Theft by Finding - David Sedaris

Amy gave me her old toaster, which I put in the pantry and forgot about until last night at two a.m.
I’d already had dinner, and plenty of it, but still I made two peanut butter sandwiches with canned
peaches on them. I don’t eat like this when there’s no pot in the house, but now I’m back to sucking up
everything in my path. Peanut butter and peaches? Since when do those two things go together?
July 30, 1989
Chicago
I was standing on Clark Street when an elderly woman approached riding one of those electric
carts people take to when they’re not quite crippled enough for a wheelchair. “Out of my way,
asshole,” she said. I moved to the side, and after driving a couple of feet past me, she chained her
little chariot to a parking meter and hobbled into the restaurant I had just walked out of.
July 31, 1989
Chicago
Jewel is having a sale on chickens, 49 cents a pound, so I bought several and stood in line reading
an article in New Woman titled “Infidelity: How to Keep Your Man from Straying.” It included
several warning signs, as you need to know when your boyfriend or husband is feeling insecure and
neglected. You need to take notice when he loses interest in sex, and you have to fight, fight, fight to
win him back. The article suggested that a man’s infidelity is always the wife’s or girlfriend’s fault. It
never considers that maybe he’s just an asshole.
August 7, 1989
Chicago
Anatole Broyard on Jane and Paul Bowles in this week’s New York Times Book Review: “Their
marriage was so open it yawned.”
The blind fellow was at the IHOP last night with his father, and I listened as they discussed
geography, particularly the states that make up the Great Plains, the Sunbelt, and the original thirteen
colonies. Then he asked his dad about New York City, saying he’d heard they have no alleys there and
that the people are rude.
“Rudest sons of bitches on the face of this earth,” his father said. “It’s crammed full of rude people
and rich foreigners—Jews, Arabs, Japs—and they make it so you can’t afford to shit.”
The blind guy has a small voice and is very polite. His eyes are in the far corners of their sockets.
Last night I noticed a lot of food stains on his shirt. The blind guy’s father, when talking about New
York, reached behind himself and used his knife to scratch his back.