever bothered to call a carpet‑cleaning company to shampoo the carpets.

One weekend, though, someone obviously made an effort.  A sharp smell of Resolve® or Shout® hung in the hallways, proof that some anonymous soul had tried to scrub away the blotches.  Whoever it was deserved a medal for attempting to keep the place somewhat presentable.

Then came the Saturday afternoon when I stood waiting for the elevator to reach my floor.  At last, the doors slid open, and there stood Maddee and her younger brother, Mordechi, dripping from the pool and armed with their usual assortment of floaties and bottles.  Just as the doors parted, I caught Maddee in mid‑swoop, giving her water bottle a final flourish and spraying the elevator carpet.  When I looked down, I saw she had left a large, wet “M” beside the other permanent stains.  She and her brother stepped out quickly, their faces tight with guilt and silence.

I greeted them anyway, asked how they were. “How you doing?” I asked.  Maddee’s cheeks flushed deep crimson, and she stammered and babbled through a jumble of half‑formed words as she tripped over her tongue.  She knew that I knew.

The next morning, more than twelve hours later, I rode the elevator again.  The wet “M” was still there.  If it had been water, it would have evaporated long before.  Whatever she’d squirted (soda? juice? suntan lotion?) had soaked in and stayed put.  It’s still there to this day.

Funny, isn’t it, how the Stankle kids, the offspring of Adonis the preacher man and his aromatic wife, aren’t always the paragons one might expect.  And the kids weren’t toddlers; at the time this happened she was about eleven, he was about nine.  Both were old enough to know better and old enough to choose differently.  After all, their father preached it every Sunday and Wednesday on stage.

In a condominium association like Sage Pointe, the carpets in every building told the truth long before the residents did.  Every stain, every spill, every careless squirt from a child’s bottle became part of the story we all had to live with.

Courtesy, like cleanliness, is a shared responsibility.  It’s one that begins with small choices made when no one is supposed to be watching.  And yet, as those lingering marks remind us, someone always is watching, even if it’s only God.

 

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Not-So-Sweet Tarts, and When No One’s Minding.

A Lesson in Modesty.

In a lot of areas around the country, this weekend marks the opening of public swimming pools, so dig out your floating devices and the skimpiest swimwear you can find.  This story comes from a time when I lived in a condominium with swimming pools, a wading pool, a cedar-lined steam room, and all the inconsiderations you can imagine.

The elevator car came to a stop on the lobby floor.  The doors slid open, and I was ready to step out, until I froze mid-step.  What made me pause were the three young women standing directly in front of me, momentarily blocking my path, dressed in barely-there bikinis and entirely unbothered by their own near‑nakedness in a public hallway.

They were college‑age visitors, laughing and carefree, accompanied by one of the downstairs middle‑aged neighbors who was wrapped in a thick beach robe.  The trio of girls, I found out later, spent the weekend coming and going, and the next day I saw them again, heading down the back stairs toward the pool.  As those sweet tarts walked, their swimsuits shifted and rode up, leaving little to the imagination between the ripples of fat and even less to modesty, by cracky.

There was even a time in the dead heat of summer where it just happened that an older, senior-type crowd was having a get-together under the heat of the blazing sun.  A group of teenage girls in tiny bikinis made their way down the pool’s stairs, smirking and walking slow and seductively right in front and past the men.  The women were at another corner of the pool and appeared not to notice the bru-ha-ha.

Throughout the swimming season, the indoor pool area itself told the rest of the story.  In the corners were mounds of inflatable toys stacked so high they reached halfway up the walls.  Beach balls, float rings, plastic ducks, water pistols, and abandoned gadgets cluttered the water.  More than once, if you wanted to swim, you had to fish out stray and abandoned toys or dive to the bottom to retrieve whatever had been left behind.  Interestingly, the steam room was always left clean and uncluttered.

Yet, it was the renters and short‑term visitors who were the ones who mostly descended upon the pools and hot tub, and that’s where most of the disorder began and remained.  Sure, they enjoyed all of the amenities but had no real stake in the property, so there was little incentive to care for it.  And, truthfully, the same could be said for the owners who hosted these guests or rented out their units.  The result was the same: a shared space treated as disposable simply because it belonged to everyone and therefore, in their minds, to no one.

In the end, what unsettled me was more than the exposed full butt cheeks and almost-to-the-nipples cleavage, or the toys or even the noise, but the casual indifference that trailed behind them all.  A shared space only works when the people passing through it feel some measure of responsibility for what they touch and leave behind.  When they don’t, when visitors treat the place as a weekend playground and owners look the other way, the common areas slowly erode.  And standing there in the elevator doorway, watching another wave of guests drift toward the pool, I realized how quickly a condominium building can lose its hominess when too many people forget or just don’t bother to care for it.

 

 

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The Quiet Edges.

There was once a resident in a condominium I owned, a man so enigmatic that no one ever quite claimed to know him.  He drifted through the halls like a rumor made flesh, and before long he became the quiet talk of the association.  Here’s the story:

He kept to himself, and barely anyone knew his name.  It was said that Alonzo’s jet black, laid down styled hair shone so bright it might have lit up all of Sage Pointe.  His hair was a shimmering emblem of confidence and unspoken connection.

“Alonzo,” those who knew his name would say, “He got the thickest, the baddest, the most outta-sight edges this side of Sage Pointe.”

“Alonzo?  Ain’t he the one with the black patent leather hair?”

“Shiny and bright, that Alonzo is.”

I know that Alonzo’s secret was SoftSheen Dark and Natural in “Jet Black.”  I’ve seen the box he threw out in the recycling bin.  His “secret” might have looked unnatural as vinyl patent leather shoes, but he had not one grey hair on his head.  It was a one-tone black from the back of his head to the slicked down edges in the front, from sideburn to sideburn.

As time passed, Alonzo’s hair became more than just a spectacle; it turned into a beacon of curiosity and a source of fascination at Sage Pointe.  People were in awe about him at the monthly condominium association meetings – the few times he bothered to show up.  They marveled at him in the church, drooled at him in the grocery store line, admired him at the barbershop, and speculated about his unknown secrets at the local diner.  Yet Alonzo carried on, keeping to himself, his glossy raven hair unfaltering, like a strange moon in its perennial glow.

But one summer evening, at the annual Sage Pointe party, Alonzo broke his silence.  He sauntered onto the wooden dance floor at the activity center with his head held high, dressed sharp as a razor in a cream‑colored linen suit that caught the breeze just so, a narrow burgundy tie tucked neatly against a crisp pale yellow shirt, and red shoes polished to a mirror shine.  The flashing dance lights cast dazzling reflections off both his raven‑black hair and the blinding shine of his shoes.  Eight gold rings gleamed on his fingers — thick, heavy bands with diamonds, emeralds, and garnets that flashed each time his hands cut through the air, catching the lights as surely as his raven‑black hair.  He moved with an easy, unhurried confidence, swaying to the beat of funk music like he had been born for that moment.

Earlier that evening, I watched as he stood off to the side of the party room sampling the appetizers— deviled eggs dusted with paprika, tiny ham biscuits, and those colorful cellophane-tipped toothpicks that skewered a variety of cheese cubes that squeaked when you bit into them.  He washed it all down with two strawberry daiquiris so cold that the condensation rolled down the red plastic Solo® cup like sweat on a July window.  He sipped them slow, savoring each icy, syrup‑sweet mouthful as though it were part of some private ritual that he wanted no one else to be a part of.

I watched him in awe along with the crowd and laughed when Alonzo pulled a small group of kids into his groove.  “It’s all in the soul, you crumb crunchers!  Dance like your hair shines brighter than the stars,” he declared, a wide smile breaking through his elusive façade.  That night, he wasn’t the enigma they had speculated about.  He was the rhythm, the light, the joy.

That is what everyone wanted to believe.

By the time the party was over, it was said that Alonzo’s edges shone so bright it might have lit up all of Sage Pointe.  After the party, although he disappeared into the quiet mystery of his condominium once again, his name would be remembered as the man who brought the condominium association an evening they would never forget.

But in the weeks and months that followed, people began to notice something strange: no one saw Alonzo at church, or in the grocery line, or even passing by the barbershop window.  His apartment blinds stayed drawn, his mailbox appeared untouched.  Some said he’d moved away; others whispered he’d simply slipped into the night the way he’d always lived— quietly, without explanation.  His silver car would be in his parking spot, and sometimes not.  His monthly assessments still were paid in full and on time.  But no one actually saw him.

Now on certain humid evenings, when the streetlights flicker and the cicadas fall silent, a few swear they’ve seen a glint, just a brief flash, like moonlight on patent leather, disappearing around the corner before they can call his name.  And in Sage Pointe, that is enough to keep the legend alive.

In time, the condominium association learned to stop asking where Alonzo had gone.  Life in Sage Pointe moved on, as it always does, yet something in the air felt slightly altered, as though a faint shimmer had been left behind.  The wooden dance floor where he’d once spun the children around seemed to hold a deeper polish, catching the light in ways no one could quite explain.  And every so often, when the dusk settled low and the streetlamps hummed to life, someone would pause mid‑stride, certain they’d caught the scent of pomade or felt the whisper of a beat only Alonzo could hear.  Whether he had slipped away to some quieter corner of the world or simply stepped into the shadows he’d always belonged to, no one could say.  But the memory of that night, and the man whose hair shone like a secret, lingered in Sage Pointe like a story half‑told, waiting forever for the rest of its truth to surface.

 

 

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Cutting the Mustard.

A Lesson in Gluttony and Control.

Finally, there is only French’s® yellow and Gulden’s® brown on my pantry shelf.

Once upon a time, that space was also shared – packed, in fact – with small jars holding other variations: champagne, chipotle, curry, honey, jalapeno, siracha, Dijon, . . .

Then, one day, I said aloud, “That’s it!  No more of these yuppified wannabees!”

And Lo!  The clouds parted and the sun came out.  Best Friend assented my exclamation with a “Hear!  Hear!”

We do like mustard.  It was easy to pick up a small jar of something a little different when we stopped by our local winery.  What’s a two-ounce jar of champagne honey mustard?  It didn’t take up much refrigerator shelf space along with the other six or seven two-ounce jars.

Yet, that one day, I had enough.  Those “specialty” mustards began tasting pretty much alike.  There wasn’t anything special about them anymore, except perhaps their unusually shaped jars that really had no further purpose for me after the last bit of mustard was scraped from the sides.

I was throwing money out the proverbial window.  And for what?  To feel like we were indulging in something special or upper class?

Pfffft.  It was a waste.  We said right then and there that those types of mustards won’t darken our doors again.  From then on, it will be a bottle of yellow, a bottle of brown, and a jar of Dijon.  That’s all!  No more yuppy mustard, as we call it.  No more fancy-this and fancy-that.

Along the same lines, in fact, the equivalent goes for fancy horseradish – I have a bottle of siracha horseradish that I bought a few weeks ago from a mom-and-pop grocery store in a neighboring town.  Is it anything special?  No, not really.  It’s really not what I expected; it’s not any hotter or spicier than regular horseradish, and it has a strange, sweet background taste to it.  I could kick myself for not reading the ingredients list better, because this bottle of weirdness has corn syrup in it.  (We’re cutting out corn syrup from our diet).  So, if I want the kick that siracha gives to my bowl of pho or broiled chicken or vegetable stir fry, I can get the siracha bottle from the refrigerator and squeeze a shot or two on my plate.  If I want horseradish, I can make my own fresh or buy a jar of straight horseradish.  I don’t need an odd yuppie horseradish-siracha concoction. Keeping it simple, silly!

So, we’re cutting the mustard.  We’re keeping it unpretentious.  Now on the refrigerator shelf sits a container of yellow, a bottle of brown, and there is a space for Dijon because I need that specifically for making Steak Diane.  Otherwise, any other types of strange mustards will remain on the store and winery shelves, available for other shoppers and connoisseurs to fill up their refrigerators and sate their taste buds with frou-frou table mustards.

It’s minimalism for us now.

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