Daily Prompt – Page 2 – My World With Words

November 28, 2017November 28, 2017

The Honor is All Mine

In honor of a former boyfriend’s birthday, I am telling the true story of the first of his birthdays we spent together, and a follow-up conversation we had after our breakup.

Honor is perhaps not the right word, unless you consider any honesty being honorable. I’m not giving real names.

Dating Dan was a subtle seduction into becoming a verbal punching bag. The smile he initially greeted me with on our dates eventually became a disinterested glance, and I tried desperately to get us back to where we’d been. Until a pan of lasagna forced my eyes open.

It was Dan’s birthday, and I’d promised him the best lasagna he’d ever tasted. All afternoon I labored over boiling and simmering the sauce, cooking up the sausage, slicing the cheese and layering it all between the strips of pasta. I made breadsticks, watching the dough rise and twisting each piece into shape. When the cake cooled, I carefully decorated it. Add a vinaigrette dressing for the salad and a bottle of good wine. I surveyed what I had done, and was satisfied.

He arrived late, as usual, and I silently fretted that the breadsticks were no longer warm and the salad was looking a little limp. Still, my anticipation of his pleasure washed over me.

He took a bite of the lasagna, and grimaced. A few more bites were forced down.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“What is this meat?” he asked.

“Sausage.” Of course.

“Why would you put sausage in lasagna? You’re supposed to use hamburger.”

“Sausage is traditional in Italian cooking.”

“Who told you that? Why did you make this? Why didn’t you just go to the grocery store and buy some from the freezer?”

He continued to berate me and I stood there quietly. I was humiliated. I sought a response, but my mind went blank. Not that it mattered. Any words I could have found to defend myself would have stuck in my throat.

It didn’t stop that night. For the rest of the time we were dating, he never missed an opportunity to bring up the sausage (not hamburger) in the lasagna. Even after we broke up, on the sporadic occasions we saw each other, he continued, until one day it got out of control.

I’d taken care of his cat, Freddy, while he was on a business trip, something I was happy to do since I didn’t yet have a kitty of my own, and Freddy and I were good buds. Dan arrived home early, catching me still at his place, and almost immediately launched into a preposterous lasagna attack.

“Well, I had a free day, so I flew down to North Carolina to visit Tony,” he said, a little too casually.

I was on guard at once. “You had a free day on your business trip to New York, so you caught a flight to North Carolina?”

“Sure.”

“Isn’t that expensive?”

“Not if you travel roundtrip in one day. I got a special fare. It was a discount airline.”

“Really. Who’s Tony?”

“Tony, my best friend from grade school. You’ve heard me talk about him.”

I knew all his friends from grade school, and none of them were named Tony.

“You’ve never mentioned him.”

“Yes, I have. Anyway, I probably never told you this, but Tony’s mom is a real famous chef in Italy. She’s from…” he paused, seeming to search his memory. “Sicily! You know, Sicily.”

“Yes, I know Sicily.”

“Anyway, she’s a real famous chef, she’s like, the Julia Child of Italy.”

“Really.” He didn’t catch the tone.

“Yeah, and she was there when I visited, and I told her…”

“Wait. Did Tony live with his dad or something? I mean, when you were kids.”

“No, he lived with his mom. And dad. Both of them.”

“In Minnesota.”

“Yeah, she took a break to raise him.”

“She took a break from being the Julia Child of Italy to raise her son in the public school system in Minnesota.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, go on.” This was a rare opportunity. Give a man enough rope, and he’ll hang himself.

“So I told her how you’d made the lasagna with sausage, and she couldn’t stop laughing. I mean, for hours. She said that was the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard, using sausage in Italian cooking.”

“The Julia Child of Italy has never heard of using sausage…” I shook my head.

“She couldn’t stop laughing.”

“She lives in North Carolina?”

“No, she lives in Sicily. She was visiting Tony for the weekend.”

“The weekend?”

“The holiday weekend. It’s a holiday in Italy. Freedom Day or something.”

“You visited him the weekend his mother arrived from Italy? During her very short visit with her son?” He nodded. “Okay, go on.”

“She was like a second mother to me.” Chin up, challenging me to contradict him.

“What’s her name?”

“Uh, Maria, I think…but she goes by something else professionally. I forget what. Anyway, she couldn’t stop laughing. She laughed so hard and so long, she didn’t have any time to spend with Tony.”

“Or you, I’m guessing.”

“She didn’t have any time to spend with Tony.” He repeated with emphasis, and paused. “You ruined their weekend together with your lasagna.”

Now it was my turn to laugh, assuming any part of what Dan told me was true and Maria had, indeed, had uncontrollable fits of mirth at my expense. Dan was annoyed, which only made me laugh harder.

A mutual friend filled out the rest of the story for me. A year or so later, Dan starting dating an Italian woman, someone born in the U.S. of — you guessed it — Sicilian parents. She invited him to dinner and (do I need to tell the rest of the story?) when he found out her mother was serving lasagna, he jokingly asked if she’d used sausage, planning to launch into this story about his ignorant former girlfriend.

“Of course,” she replied stiffly, and the conversation went downhill from there. Dan would never tell me any part of the story himself, but I had imagined something just like it for so long, so I was pleased as punch to hear it from our friend.

But the sad thing is, I haven’t made lasagna since that birthday so long ago. And my lasagna was damn good.

One-Way

Image Credits: (Sicily Sign) gustavofrazao — stock.adobe.com; (Dinner Table) lyudinka — stock.adobe.com; (Italian Cooking stamp) squarelogo — stock.adobe.com; (Chef’s Hat) courtesy of Pixabay; (Airplane) GraphicStock

November 24, 2017

Mature Process

So often I’ve compared a given experience to learning to drive a standard. You know, with the clutch.

Today’s new drivers aren’t as likely to learn to drive this way, since most new cars today are automatic (and have been for a long time). But once upon a time, at least in my neighborhood, if you were a teenager and wanted a car, you took your official driving lessons in an automatic (the school provided lessons once you passed Safety Ed.) and a family member took on the task of teaching you to drive a 5-speed.

You learned because a standard cost about 25 percent less than an automatic. That’s a lot of money with that price tag. Besides, there’s more power in shifting gears. More control. More attitude.

However, it’s a frustrating process. You know what you’re supposed to do, you swear you’re doing it and still it doesn’t work. That’s not the only swearing, typically. Your first teacher gives up after sharing a few choice words and passes the task on to the next unsuspecting volunteer.

Then one day, you get it. It works. You no longer are stopped at a green light, praying you won’t stall again. There’s the occasional slip-up, sure, but you now know how to drive a standard.

Other learning experiences mimic that process. For me, it was math. Particularly algebra. I struggled and struggled until miraculously, the light broke through. Lucky for me, my high school math teacher watched my process and understood why I went from Ds to As, virtually overnight.

I wasn’t so lucky in college, but that’s another story for another day.

I’ve seen men and women take on knitting, something that is second nature to me, and talk themselves through every labored stitch. “I’ll never get it,” they might moan, but I assure them, it will happen. Just keep breaking in those new pathways in the brain.

Driving, calculating, knitting. It takes time, but the battle is part of the joy. By the way, I impressed the heck out of a KFC worker a few years back when I pulled up in my 5-speed Corolla. “I’ve never seen a woman drive a standard,” he marveled. Ah, the passing of time. The needs, and therefore the skills, change.

So whatever you’re learning, stay with it until that breakthrough. Actually, I’m not going to say never give up. There is always a time to move on. Just don’t give up before the process is complete, and your frustration has matured and born fruit.

Clutch

Image Credits: (Light Bulbs) © Dmitry Guzhanin – stock.adobe.com; (Frustrated Woman) © ivector — stock.adobe.com; (Woman in Car) courtesy of Pixabay.

November 12, 2017

Finding Home

The other day I was getting my hair cut, and I commented on the casual Friday attire of the stylists.

In the past, they always wore black, and the color was more important than style. There’s a new owner now, and she believes given the nature of the salon — creating an image — the individuals responsible for the changes for their clients should be able to express their own style.

I have to agree, and I liked the change.

The new owner is a long-time employee of the salon, who started out as a receptionist, and worked long, hard hours to get to where she is today. She can be abrupt, but you get used to that, because she cares about both her employees and her clients.

She’s been cutting my hair for the last seven years, and does a damn good job. She also colors it (too much grey for my comfort) and — lucky for me — charges me a small portion of the typical cost for color. That’s not something she does for too many people, and I’m not sure what motivated her to do it for me. I don’t question it.

The longer you live somewhere, the more roots you establish, the more small benefits accrue. You know the back routes to beat traffic, you’ve discovered the quiet groups of people who share your interests. You’re in on the local secrets.

I’ve lived in my current location for 14 years, which is nearly as long as I’ve lived anywhere in my life. Granted, I haven’t been in the same home the whole time, but most of it’s been spent in the same city.

I like it here.

I’ve lived in cities where, despite all my efforts, I never felt at home. I’ve lived in places I once loved, but now find to be uncomfortable. The pace here suits me.

There are things I don’t like. The job opportunities in my field are exceptionally limited. The political and justice systems are somewhat backwoods. Yet despite those issues, I’ve found a community of supportive people of like mind.

Including my stylist. Okay, her political views are diametrically opposed to mine, so we don’t discuss the current state of affairs in our government. But we share many of the same values.

When she leaned in and whispered how much it cost the parents of one 17-year-old to have extensions put in her hair, I was shocked. This girl had gone to a cut-rate salon that had fried her hair with bad color and an equally pathetic cut. Her long, beautiful blonde tresses had to be trimmed to a short bob. After one weekend, her parents gave in to her sobs, and shelled out the $4,000 it cost to have extensions.

You read that right. Four. Thousand. Dollars. That’s before the tip.

I told my stylist my parents would never have done that, even if they could have afforded it. Your hair will grow out, they would have said. She agreed, and she has four children, so she knows the pressures.

It takes awhile for even the most verbose of reputable stylists to tell that kind of story to a client. I like being one of the favored, someone whose responses she can predict, someone she can trust.

I like being a long-time client, long-time patient, long-time resident. I’m not moving any time soon.

Black

September 15, 2017

A Handful of Tips and Tricks

The best flavoring a hostess can add to her entrees?

Hungry guests.

Tricks of the trade can give anyone an edge. Here are a few I’ve learned. For some of you, at least some of this information is old hat, but hopefully I can pass along some useful trivia to help make your life a little brighter.

Use triangles in photo composition.

They don’t have to be perfectly symmetrical, of course, but three points in a photo that create a triangle make for a pleasing image.

Use parsley to get rid of garlic breath.

Ever wonder what the sprig of parsley is doing on your plate? It’s not just decorative. It’s nature’s breath mint (well, a couple of mint leaves will help too).

Call TV news stations after lunch but before your afternoon siesta.

Want your local news to cover your event? Generally speaking — and on any given day, this can change — your local television news staff has the most time between 12:30 and 2:30. The morning news program is over, and they still have plenty of time to pull together the evening news. So they have time to listen to your pitch.

Rub a walnut on scratched wood furniture.

It’s basically the oil in the walnut that does it, of course, but you feel so ingenious doing this.

Baking soda does wonderful things.

Scour out your kitchen sink. Mix it with hydrogen peroxide and gob it on insect bites. Sprinkle it in your shoes. The list goes on and on…

And I’ll say it again, hungry guests are happy eaters.

Any helpful tips you’d like to add?

Image Credits: Triangles, Walnuts and Tip icon courtesy of Pixabay; Background on header © Dreamstime; Reporter © Bigstock.

Flavorful

September 6, 2017

A Swing and A Smile

Last night the temperature dropped considerably, and when I left for work today, I needed a sweater. First time this season, and much earlier than I anticipated.

It was a mild summer, and now I’m wondering what winter will look like. The snow I can do without — we have so few snow plows in this area, a few flakes and we’re homebound for days. However, I wouldn’t mind some brisk weather.

A good cold snap and beautiful fall leaves. A winning team. A steady paycheck. I’d like to walk around the block with a swing in my step and a smile in my eyes.

I’d like my nails to grow out a bit, instead of constantly tearing off just as they reach a decent length. If I can keep my hair just the way it is… (okay, that won’t happen, but at least I know where I want it).

A new sofa would be so nice…books pouring out of my bookcase…a solid savings account.