I once took the bus from Manhattan to Albuquerque.
With the money I saved, I bought a pair of purple cowgirl boots that I foolishly took to Goodwill–and frequently mourn.
The journey out was zen-like; we crossed into New Mexico as Aquarius played in my headphones, and the first perfect snowflakes tumbled from the sky.
On the way home, however, there were two arrests at the state border. A woman became suddenly and violently deranged, and we waited again for police. When the bus caught fire, I huddled on the side of the freeway, pledging to fly next time.
Pumpkin pie often turns out as 448C: the most unappetizing color known to humankind, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
Despite unending mountains of dishes, I love Thanksgiving. Gratitude is a potent tonic for many ills, and all others can be cured by a good meal with loved ones plus a couple of days off.
What I don’t love is the traditional Thanksgiving menu.
Luckily, no one in my posse complained when turkey was jettisoned for the moister, far tastier roast chicken, and banning marshmallows was a breeze. If only they recognized pumpkin pie as the clammy, odd-textured abomination it is. Squash should be savory. Let’s make a nice soup instead–with a little sage, perhaps–and follow with chocolate.
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P.S. I thought I was alone in my lukewarm response to the classic turkey dinner until I read a piece in the New Yorker entitled, “Wonton Lust.” Here’s a brief excerpt from Calvin Trillin’s brilliant essay:
“The Thanksgiving ritual is based on eating, and, in that spirit, I particularly want to give thanks for the Immigration Act of 1965. Until then, this country virtually excluded Chinese while letting in as many English people as cared to come–a policy that in culinary terms bordered on the suicidal…. Naturally, I’d speak during [our Thanksgiving] meal about what Americans should be grateful for. ‘If the Pilgrims had been followed to the New World only by other Pilgrims,’ I’d say to the girls between bites of duck with Chinese flowering chives, ‘we would now be eating overcooked cauliflowers and warm gray meat. So count your blessings, ladies.’”
I love raspberries, dark chocolate, decaf lattés, halibut with spicy mango salsa, potatoes mashed with cauliflower, cucumbers, french fries, crisp apples… but my most favorite food is: toast.
With a crunch like boots in snow, with butter pooling in the little troughs and valleys, leaving salty streams across my lips and fingers–what’s not to love?
Toast comforts me when I’m sick, when I’m sad, when I’m bored or peckish. It magically clears my head at day’s end.
Toast is like a warm hand on the belly; toast is perfect.
I remember when each hour crawled languorously before me—a caterpillar on sixteen tiny legs, inching from Pensacola to New York City and back before the mantel clock would chime again.
Two days before my birthday, I thought I might be 50 before I turned eleven.
Now the years skip about with surprising unpredictability, and I’m never certain how old I am on any given day. It’s not unusual for me to believe I’m in my late twenties–until I try to stay up past eleven, until I glance at my little ones, and realize we see eye to eye.
Last year, I went home to watch my father die–though I didn’t know it until I landed.
We gathered round him to sing and reminisce; to hold his hand and each other.
Twelve hours later, we were arranging logistics, designing a bulletin, planning the memorial.
One by one my siblings hopped their flights to head home, but there were still a few hours before mine.
Raw from crying, my mother, brother, and I ran out of things to say. We found ourselves in a booth at Dairy Queen, eating a Blizzard, a Buster Bar, a slushie, wondering, what next?
At the last of a long string of unpaid internships, I was sent on an errand with the gallery owner. He asked repeatedly for my name, then shrugged. “No. I’m not going to remember you. Interns come and go.” He may have seen me bristle, because he added, somewhat apologetically: “Maybe if you tell me something about yourself.”
Then conversation unfolded in the most surprising fashion, until suddenly he was pulling over to the curb through three lanes of traffic to tell me, “There is no truth but the human heart; nothing greater than tenderness in the face of adversity.”
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Note: Today’s post is the fourth in a series of 100-word pieces I’ve been writing in solidarity with NaNoWriMo. Couldn’t commit to the 50,000 words, but I could do a lot more than I have been…and at 100 words a day, I’ll finish on March 22, 2017.
During summer days we roasted on ladders, scraping and painting our little red house. My sister wore her impossibly orange bikini and basted with baby oil. I wore cutoffs and brought the radio. Never venturing beyond the first story, we must have dribbled half a gallon of stain on the driveway, but at $1 an hour, management wasn’t complaining.
At the end of our shifts, we would wrap the brushes in foil and tuck them in the freezer.
Dubbed “the eternally painted house” by the neighbors, it was perhaps only a marginal improvement over the salmon eyesore it had been.
The scars are real; they still partly define me, highlighting my insecurities and self-doubt. Yet, when I think back on my darkest of dark ages, I can see that my childhood was not simply good vs. evil.
The ones who bullied me have scars of their own, perhaps still buried deep in their closets with self-loathing and abuse.
And just because I was frequently the target does not mean I was beyond reproach.
With great shame I recall hiding in the backseat, tying my shoes for an eternity, so no one would know I had arrived with the fat girl.
Bad Parenting 101 
