Bagel with a Schmear

I do love a good bagel. And I don’t mean those mass produced, white-bread, bagged things from the supermarket. I mean a freshly made bagel from a proper bagel shop.
As any connoisseur of bagels knows, the best complement to a quality bagel is cream cheese. Some nova or lox doesn’t hurt either. Salmon-infused cream cheese or “salmon spread” as they would call it, is also acceptable. But, if you’re putting peanut butter and jelly on a bagel, don’t talk to me. Next, you’ll be putting ketchup on ice cream.

Last week at the bagel shop, a young woman ordered vegetable spread. I asked her if she actually liked it. “Well, it’s healthier,” she said. My feeling is if you’re ordering vegetable spread to feel healthier, then just eat a damn salad. Vegetable spread isn’t going to lower your cholesterol or make it “heart healthy.” Cream cheese has one dietary purpose: to clog arteries. It even has the consistency of spackle, just to give you a hint. The mental games people play.

However, being a contrarian, I don’t want to clog my arteries. So, I ask for a “schmear” of cream cheese, which means a thin coating. More cream cheese doesn’t mean more taste. Schmear is the Germanic word, from which we derive “smear,” which is most likely heard in Yiddish.

Unfortunately, the minimum-wage teenagers don’t understand the schmear concept, as they grew up in the “supersize me” generation that always thinks more is better. Things like cholesterol and moderation are beyond their ken. (And yes, they think ken is Barbie’s boyfriend.)

So instead, I now explicitly ask for “a smear of cream cheese only about a millimeter thick.” But given the poor state of our education system, they have no grasp of metric either. So instead, I receive the usual massive glob of cream cheese that oozes out when the slightest pressure is applied to the top and bottom sections of the bagel. So then, I have to ask for a second bagel and a knife, do some redistribution and spackling, and save the extra bagel for later.

Life is so damn complicated. Crank on.