The Short Happy Life of a Packet of Heinz Ketchup

Despite his many afflictions and disabilities, Trace insisted upon walking to the Albertson’s market at the corner of Verdugo and Hollywood Way almost every afternoon, weather notwithstanding, to fetch a bottle of affordable wine or a six-pack of cheap beer and a box of the finest coffin nails from the tobacco fields and factories of Phillip Morris.

Trace walked with a cane, of course, because it had become difficult and extremely painful to move more than ten feet without assistance as his psoriatic arthritis advanced like creeping doom over the years. With his cane and limping stride, baseball cap perched on his head, and a canvas City Lights Books grocery tote bag slung over his shoulder, Trace became a familiar sight to the residents of the tranquil tree-lined Burbank street that led to the grocery store; neighbors on their front lawns would wave at him as he passed by or give a little toot on their car horns.

One sun-blasted afternoon in June as he was taking his ritual stroll, looking down as he walked to avoid treacherous cracks in the sidewalks from tree roots grasping desperately for water, Trace spied a small plastic packet of Heinz ketchup, the type that could be procured at the Del Taco fast food restaurant in the Albertson’s shopping center.

The packet of ketchup was almost perfectly positioned in the exact center of the sidewalk; it was plump and unmolested, brimming with tomato concentrate, sugar, distilled vinegar, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, and natural flavorings. Trace didn’t want to squash the packet underfoot or explode open its contents with the hard rubber tip of his cane so he circumnavigated around it and continued on his path to the grocery store.

For the next week as Trace made his daily journeys to Albertson’s, the Heinz ketchup packet continued to cause circumnavigations in his path; he thought for sure that a child’s bicycle, a jogger’s running shoe, a gardener’s leaf blower, or a hungry pigeon would have dispatched the ketchup package to the dust bin of irrelevant history but there it rested, defiant, baking in the sun, its contents certainly no longer edible or useful for anyone’s purpose. Night and day, sunup and sundown, morning dew and blistering afternoon sun, the Heinz ketchup package endured.

It was on a Friday afternoon shortly after four o’clock that Trace, on his usual rounds, discovered the mortal remains of the Heinz ketchup packet; clearly, it had been stomped upon, probably by a mischievous child. There was an uneven split seam down the center and its plasma-like contents were strewn across the sidewalk. The sun was baking the red goo into a shade of reddish-brown. Every last drop of tomato concentrate had been viciously, aggressively crushed out of the small white packet, exploding like an overheated supernova into oblivion.

Trace stepped around the mass of red goo on the sidewalk, considered it for a long, contemplative moment, and decided that he would splurge on a twelve-pack of Modelo that afternoon.