Food & Attitude

My mom was the most resourceful cook you could imagine. Anyone else might have opened our cupboards and declared they were in the house of Old Mother Hubbard; nevertheless, my mom would still manage to make a meal worth serving to her kids and thankless husband.

For example, one day she needed to make dinner, macaroni and cheese, but didn't have quite enough macaroni. There was nothing else in the house to make. She looked in the fridge. Hmm...macaroni salad. So she rinsed the pasta from the macaroni salad and used that. Dad ate it and liked it until she told him what she did and he was pissed. Of course--not only was he thankless, he was also humorless, which is how he earned the name Mr. Personality by Mom and her best friend G.

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One time, when I was I don't know 8 or 10, Mom and I were making meatballs to put in spaghetti sauce and eating M&Ms at the same time. One of the M&Ms fell into the bowl of hamburger. So we decided to keep it in and work it into a meatball and find out at dinner who would get the meatball surprise.

So we were sitting at the table waiting, waiting. You could almost hear Final Jeopardy music counting down the seconds. Mom and I ate silently, barely suppressing our laughter, our eyes darting from Dad to me to Kendall to Mom. Each bite was a mystery. Who would be the one?

Of course it had to be Dad who got it and of course it pissed him off. "What the hell?!" Mom and I burst into hysterical laughter and tried to explain. "I don't give a damn what you were doing. I work hard to put food on this table and when I come home from a long day's work..." Blah, blah, blah. Even the sharpness of his anger couldn't cut through our laughter and amusement.

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Another time Dad was trying to have a conversation with Mom about something while she happened to be eating crackers. He was mad at her for talking to him with her mouth full and said, "Damn it! Empty your mouth while you're talking to me." So she did. She spit the crackers out onto the table and looked at him as if to say, "Now what was I saying?" It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that they both looked back on their marriage and admitted that communication was their biggest problem.

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Some time after my parents divorced, but before Mom and I moved to Oregon, Mom's best friend, G and her kids B & A, moved in with us. Now, Mom and G couldn't have been more different. They were the female version of The Odd Couple. Mom was messy Oscar and G was neat-knick Felix.

By all reports, including her own, my mother was always one to sit on her duff and let everyone else do all the work. After a big family dinner when all the other women were cleaning up, Mom would be mysteriously, yet predictably missing. Evidently the bathroom called to her precisely at clean-up time. Every time. Funny how that worked. She also had a way of getting people to do things for her--get her a glass of water that clinks (with ice), bring her a book of matches, get up and turn the channel (obviously before the remote control)--in a way that made us actually want to help her. We all fell under her spell in this regard.

One day, G had just finished cleaning the kitchen, which likely included doing every dish in the house and meant hours and hours of scrubbing, since Mom never rinsed anything. It was at this moment, this satisfied, proud-of-her handiwork, exhausted moment that Mom decided to make a cake. It was a double-layer cake with one layer chocolate, one layer yellow. She'd finished mixing the chocolate cake batter and needed another bowl for the yellow, but G refused to relinquish it, not after all her hard work and a perfectly gleaming kitchen. So Mom said, "Fine. Hold out your hands." Then she proceeded to pour the chocolate cake batter into G's hands, while she used the now empty bowl to make the yellow cake batter.

Such a clever girl.

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The first few years Mom and I lived in Oregon were pretty lean years involving food stamps, which we used at the other grocery store in town where no one knew us, and government handouts of cheese, bread and milk that she made me pick up at the high school gym. As resourceful as she was, there came a day when the money and food stamps ran out before the food did. There was nothing, literally nothing, to eat. That night we had popcorn for dinner. Just popcorn. No butter. Just popcorn. We thought, wow, this is really sad. Someday we're gonna laugh about this. But the truth is, we were laughing even then.