Food Tsunami

James likes to cook after I scrub the kitchen. It’s usually just meat, but occasionally he’ll throw a vegetable in there, provided it’s immersed in some sort of sauce he created from salad dressing, cheese and whatever he can find in the refrigerator door that hasn’t expired. One time, at 3:00 a.m. he handed me a plate that included bacon, country fried pork, and a slab of ham. I never know what to expect, but it’s usually complicated and involves every pan he can get his hands on. He often photographs his projects and posts them online along with his “secret” recipes. He’s a proud man.

Our kitchen is smaller than the master bathroom in my house in Grand Rapids. If you have to get into the fridge when someone else is in there, the other person has to step into the oven. I try not to go in there when he’s working his food magic unless I’m summoned to chop an onion or find the soy sauce. I can hear what’s happening, but I really don’t want to know because I’ll find out soon enough after he abandons the job. On his tombstone I’m going to chisel, “I’ll clean it later.”

He makes these great offerings to me; these overflowing platters of gruel, when I’m least hungry. I have to eat it all or his feelings are hurt. “Don’t you like my food?” “Ummm, yes, but you gave me a pile of meat that’s bigger than my head, and is as taller than that mound of potatoes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “

Everything within two feet of the stove is covered in splatter. What I never understand is how I find food and butter wrappers in the sink when the garbage is sitting right next to his feet. I’ll be scrubbing the cupboards after he cooks, wondering what the Hell the sticky green stuff is and where he found mint jelly. Plus, what the heck was it IN? Was that lamb I was eating? Sometimes it’s hard to tell because he enjoys overcooking animal proteins. I’ll be on my 99^th chew of a skewered piece of beef when he says, “What do you think?” The answer is always, “Wow, this is fantastic!”

I once found my hamster behind the refrigerator. She was huge; yet another victim of James’ Muppet Show Swedish Chef cooking style. What did she find? Chicken nuggets? Petrified pizza crust? A stray side of beef? She could have lived for years back there had I not heard the crunching.

James was in there again tonight. I came home from work and found a non-stick fry pan caked with something I had to soak off; a 2 foot long BBQ spatula; and a plate caked with cheese in the sink along with two beer cans and a dirty cake pan. His motto is, “I cook it. YOU clean it!” I don’t think this should apply if there is absolutely no evidence that there was anything for me OR the hamster. I probably wasn’t looking close enough. I’m sure he left me something under the stove.

Valley of the Dogs

I picked up my dog at the vet a few days ago. She had minor surgery to remove a growth that went from the size of a pea to the size of a grape and then to the size of a pea again; then it grew again and she couldn’t stop licking it. My local vet is scary. I think he might be German and he has Wagner blaring from speakers in the ceiling in a Jewish neighborhood. It’s a little creepy. However, basically everyone around here recommends him. His office looks like a set from Scary Movie 8: The SAW Chronicles. He has old National Geographic magazines from like 1952 and Field and Stream placed perfectly on the waiting room tables. I'm afraid to move them, lest I get them out of their perfect chronological order. Our old boxer, God rest her soul, hated him and almost bit his face off when he tried to trim her nails.

Peaches had only been there once to get a second rabies shot when we couldn’t get the paperwork for her first one. She was reluctant to enter, as most "children" seem to fear the possibility of a shot. My eighteen year old son still has to be distracted when a needle appears, “Hey, I was thinking about buying you a car! (‘OUCH’) NOT!” Anyway, my stomach was in knots when I went to pick up Peaches, an hour earlier than scheduled. Dr. ich bin ein Berliner told me I could take her home and that she was fine. I didn’t realize that “fine” meant that she was high as a kite and stumbling like a drunken lumberjack on a log roll.

He brought her out into the lobby where I had a new toy monkey waiting for her. She stumbled into my arms and tried to lick my face, missing my lips every time. Then she turned back to the vet and ran at him to kiss him into oblivion. She kept running back and forth between us, her look saying, “I love YOU vet! I love YOU!” “Thanks for the monkey, mom! Is this my monkey? I can’t keep it in my mouth. Is this my monkey? Carry it! Wait, I’ll take it! NOPE, YOU take it!” “I love you vet!” This dance went on for a good two minutes before we left the horror film set and cartwheeled toward the car.

She spent the rest of the afternoon falling into walls and acting like all the toys she’d recently become bored with were now the most interesting and exciting things on the planet. Her brother stood by and watched; his brow furrowed in confusion as his sister spent the next few hours on a trip that was clearly the result of the antiquated canine barbiturate doping system. James was absolutely aghast that a milder, “less fun” sedative hadn’t been used. As for me, I was thrilled for her and am now contemplating having this chicken pox scar on my chin removed. I wonder if being a Dr. of Veterinary Medicine also qualifies you to operate on humans. All I could think was, “I want what she’s having.” I still don’t know if she was smiling all day, or just couldn’t keep her twelve inch tongue in her mouth under the influence.

I don’t know how to break it to her that next time she goes to the vet she probably won’t be getting the same treatment. We’re both going to be very disappointed.

Inauguration of a Sixth Grader

I was fortunate to have many excellent teachers throughout my education, but one of my greatest influences was Dan Blair, my sixth grade teacher from Huss Elementary in Three Rivers, Michigan. Fresh out of college, his idealism and excitement inspired a generation of students who were attending what was considered to be “the poorest” elementary school in our city.

A storyteller, he never failed to grasp our attention, whether it was stories about his childhood playing in the vast abandoned tunnel system under Flint, Michigan with his friends; or his experiences attending college in the early seventies. He was able to gain our respect and therefore our attention when it came to the more serious business of the history of the world, and more importantly, the direction of our nation because he treated us like people. We still played outside until the street lights came on and read Judy Blume books, but he talked to us as Aristotle might have talked to Alexander. This was a person who taught the young people in the forgotten ward that we were human beings with brains that deserved to be filled with great literature, and lessons gained from A Clockwork Orange.

Sixth grade is a brutal time for many. It’s a time of great hormonal surges, horrifying peer pressure and sometimes shocking loss of innocence. I went into sixth grade worried about how my hair looked, and came out thinking about Civil Rights, personal freedom and the shocking stories of the Holocaust, which had ended only twenty-three years before I was born. It seemed like a hundred years to me.

Until that year, I had been raised in a gray world. When friends come over, they inevitably pull out the meticulous scrapbooks my mother created from our lives. It’s always good for a laugh, but looking at my school pictures, it seems that they never fail to point out to me that half of my class was black. Funny, I never noticed it at the time. My parents never mentioned it and I didn’t realize that I lived in a geographically segregated community. We were just kids, people playing together, attending Girl Scout meetings and going to each other’s birthday parties. We were also students in a class who were treated as equals with endless possibility and the opportunity to “live the dream.”

Mr. Blair encouraged us, every one of us, to learn from history and to live lives of endless potential. He taught us that we only had to wait until we were thirty-five to run for President of the United States, and that seemed like a lifetime away because it was. My classmates and I passed that mark five years ago. Reflecting back on my life, I remember growing up knowing that as an American Citizen, born in the United States; it was a possibility for me. I think he made us all feel that way. I recall attending American Legion Auxiliary Girls State, surrounded by girls full of ambition and belief in our nation. It was one of the single most important lessons of my life, and I know that even my desire to go there was instilled in me back in sixth grade at Huss Elementary.

I realize now how young Mr. Blair was when he was our teacher and I think about the optimism and self assurance he helped instill in us. I hope that he was able to continue to inspire hopefulness in his students like he did when he was a brand new teacher stimulating our desire to expand our minds and realize our dreams. It seems I’ve lived a thousand lives since then, and as I sat in Highland Park, Illinois watching the inaugural activities from my tiny condo, I remembered that life is still full of possibilities and endless dreams to realize. The installation of Barak Obama as President of the United States brought back a flood of memories; to the history lessons from sixth grade, the year my eyes were opened.

Huss School students were integrated into other schools when my little sister started. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, nor do I necessarily think it was the best thing for the students, or the wonderful teachers who were so integral in our lives.. The closing of that school meant the slow death of our neighborhood and the realization that the place where the more formidable years of my education were spent would no longer be a beacon of hope for so many. I am so grateful to have had the experience that I did. To have had the opportunity to grow up in a place where I walked to school, hung out with neighborhood kids and lived in the blissful naivety of peaceful cultural diversity was amazing. What happened in that school was a quiet miracle.

I feel for the students who ended up on busses, heading into neighborhoods as strangers in new schools, miles away. I’m so grateful today that I was fortunate to attend Huss School in those few idealistic years where there was peace and harmony in our neighborhood; when we had the chance to learn together and know each other as people with families, hopes and dreams; where we were all equal with equal potential and promise.

Huss is no longer an elementary school; Mr. Blair is a retired math teacher; and the houses in my old neighborhood are falling down. When I pull into Three Rivers now though, I don’t show guests my high school, which is now a church, or talk about my college or time spent traveling. I point to Huss School and say, “That is where I got my education.”

How's Your Salad?

My friend Kelly was sitting at the bar before her shift one day last week, eating her salad. The restaurant was empty, except for a couple of servers and the kitchen staff. She was pretending to pay attention to the sports ticker on the silent t.v. screen staring back at her when she suddenly got a text message from a number she didn’t recognize that said, “How’s your salad?”

She put down her fork and looked around. Odd, she thought, “Who knows I’m having a salad?” Coordinating her investigative team from the wait staff, it was soon detected by Ali that the perpetrator’s number was on the employee phone list. Alas, it was Rueben in the kitchen, who just wanted to know how her salad was. If only I could communicate with my customers through text messaging.