Most people think of a six-pack as a holding device for soda or beer. I think of yogurt.
For the past 20 years I have bought yogurt by the case, six quart-size containers per case. Most shoppers never see the case, just individual quart containers on a shelf.
But I shop at Stern’s Quality Produce in White River Junction, and when owner Judy Stern noticed 20 years ago that I was lining up at the cash register with four or five quarts of yogurt precariously piled in my hands, she said “Why don’t you just buy a case?”
“I didn’t know they came in a case,” I answered.
“I’ll put an extra case on my order for you,” she said, and we were off on what became a 20-year ritual.
After she showed me what a case looked like (six yogurt tubs wrapped in plastic with stackable cardboard platforms), she said, “Just go in the cooler and get one yourself ” and for the last 20 years I have had the unique experience of walking down her creaky wooden office hallway, quietly opening a giant metal door that looks like Fort Knox and venturing inside the cooler.
Sometimes when I came out with a six-pack in my arms an employee would look at me like I was a thief, with surprised eyes that said, “What the heck are you doing in the cooler anyway?”
I would explain, “Judy lets me go in there,” and they would instantly understand.
I loved having that privilege. And secretly I loved having staff eating crow when they discovered I was legitimate and not just some yogurt thief.
So you can imagine how sad I was to hear that Stern’s will cease to exist at the end of the month. It’s hard to end a 20-year ritual.
When you’re inside the cooler you can peer out from inside the display case at the customers, but the customers barely notice you are inside creeping around. There, on the floor, every 10 days or so for the last 20 years, stood a stack of 10 cases of quart six-packs of plain yogurt, including the one extra six-pack on top that Judy ordered for me.
I must have gone in that cooler 1,000 times. Let me do the arithmetic: I would buy a six-pack every 10 days or 36.5 times a year. Multiply that by 10 years and it equals 365 freezer “break-ins” per decade.
Now multiply that 365 by two decades and that makes 730 times I’ve grabbed that giant cooler door handle to crack open the huge metal door and got a whoosh of arctic air in the process.
It felt so good in the summertime.
When Stern’s closes at the end of this month I will have bought and eaten a mountain of yogurt: six quarts times 730 purchases makes 4,380 quarts of yogurt.
Could one human being eat that much yogurt? I guess so.
Actually I should deduct several weeks from the 730 calculation for days I spent on fellowships as a high school teacher at the Civil War Institute in the summer and two National Endowment for the Humanities seminars at Amherst College and the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore., and for a heart attack and a kidney removal (neither of which was caused by yogurt consumption, I assure you).
That reduced the number to 3,822 quarts that I’ve bought at Stern’s, and eaten, over a 20 year period.
By the way, I once told a doctor that I have consumed a quart of yogurt every day or two for 20 years and he replied, “No one should have that many lacto-bacilli in their colon.”
Well it’s better than alcohol or tobacco or drugs, thought I. And besides, I’m still on my feet at 74.
Yogurt must be treating me right. Right?
The famous actress Gloria Swanson was a health food fan before healthy eating was a thing. When she died at 76, journalists wondered whether health food had lengthened or shortened her life. The joke at the time was “Her death certificate listed her cause of death as ‘Riddled with yogurt.’ ”
I could do worse.
My secret decades of cooler-break-ins to get my stash of lacto-bacilli was a kind of private joke among the Stern’s staff and me.
I’m going to miss them.
I even bought them a cake that read “Thank you to Stern’s for 3,822 quarts of yogurt. LOL!”
And I surely will miss Judy Stern and her 20 years of kindness to me.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.