Sad About Tuna

At C-Town this morning I noticed a brand of Tuna called Dolores. Such a strange name for Tuna. The name derives from a word meaning sad, but it doesn't make me sad because it reminds me of my wonderful aunt. Well, it is sad that she passed away but I like to think she's still around, joking, guiding me to stumble across a brand of tuna bearing her name. Just like I once wound up driving behind a car with plates that read AUNTDODO, which is what we all called her. While she was alive, she collected dolls and had a husband so sensitive he cried when he listened to Segovia play the guitar. It was very hard for a man like that to recover from losing his true love, but he did it.

I was three quarters down the aisle when I backtracked a little to look at an old man whose profile reminded me of my father's father. He was talking to a woman about his health, telling her he has been in tears for the last two weeks with some health problem. He blamed her, he said it was because of her damn ouija board. That's when I decided to continue eavesdropping. He said that the board talked to everyone but him, so he challenged it and shoved it under his bed. The next day he tore his achilles tendon which is not a good thing when you live in a 5 story walkup.

In another aisle I saw a woman shopping, her beautiful baby sitting silently in the seat of the cart like a tiny glowing buddha. I had seen her when I first entered the store about 10 minutes ago, and now I was seeing her again, but she didn't have a single thing in her cart. I complimented her on her baby, and she spoke to me a little, with a foreign accent. I started to wonder if that was why she wasn't buying anything, maybe nothing was familiar. Maybe she doesn't trust American food. I know it's hard to switch from European bread to the kind we make here. I once new an exchange student from Spain who wouldn't go near American grocery store bread.

Tuna has been something I've been reluctant to go near since childhood when I learned about the dolphins killed in tuna nets. But I love to eat tuna, and so did the teachers at my elementary school, who weren't happy when I set up a booth to collect donations and disseminate information about the dolphin slaughter. I only got to do that one time.

The NYT reported that there are other reasons to avoid tuna, or at least just eat it once every three weeks. According to the article "The highest mercury concentration, 1.4 parts per million, was found in tuna from Blue Ribbon Sushi. The lowest, 0.10, was bought at Fairway. Why so much mercury? Can the oceans, as vast as they are, really be that polluted?