A lot of people think door-to-door salespeople are a bit fishy, but I have the fishiest salesman of all.
He shows up every couple months or so in his white van full of freezers and — you guessed it — seafood.
The first time he appeared it was August and I was knee deep in garden harvest. With a full work schedule and a freezer fat with produce, I had been putting off a trip to town for over two weeks. We had been out of meat for days. Darcy is willing to put up with my vegetarian ways for awhile, but then he gets like that cranky old lady in the burger commercial demanding, “Where’s the beef?”
So when the fish guy showed up on our back country roads, twenty miles from nowhere, I put away any misgivings, got out my cheque book and chose a box that looked like it would fit in the freezer. Maybe it was because he had gone so long without meat, but Darcy thought it was the best thing he had ever tasted.
When the fish guy showed up again I bought another box and a few months after that another. When several months went by and he failed to return Darcy insisted I give the guy a call; making me the only person on the planet to actually solicit a door to door salesperson.
Having food delivered to your door is a bit of a novelty; especially when you’ve grown up in the country. I can remember staying at my Aunt’s place in town and the excitement of having the milkman deliver glass bottles of milk and cream and packets of butter right to the door.
When the ice cream truck rolled by in the afternoon I thought I was going to lose my mind.
I guess we had our own version of doorstep dairy delivery; but we called it a cow. Daisy had a lovely moo, but it just didn’t compare to the bells and whistles of the ice cream truck.
Though it’s possible our city cousins thought differently. Familiarity and all that.
We did have the odd door to door salesperson show up in the country. They were usually hawking things like encyclopaedias or spices.
The most exciting one was the Electrolux vacuum salesman.
You wouldn’t think vacuum cleaners could be exciting, but this guy had a spiel that made even ice cream trucks seem boring.
To show us the suction he put one of our throw cushions in a garbage bag, wrapped the mouth of the bag around the nozzle and flipped on the switch.
The cushion deflated into a hard packed postage stamp of its former self. Not only that, we were reassured it now had all the dust mites sucked out of it.
Then he reversed the flow and tossed a little plastic ball onto the end of the nozzle where it shot in the air and bounced about in the back draft.
I can remember actually laughing and clapping my hands. It was like the Barnum and Bailey Circus had shown up in our living room. Then he had my mother bring out the pathetic machine we brazenly dared to call our vacuum cleaner and run it over a section of the carpet.
Then he snapped a brand new dust bag into the Electrolux and ran it over the same patch, extracting enough debris to horrify my mother into buying the machine on the spot.
We three kids were unreasonably ecstatic.
If my mother had any misgivings about shelling out a considerable amount of hard earned cash for the vacuum cleaner, they were lost in the weeks that followed as she watched her children fight over who got to vacuum. Those were dark days for dust mites. And throw cushions.
Thinking back, it’s enough to make me want carpets again. And throw cushions. And a vacuum cleaner.
Between personal aesthetics and allergies, we don’t have any carpet.
For our laminate and hardwood flooring I simply use a lightweight stick thingamajig that is part duster and part vacuum. It certainly doesn’t suck like the old Electrolux — and when it comes to vacuum cleaners you do want it to suck — but it gets the job done. And it takes up less room. But Barnum and Bailey’s it isn’t.
As for the fish guy, he showed up yesterday full of apologies. I was reassured we were back on his route, but I still bought two boxes just in case. And when Darcy arrived home to the smell of his favorite seafood cooking it was like the circus had come to town, or rather, to the country.
Shannon McKinnon is a humour columnist from Northern BC. You can read past columns by visiting www.shannonmckinnon.com