The Virtues of Thinly Sliced Cheese

I am visiting a friend who lives in a city close to the suburb where her parents raised her and where they still reside. They buy groceries for her from time to time, and it seems like every time I visit her, they show up with groceries. They buy deli meats and cheese and eggs and bacon and bread. The cheese is always very thinly sliced. I never eat thinly sliced cheese, but I can't stop eating it when I'm here visiting. She gets a massive 6-inch high stack of it: processed, sliced dairy cheese- that's the only information we get on the deli sticker. And it's so delicious to just let one thin, salty slice of it lay flaccidly on my tongue, wilting, while I contemplate the virtues of this cheese. It is not so much the flavor that is unique. It's pretty standard and you probably taste something like it on cheap burgers from non-franchise fast food restaurants and diners all over the place. What's notable is that it's a grocery product bought by my friend's parents for her. Since she was 10, they've bought the same cheese from the same grocery store chain. That's 20 years of the same cheese. Now you see, everybody else, meanwhile, has moved off to other cities and shinier, newer suburbs where we all shop at Whole Foods or we find a new and different affordable grocery store where we discover new favorite processed products that we buy at these new-to-know-you grocery stores. But my friend has her stalwart thinly sliced cheese from Giant Grocery in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and she will always have it. It's a dairy-fresh atavism. Not because no one eats thinly sliced cheese any more, but because no one eats the same thing from the same store for 20 years any more. We get restless, we get new goals, we get divorced, we eat different cheese. There is no constant. And that's why I love eating her thinly sliced cheese. Because continuity is something that's nice to visit once in a while, just like old friends with different worldviews.