Alfred and the Surplus Buns

            My cousin Alfred, baseball and spring have everything to do with ‘The Surplus Buns’. You might have been wondering. That is what occurs when you buy packs of hot dogs along with packs of buns. The hot dog packs have ten. The bun packs have eight. Last spring, during one of my cousin Alfred’s more attentive moments, he noticed that after buying three packs of hot dogs and four packs of buns for a largish gathering at his house, that after all the dogs were gone, he had two buns left in a bag.

            I visited early in the spring last year, and observed Peg with her hands on her hips with a ‘look at you!’ expression for Fred, as he expounded on the ‘Hot Dog-Bun Complex’. Something he’d picked up on the internet. His voice found a slightly higher pitch as he said-

            “The two industries plan it that way. They’re in cahoots! They get you that way, you know. So you keep buying hot dogs, then more buns…” I’d never seen him so adamant, except if you count the time when they used the song ‘Like A Rainbow’ in a commercial. At least he’d found something relatively innocuous to become radical about. Peg had a photo she’d taken of Fred on her phone. He was frowning and holding up a bag with two buns in it.

            “It’s gone viral.”

            Now, when I buy hot dogs, I usually get a pack or two of cold cuts. When the hot dogs are finished, I go on to the cold cuts, making little hoagies with the little buns. I add mayo, leaf lettuce, and a slice of two of yummy tomato, and that’s a good meal. I didn’t tell Fred and Peg this, though. Instead, I followed Alfred’s campaign against the so-called ‘Hot Dog-Bun Complex’ on Facebook. There was the iconic photo, along with a short statement. The food pantry rejected his offerings of what was left in the bun packages. When he tried to feed them to the birds, a jealous squirrel dropped a walnut on Fred’s head from some height, resulting in a knot. So, then, another photo was included on his home page, a close shot of a finger pointing to the injury, but it looked like someone pointing to where an egg had been in a nest. But, it was the thought that counts. ‘The Hot Dog-Bun Complex’ had taken ‘First Blood’. A lot of people were following this. At times, I would contact Fred, or even visit, and I was also impressed by Peg’s reaction. She was the more practical one in that tiny household. But, she fully supported Fred’s efforts to expose this ‘complex’, and was a full participant in them. I doubted that the complex existed.  

            Of course, in my life, I am on a different mission. I seek the truth. I did the same research that Fred and Peg had on the internet, and found some of the same things about a potential Dog-Bun Complex, but I had a different take on it. Aside from one executive going laterally from a post at Hormel to one at Wonder Bread, there seemed to be no evidence. Until I simply looked in a hard-copy phone book. What I saw there made my blood turn cold.

            ‘Hot Dog-Bun Complex 3200 12^th.’

            The impunity! I immediately called Alfred, but he rarely picks up, or checks his voice mail. I left a message with hope. As it turned out, Fred listened to it soon after that, and this is what he heard-

            “Fred! Merle, here. I’ve found the Complex right under our noses! There in the phone book! I don’t know if it’s in the internet phone book, but it’s in the hard-copy one. Thirty-two hundred twelfth street! The bastards! They exist. I gotta tell you, I was skeptical, but now… I’m going there right now! We’ll hold these weasels to account! There has to be a law against it. ‘Manipulation of ingredients’, or something like that. The greedy, mean, manipulatory…manipulating… BASTARDS! There’s gotta be a law. Either on the books, or proposed, or just struck down. You can count on that. We’ll follow through! We’ll find out exactly what they’re doing, we’ll confront them, and we’ll go to the Better Business Bureau. If that doesn’t work, we’ll go to Senator Whatsisname! I’m going there now. Bye. Um. This is Merle. ‘beep. boop. beep!’ what the hell… ‘beep. rattle. click!’.”

            I took the teal bus.