It's like Tuesdays with Morrie without all the wisdom
Posts tagged growing up
In Which I Fondly Remember my First Pork Roast
3April 8, 2009
It’s spring break around here for my nieces. Truthfully, my kids have been on spring break since the end of February. That’s how it always goes with us. We take a huge break from doing math from the end of winter until about May and then we get back into the swing of things. Sometimes I have them go to Quizlet.com and play games there, but not while their cousins are here. For sure.
I posted some pictures of my messy, messy, nothing is where it actually goes house. It’s extra messy because of the sleepover/spring break/let’s not make the children do chores attitude that’s going on this week. It felt false to kick the blankets/stuffed animals/toys out of the way before snapping pics like this:
That’s what the basement looks like every morning this week. Oh well. At least there are some sweet pictures like this to maybe redeem me:
How could I make these sweet girls clean up their bedding? What kind of a monster would I be? They’re obviously chillin’.
So I made a couple of pork roasts in the crockpot the other day and turned them into shredded pork bbq. It was yummy, but that’s not the point. Certain foods in my life are tied to memories of certain people. I don’t want to say that the food is the most important part of the memory and the person is just secondary, but it seems like my most vivid memories of people have to do with food.
Every single time I make a pork roast, I think of my ex-stepdad, Marc. When I was a junior in high school, he and my mom got married. Not only were we able to move out of our apartment up above Dave’s bar, but this marriage came with a Sam’s Club card and a dude that was a great cook. (Yes, those facts were more important to me than the fact that my mom was also able to get rid of that perpetually muffler-less Chevette in favof the Beretta of Hotness.) After 7 years eating frozen chicken patties, chili, spaghetti, canned ravioli, steak ums, and the like, I couldn’t believe it when I came home from a greuling softball practice with my friend Katie, “starving for death” as Maya would say and Marc had a pork roast in the crockpot. A pork roast with onions, potatoes, carrots and special seasonings. I instantly started drooling, asked him what it was, and then proceeded to eat half the thing over the kitchen sink. With my hands. Like an orphan. I’m pretty sure I grunted and hunched to warn the other animals not to touch my food. I can’t speak for Katie, but “scarfing it down” doesn’t even begin to describe what I was doing. I know for sure that I didn’t even take the time to put my softball glove down. It was still clutched in my armpit. I was starving for death and there was real food. And my stepdad is the type of person who doesn’t know you love him unless you’re eating his food. Especially if you’re eating it over the sink, straight out of the pot, which, as anybody knows, is the best way to eat food.
NOOOOO!
12July 14, 2008
I can’t describe the strong reaction that I had upon reading this headline: Belgian Brewer InBev to Buy Anheuser-Busch for$52B
No! I just heard on NPR that AB was all, “You’re mean! We don’t need your money! And, hello? Cuba? Please,” and that was very comforting to somebody who grew up on Busch Light (after graduating from wine coolers and Boone’s Farm, of course). When I moved on from the watery taste of Busch Light, it was the watery taste of Bud Light that I loved. I felt more sophisticated. Bud Light was a grown-up beer. On special occasions, such as 8th grade graduation, I bought it in bottles instead of cans. In college I experimented a little bit with Bud Ice Light and Zima, but everybody experiments in college and nobody should be judged for that. When I moved to Arizona at 19 and my brother sneered over my shoulder every time I ordered my tried-and-true favorite, I branched out a little bit and started enjoying Bass Ale, which is an import, but it’s distributed by Anheuser-Busch, so it was ok.
Even though nowadays I don’t really stick with the AB brand all that much, it’s still a piece of my childhood. I don’t buy Fun Dip anymore, either, but it still holds a special place in my heart and I would prefer that it was still called Lik-m-ade like it was when I was young. And you know how at the end of the Bud commercials, the deep-voiced announcer says, “Anheuser-Busch, St. Louis, Missouri”? That just feels like home to me. If he starts saying, “Anheuser-Busch InBev, St. Louis, Missouri, Belgium, Cuba,” that just won’t feel right.
New Bedrooms, Old Memories
8July 8, 2008
We switched the bedrooms around so all 3 girls have their very own room for the first time ever. Lena and Liberty have always shared a room and when Maya started beginning the night in a bed other than mine, it was Liberty’s bed she wanted to be in. Recently, though, their accumulation of stuff and clothes has made me very annoyed with the closet/bookshelf/toybox situation so I broached the subject of splitting them all up into their own rooms with their very own closets. Everybody was on board, so we went for it.
Yesterday was the first full day of lone bedroomdom and Lena used most of the day to lounge on her bed listening to her mp3 player with headphones on, singing right out loud to all manner of tween songs, both local and foreign. It was just as adorable as you’d think, but it also brought back one of my most awful childhood memories: When my brother was a teenager, he would put on his headphones and sing RATT and W.A.S.P. and Black Sabbath very badly and very loudly. Constantly. He wasn’t adorable. And he wouldn’t shut up. I at least had to good sense to turn my portable tape player up really loud in order to try to drown out my own voice when I was singing in my room. Not my brother. And, though he can sing very well now, back then, with his headphones on, singing his devil music, it was just painful to hear. Also, my portable tape player didn’t have a very high volume, so sometimes his voice drowned out my Cyndi Lauper. Not cool. Even if I didn’t know what She Bop was talking about, I still thought it was a kick-ass song and I wanted to hear it without some dumb boy singing “Round and round, what comes around goes around, I’ll tell you whyyy!”
It makes me shudder and it occurs to me that I’ve never addressed this deeply repressed childhood memory in therapy. Excuse me while I make a phone call.
Don’t Break into My House
6June 4, 2008
I’ll be doing this today:
It’s true.
I’ll be gone for a week with very slow internets that make me feel like I might experience a brain bleed from the trauma of watching the hourglass spin while I try to force lots of thick and juicy information through the narrow inter-tubes. I’ll miss you. If you know where I live, don’t break into my house while I’m gone. I don’t have anything to steal because we’re taking all of our expensive stuff (like Lena and Liberty’s DS games) with us. Also, you’ll never find where we hide our p@rn, so don’t even try it. Ha, I’m kidding! It’s right where you’d expect it to be. Kidding! God, take a joke.
That reminds me, when I was around 8 or so, I broke into my neighbor’s house to steal blueberry p*p-tarts because we never, ever had those in our own house and I really, really wanted some. They were soooo yummy, but then the guilt made them taste bad. My brother and sister love to make fun of me for doing that, but they used to break into the other neighbor’s garage to steal pop on a regular basis. And they wouldn’t share with me. I don’t know why I never told on them. I’m going to have to remedy that when I get to Michigan tonight.
Anyway, we’re taking our junk food with us, too, so just don’t even bother.
My Baby Nephew is a Grown-Ass Man
3June 3, 2008
And we’re going to Chesaning this weekend to celebrate him and his high school graduation. He was born a day before my 15th birthday and he was every bit the adorable pudgy little doll baby. I loved driving him around in my sweet muffler-less Chevette and feeding him Happy Meals while he yelled out, “Putt-putt!” every time he saw a tractor in a field or “Who dat?” every time I waved at a passing car. He called me Aunt Babby and liked to play with my big, permed hair. And I don’t mean he liked to twirl a piece around his fingers while drifting off to sleep. He would say, “Can I hode your hair Aunt Babby?” and I would sit on the floor while he stood behind me and played with my hair. With his face. And his drool. He was endearingly odd in that way, but I let him do it because he was my sweet little first-born nephew. He also used to use his eight thousand toy tractors (which he still has) to make elaborate farms and if you happened to need to walk through his play space, he would screech, “DON’T STEP ON MY FIEEEELD!” Very serious business, carpet farming. Sometimes we would have to pole vault over his precious farmland in order to get through to the bathroom.
And now he’s all grown up and only calls me Babby if he’s trying to get me to do something for him, which works every time. He doesn’t drool in my hair anymore while piling it on top of his face. And maybe he doesn’t play with his toy tractors anymore (that’s a big maybe), but that would only be because he gets to drive the real ones with real crops, which is no different than playing. But he’s still my nephew and I still adore him and I’m so looking forward to seeing who he becomes in this next phase of life. And I reserve the right to make him call me Aunt Babby for the rest of my life.
