The Search for Octopus Balls

"Mama," my nine-year-old son said.  "We need some octopus balls."

My eyeballs nearly popped out of my head.  "Excuse me?  What did you just say?"

The boy repeated himself.  "Octopus balls. We need to go get some.  They're really yummy!"

I didn't know whether to laugh or vomit.  I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts.  "Okay.  Are these some kind of sushi/Asian food?"

"Yeah, Mama.  My friend's mom made some for me. And she told me where to get them."  He slapped down a calendar with the store's name on it and a package wrapper of the stuff.

I looked at it dubiously.  "We'll see," I said.

Today I decided to find these octopus balls.  "Come on, Bubba.  Let's take a little trip."

We ended up in a Korean part of town.  All the stores had Korean signs.  All the people walking around were Korean.  And I didn't have a clue what the signs said, or what the people were saying.  We walked into the Korean supermarket.  Korean music was blaring on the speakers.  Korean salespeople with headsets on were blabbing about Asian pears and fish heads. In Korean, of coarse.  My boy and I were the only Caucasian people in the place.  We wandered around trying to find octopus balls.  We saw piles of live blue crabs squirming in buckets, ready for picking.  We saw whole fish lying on ice in the center of a main aisle.  We saw things, which I couldn't even begin to describe.  It was like walking into another country.

After wandering the store for thirty minutes, and not finding octopus balls, I decided to ask a worker.  "Excuse me.  Can you please tell me where the octopus balls are?"

She looked at me like I had three noses. She shook her head, said something in Korean, and walked away.

"Dude," I said.  "It looks like we're not going to find our octopus balls."

So we wandered around for another fifteen minutes, picked up some packages of food with Asian writing on them, that I have no idea what they are, but I'm going to feed them to my family anyway, and headed to the checkout.

That's when I spotted the Macaron cookies.  "Dude!  Normal food!"  Of course we had to get some.

So that's my story of the search for octopus balls.  If we survive eating the food we purchased, maybe we'll take a trip to the Atlantic Ocean and find some real octopus balls.  Or not!