Family table
If you want to get decadent, peel four cloves of garlic. Take the bread – Acme sourdough works well, and it doesn’t have to be stale – and slice it thickly into four to six pieces. You can cube it or you can keep the slices. It depends on your willpower, what you are going for. Heat four tablespoons of olive oil in a large sauté pan (low to medium heat), toss in the garlic cloves, and cook, stirring occasionally until they are golden brown on all sides. Remove the golden cloves. Cool them. Eat them. Puree them. Smash them with a knife and breath in the scent of tamed garlic.
Turn up the heat – not too much – and toss the bread cubes/slices into the hot oil. They will sizzle. They will drink in the garlic-scented oil and turn crisp with joy at what they are about to become. Stir them occasionally, until they are mostly brown, and then remove them from the pan.
Try your best to let them cool. Try your best not to eat them all before the family comes into the kitchen and claims theirs. Wait for the salad, for the romaine and the chickpeas and the feta, for the red onion and cherry tomatoes and kalamatas, for the red bell pepper and vinaigrette. Wait! Wait I tell you!
If food was purely love and not also fuel, then this is what I might make every night. Croutons. Real macaroni and cheese, bubbling and unctuous. The things that we used to call things (corn tortillas, faux sausage patties, salsa, green onions, tomatoes, jalapenos, cheddar cheese, avocado and sour cream cooked on a griddle until the tortilla was crisp and the cheese was melty, a combination of spicy, crunchy, and smooth). Pumpkin waffles, despite the dog’s fear of the iron’s dangerous beep.
Every Saturday morning I used to make pancakes, always the same, oatmeal batter with blueberries, and then I just stopped. Maybe this was the end, the line in the sand, the snap of the rope. I took one step back, and then another, watched them as they sat with their cereal, as they got smaller and smaller. I accepted that some children might like prepared rice and beans better than my own. I had ideas about the dinner table and family, ideas from an early life of meals where I was excluded or ridiculed. I swore this would never happen in my own family and so I made it easy, with as little conflict as possible.
If food was purely a combination of love and fuel and not also a tug on the heart, if childhood meals and tables weren't forever linked in my mind with my worth, with myself, the separation would not feel necessary. While they talk, I let my mind wander. I think about the dishes waiting to be cleaned, the lunches I have to make, the next task, because the moment is so hard to be in, with its associations, its sad recipes and I wonder if they notice me as I float above the room.
From the prompt "The wall."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. I tightened this one up a bit. And please remember that these prompts are just little snapshots of writing, that they don't necessarily represent my continual internal state. In other words, it's not always that bad.
Image by kevindooley.