My Favorite Cheese.

Hurray for 2am grocery shopping.

The green Cracker Barrel cheese, in a jumbo size no less, sat there on the Hawaii Kai Safeway shelf like Wilson Flannery, that blue-eyed sweetie who gave me his milk carton seedling at the end of the school day in 1st grade at Case Elementary, the closest thing to a long-stemmed rose I would ever receive for many years. Only Wilson would be 37 years old now. I might not recognize him.

That Cracker Barrel looked just the same, though. A little stouter; 20 oz instead of the usual 10 oz, but join the club, eh?

During college days this was my absolute favorite cheese. A block of Cracker Barrel Vermont Sharp White Cheddar & a fresh baguette from the Patisserie; this is what I sat down to at lunch time. At Silke's house we would boil pasta & mulch the entire 10 ounces on the jumbo grater. And in my sunlit dorm room, I would read my Oscar Wilde (I did read some of the assignments, you know) with a plate containing 2 slices of Healthnut bread & a third of a block of cheese. Or a plateful of the best crackers ever, Stoned Wheat Thins.

The red & yellow Cracker Barrels were found on most dairy shelves, but the green one could only be gotten at Star Kahala, & sometimes Times Kahala.

And then it disappeared. I'd look in vain at every cheese display at ever grocery store I went to, without hope. Red & yellow, no green. I visited the Kraft website to find that no one in Hawaii sold it. Until now. God bless you, Hawaii Kai Safeway.

My week just got brighter.