In his waning years, my rancher dad sat sleepy-eyed on his couch, regaling stories about his working days. His dreams, he said, included details that he was still branding, still fixing balers, mending fences, putting away his hay for the winter and tending his cattle.
These were vivid dreams that followed him throughout the waking hours. And of a life he loved dearly.
I can relate.
Even now that I have recently retired, I still have dreams about overseeing produce departments, either as a supervisor or a manager. Mostly, these dreams involve meeting a deadline, such as keeping up with volume or sending in an order on time.
Recently my own vivid dream was about a grand opening somewhere. I was tasked with keeping the wet rack stocked amid wall-to-wall customers. This really happened, many times. Our grand openings for new or remodeled stores often included insane low-priced specials. It was like chumming for fish, aiming to attract as many customers as possible. It worked.
In one such summer grand opening, we offered a larger-sized 12-count cantaloupe for something crazy, like two for a buck. We built a massive 14-pallet display and sold three semis of melons on the first day, three on the second and at least one straight load (20-some pallets) until the ad finally ended. I was worried about rotation for such a monster-sized display. “Don’t worry,” said the manager. “At that price the customers will rotate for us.”
But back to my crazy, dream sequence with the wet rack.
I couldn’t keep up the pace and felt swallowed up by the traffic. If you’ve ever been in such a tight spot, you know it takes forever just to wheel your loaded cart through the crowd to get to the display. Fortunately (in my dream), my friend Keith McCarrell was helping me. Since he’s tall, he was able to handle things easier, rearranging stacks of leafy greens in tubs extra-high.
I know what you’re thinking: Armand, you’re retired now. All this is behind you.
When you work over a half-century doing anything — ranching or working in the produce aisle — the subconscious mind takes over while snoozing. In fact, there’s no time to snooze, I think in my slumber. I just found a tray of escarole and endive in the cooler. How’d I miss these during setup? I dreamed about how the better-qualified setup people displayed the endive, folding back the greener, outer leaves to expose the beautiful, bright-yellow inner heart of the endive and how nicely it displayed that way, like giant flowers on the case.
In the next moment of my drowsy half-mindset, I recalled how I learned from Coosemans specialty produce years later that the chicory type of Belgian endive is pronounced ohn-deeve.
Crazy, mixed-up dream sequences all right. What finally woke me up (besides my old-man aches and pains) was realizing that my pal Keith and I were buyers together and never worked side by side in a store. I did, however, chat recently with my buddy Steve Abeyta. (You may remember him; he was the one with numerous, contrived grandmothers whose untimely demises he conjured up on occasion to justify getting a coveted Saturday off.)
Steve invited me to get together with a couple of other old produce buddies soon for lunch, which I will now have time for, to rehash old stories and reflecting on characters (colorful customers and fellow employees) who intertwined the many years of retail, of countless store openings and too many instances, both somber and humorous, to talk about in one lunch setting — which is why they meet every so often. I’m looking forward to it and happy to be included.
I also need to reach out to my wet-rack mate Keith and thank him for bailing me out — even if it was, you know, just a dream.
Armand Lobato’s more than 50 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions. He is retired from the Idaho Potato Commission and has written a weekly retail column for nearly two decades.