Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie

Interlude: Wherein We Talk About Peanut Butter
Skippy. That’s the kind of peanut butter I grew up on. When I was a really little kid my mom would make us peanut butter sandwiches with Skippy peanut butter. I liked mine without jelly and no crust. She would cut the crust off if she was in a good mood, and she wouldn’t if she wasn’t.
By the time I was a teenager for reasons unknown to me, my mom stopped bringing Skippy peanut butter home, and started bringing Peter Pan peanut butter instead. I loved it. This after she had, maybe once or twice; brought home Jif. Man I hate Jif. It tastes like the nuts were burned in the fires of Hell and topped with a fresh turd. Peter Pan, I was still eating Peter Pan when I moved into an apartment all my own way back in 1995. In fact I was so poor that sometimes I would eat PB&J two times a day, and I’m not complaining. I loved it.
So how is this a confession you may be wondering? Okay. My parents had six kids, and I can’t vouch for all of them, but most of us ate peanut butter on a regular basis, and I know for a fact that I ate peanut butter just about every single day. Again this is neither a complaint nor a rage against my parent’s ability to provide for me. I loved peanut butter just as much then as I do now. It may be, in some small way a confession and an apology. See when we were kids, when the jar of peanut butter got pretty close to empty, when you couldn’t really get any more peanut butter out of the jar with the use of a regular knife, we kids would just pitch the jar of peanut butter into the trash. As far as we were concerned it was empty.
“But it’s not empty,” my mother and father would say. “There’s still some in there. All you have to do is get a spatula and scrape the rest out.”
We kids shook our heads at this madness. Spatula? Scrape? Please! We kids had no idea, no clue what ever of the true value of a dollar, and what it means to get your moneys worth., to get every last drop of peanut butter out of the jar. Lot’s of peanut butter got totally and completely wasted.
I’m a grown man now, and homeless. I haven’t owned and operated a jar of Peter Pan (or any other kind of peanut butter for that matter) in over 18 months. It’s something I miss. Comfort. Food. Comfort food. Now for the confession. In my old apartment, hell in all of my apartments, devoid of furnishings save a chair, a couple of lamps, an entertainment center, and a bed, I would often have five or six jars of peanut butter. Peter Pan of course. It’s the kind I like. One would be full or fresh, and the others would be just about empty. I never ever threw a jar of peanut butter out. Not until I got out my spatula and scraped every last bit of peanut butter out of the jar. Every last bit. I would then combine the globs of peanut butter into one jar, or make a couple of peanut butter sandwiches with it right then and there. I had finally learned the value of a dollar, and was always ready and willing to get my last pennies worth of peanut butter out of the jar, and I secretly hated myself for disobeying my parents, for not listening to them when I was kid and getting out the spatula and scraping out the very last drop. It didn’t feel cheap when I did it as an adult. It felt good. Like I had some how triumphed, like I had won. ****
I was not affected by the peanut butter recall that happened on or about February of 2007. As I was homeless I had not been to the store to buy peanut butter in months. Had I been living in my old apartment I think that there is a good chance that I could very well have been affected by the Salmonella scare as it did involve my favorite brand of peanut butter: Peter Pan.