Three Tipsy Butchers

Three Russian guys run the fresh-meat section of my neighborhood supermarket. Avi is the senior. He is a tall, slow-moving man with tired brown eyes and a heavy grey moustache.  Reuven, short, dark, and restless, wears a kippa and is an expert on the kashrut followed by all our ethnic groups. Sometimes I see him sitting outside the building, smoking a cigarette nervously. Serge is handsome and a little sardonic, with a gold loop in one ear. He likes to discuss kitchen equipment, becoming almost lyrical on the subject of knives. They joke and comment among themselves in Russian, and nothing that goes on in the supermarket escapes them. For some reason they call me “Miri,” which nobody else does.

I enjoy exchanging a word with all of them, but Avi is my pal. We talk recipes, commiserate over each other’s health tsuris, wish each other a “Shabbat Shalom” when I’m in the supermarket on a Friday. It’s become my habit to give him a bottle of my home-made wine every year on his birthday. If I forget his birthday, he’ll remind me, no problem. I know his taste: he likes wine to be on the sweet side.

So this year I took a bottle of my Summer Fruit wine around to the supermarket. This is a wine made with peaches, apples, pears, the odd bag of cherries, apricots, or strawberries that’s been sitting in the freezer. When the wine is ready, I add a tiny bottle of rose essence and let it sit for another couple of weeks. Each batch improves as my skills improve, and this year it was very good indeed. Kind of on the strong side, though. I had been careless about gauging the alcohol by volume, but figured it was around 15%.

Well, I gave it to Avi, who thanked me and put the bottle away quickly. The following week, I stopped by the fresh meat counter, and the three of them were there, smiling at me. I looked from one to the other. Actually, they were grinning.

“What is it? Something funny about me today?”

Reuven and Serge said nothing, but got on with their chopping and wiping spaces down, smiling all the while. Avi put on a mock-solemn face and said,

“You don’t know what a bomb you dropped here, Miri.”

I was startled. “For Heaven’s sake…was it my wine?”

“It was good. And strong! It must have had 17% abv. I opened the bottle here and we all drank some – next thing, we were all standing around laughing. The customers kept asking what was so funny. We couldn’t exactly tell them we’d been drinking on the job.”

The two others smirked. I rolled my eyes.

Next year, I’m baking Avi a cake.