Where's the Brown Stuff?

Over the past week I have had the pleasure of consuming an abundance of home cooked meals. My girlfriend's parents and grandparents insist on feeding me only the best vegetarian recipes their Italian heritage can muster. Whether it was vegetarian lasagna, spinach pie or eggplant parmesan; I was well fed. Usually after a victorious, digestive sigh, I make an off hand comment about not usually eating "like that". Which is nothing, but true. Often times I rely on the microwave to cancer my food into a warm facade of edible, moist dinner. Or restaurants who charge 7 times the amount of the ingredients it would take to prepare the food, with three times the salt and one hundred percent more convenient. Though the comment itself is always taken in a different direction: "your mother cooks doesn't she?" a harmless enough question with a harmless enough retort: "not that well, but she does cook", oddly enough, another retort generally follows: "she can too cook well! Of course she can!". I generally respond with a smile and an "if you say so" while I contemplate how anyone who has never dined on my mother's cooking can possibly know that she can, in fact, cook well. And of course my mother can cook, she's not an idiot, she can probably hold her own against most moms, but the fact of the matter is, I know best. My mom was my age when she first started cooking meals for me, this was an age of burnt grilled cheese, hard craft noodles from the box, steamed vegetables that would don the consistency of puree with the lightest subjection of pressure from a fork. This is no knock on my mother, in fact quite the opposite, her cooking to this day has taught me the most cherished ability I do believe I posses: the ability to pretend.

In the beginning I was none the wiser. I ate burnt grilled cheese with nothing, but bite after contented bite. One day, in an act of a truly aspiring mother, my mom decides to cook as carefully as she can, a perfectly bronzed and fresh grilled cheese. Proud as can be she places in on a plate in front of me. I'm appalled. "Where is all the black stuff?" I ask in such an adorable way that my mom has no choice, but to return to the kitchen and burn the grilled cheese she worked so hard on. As I grow older and those finicky taste buds take on the same curiosity as a child, always wishing to try something new, but never contented enough to settle, I took on new tactics. Pretending that the texture of squash makes me vomit, pretending that I can't swallow corn, pretending to throw my napkin away when in reality it's a ploy to also throw away the green beans I have conveniently wrapped in it. I was creative, I might not of had to be had my mom prepared better meals. She always caught me too, forcing me to get more creative. Then later in life, there are still lessons to be learned. A little while ago I pretended to like a key lime pie despite it being more lime than anything and in all probability might have given me a stomach ulcer had I eaten much more of it. Pretending to like the yolks on my fried eggs broken before I get a chance to eat them is also a regular occurrence.

Society might consider this lying, has even branded it with the rather benign title of white lie. While we think of this as a means to avoid attaching any weight to the lies we tell our loved ones, I think of it as something else entirely. I think of it as pretending, I even get really good at it. Let's take the most commonly used white lie, the old "does this dress make me look fat" conundrum. If we say yes, we are liable to offend the individual posing the question and if we say no, we are lying to them. But if we can imagine, in our own mind, the dress is indeed the most slimming of clothing choices, to the point that we actually see it that way, we are only lying to ourselves. I pretended that squash made me vomit, so much so that it eventually did make me gag. When I played with action figures, the scenarios came alive if only for a moment. Sometimes I would pretend that the teacher and I would be having a one on one conversation and I'll be damned if I didn't pay attention better. If you are truly good at pretending, you could pretend that this blog post is the greatest thing you've ever read and it may even bring tears to your eyes.

 It is not just my ability to get by in awkward situations, it is my ability to find the best in any situation and convince myself to believe in it. My car was backed into this past weekend. There was a white paint mark on the front bumper when I found it, when I looked up I saw a car parked directly in front of it with the exact size of white paint taken off the back bumper. I know who hit my car, it didn't even look like they hid it, it's like they wanted me to see. I wanted to get angry, but I pretended for a second that maybe the person who hit my car was going to go out and do harm to someone else or even them self. They had a horrible week at work and wanted to take numb it by drinking and driving, by doing some horribly reckless act they wouldn't normally do, when they backed out they hit my car and it jolted them out of there head for a minute. They thought about what they were doing and they went back into their house and watched Netflix. I was able to pretend, fancy, imagine, maybe even believe that turn of events to be true that I became at peace with what happened. I'm not always able to do this, but I do love my ability to do it at times and I attribute this skill, this way of life, to my upbringing. To my mother's cooking and everything it taught me. So no, my mom couldn't cook that well at first, but I'm glad, thanks mom.

Thanks for listening,
Kyle