I had a dream in which somebody from Owen house called us to ask if they could take some of our canning jars to do some canning. Jane was on the phone with them, and is an advocate of canning. With little else to think about at the time, I was eavesdropping casually. I overheard Jane saying “Well, we’ve got a bunch of stuff in our jars right now. But I suppose we could take them out of the jars and put them in the freezer so you could borrow the jars…”

At this point, I felt I needed to intercede. “Hey, let me have the phone,” I said to Jane. She handed it over. She had been a little bit flustered to have been talking on the house phone at all, and especially to be negotiating business with someone she didn’t know, so she was glad to hand over the responsibility to the veteran co-oper.

What followed was a very long scene of me explaining, in a very verbose and thorough fashion, exactly why this guy’s request was ridiculous.

“Were you aware that canning jars are sold at stores? Yes, they’re not exactly something that you can share in this manner. However, fortunately for you, you can go buy them at places like Downtown Home and Garden, or probably even Meijer.”

(a scene cut occurs here, to imply that this conversation went on much longer than was pictured. Somehow, I had wandered all the way to Burns Park during this conversation and was sitting on the swings, still railing on this guy about his stupid canning plans.)

“Furthermore, I don’t know what the heck you were thinking of canning! In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not much growing and being harvested around here right now. What are you going to do? Purchase stuff from California at full price and can that just for the heck of it? You could get that stuff shipped to you all winter, dude. The purpose of canning is to save you some money and let you eat local all winter. You gotta go get U-pick stuff during the summer. Just pick bushel after bushel of green beans and can that up. I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but it’s not at all useful, and you shouldn’t be taking up our jars to do it and… Hello? Hello? And another thing.”

He hadn’t said anything for a long time, so I started to suspect that he had hung up, but I was on a roll. I just kept going.

That dream ended with a big fade out of me still rambling. I had just gotten on to the subject of peaches when the dream was over.

Man oh man!