Sunday dinner

It is a brilliant, fresh, blustery October Sunday in Yucatan, and I'm cooking Sunday supper.

But not for you guys.

When I was a little girl, I hated Sundays.  The day dragged and the week loomed, heavy and impenetrable.  But now I love Sundays.  Sunday breathes.  Sunday stops.  Sunday is the great pause, where nothing is expected and anything goes.  My religion is Sunday supper, served anytime from 2 to 8 p.m.  It is a definitive moment, a collective sigh, a communion.

I wonder where you are every day but especially on Sundays.  Do you think of my Sunday suppers and remember me fondly?  Are you cooking for yourselves, or just opening cans?  Do you even have money to buy food?  Who have you conned into cooking for you now?

The boys loved my insistence on Sunday supper.  They loved it even more because I am a wonderful cook.  And they loved it more than that because I was willing to cook at my house and bring it over to their house.  Easier for them not to be a guest, not to leave their house.  At the time, it seemed like a fair trade to me:  I cooked, they entertained.  But they were thinking, wow, did we get a deal with this one.

I cook with heart.  "You should open a restaurant," Tommy said. "Really."   Trays of lasagna, pyrexes of Chicken Marbella, parsley flecked tabouleh salad, plum tortes, roasted beets, candied carrots, masterful meatloaves, vats of hearty soups and home baked breads, apple crisps and prize winning carrot cakes.  My Sunday suppers were comforting and inspirational.

I think of Uncle Ron laughing at his good fortune, his two "nephews" had found a live one.  He was the only one who knew exactly how good the food was.  Tommy screamed "Awesome" all the time.  "Elizabeth it was awesome," he said with two thumbs up and a definitive nod. No matter what I cooked, it was awesome.  I hate the word, awesome, it became meaningless.   I could have cooked sloppy joes and they would have screamed, "Awesome."   Awesome is what I consider to be everything wrong with America -- super sized, meaningless, lack of imagination.  What awesome really meant to them was:  something we didn't have to cook ourselves.  

I was awesome because their diet consisted of defrosted Costco.  No Mexican supermarket for them with its chance of germs, of strange packaging they couldn't read.  They bought by the bulk:  huge bags of frozen, breaded chicken, tough steaks by the dozens, (they would never spring for the good meat -- all they wanted was huge quantities of beef on the grill)  enormous cans of baked beans.   Their idea of the high class was what they had gleaned in Rustler steak houses, not Gibsons of Chicago as they claimed.  They liked their baked potatoes wrapped in silver foil,  precut iceberg lettuce salad served in separate salad bowls, with a selection of bottled dressing on the table, and steaks that were tough as hell.  I took it as charming, nostalgic Americana and didn't think more about it.  As I struggled with the steak I thought, maybe they just didn't know about good steaks, never considering they didn't want to spend the money.   And the wine they bought was pure shit. I was never served a decent glass of wine in that house.  In fact I cringed when a glass of wine was offered to me.  And yet, I ignored all these messages staring at me in the face because...everyone did and they were so nice.

Tommy had an emotional thing for jarred pears and cans of tomato sauce.  If his cupboard was filled with pears and tomatoes, he felt safe.   Industrial size bags of potato chips, those giant, impossible to put anywhere bottles of Kirkland vodka, flats of Coke, dozens of cans of tuna, huge glass jars of pickles.  It was American, it was big, it was sterilized.

My memories on this tropical blustery Sunday morning, with the air so fresh, blowing across the peninsula, this is the reason people move to the tropics, I think.   I make a luscious Jamie Oliver chicken bake that I cooked for you once, a roasted beet and goat cheese salad, a creamy rice pudding.  You will not be eating this.

You never deserved me.  But mostly, I didn't deserve you.  You were the first evil ever to show up in my life.  It palls me to think you never spoke one honest word the entire time I knew you, except for the word, "Hello."  Everything after that was pure shit and lies.

I am pleased that you never said goodbye because then that would make two honest words out of your mouth.

That's what happens when you skip town in the middle of the night.