Earlier this summer I admired the logo for the southern American supermarket chain Food Lion, a proud blue lion in a square lozenge.  I was enchanted by its graphic clarity and its Euro-regal pretensions.  It all seemed a bit much, and also exactly right, for a supermarket that stocked buckets of lard and a thousand varieties of barbecue sauce.  So I was surprised to spot the logo gracing a supermarket called Delhaize in Brussels.  It turns out that Food Lion is a subsidiary of the Belgian conglomerate (also called Delhaize) that owns the chain.  When they built the Food Lion brand they reused the same logo.

I imagined that the Food Lion lion had been concocted, “Mad Men” style, by an enterprising, low-ranking manager at the American headquarters in Salisbury, North Carolina sometime around 1962.  In a way the lion has become the mascot for my peripatetic summer.  What was there tying together my small-town Arkansas days and big-city European adventures?  “Le Lion,” was right there, all along, looking over me, and keeping me well.