Tonight I made two kinds of spaghetti sauce. The good kind had onions and garlic and country sausage, a cup of cream and an entire diced zucchini from the garden. The kid kind was just the frugal #10 can of marinara from Costco, unadorned, or if Avery was to be believed, undefiled.
Lucy asked for the adult kind first. She is our great lover of zucchini, the one who led Nana Marian into the temptation of grilled zucchini rounds before dinner. Nana confessed their devouring of our daily zucchini; it felt too odd to scold for gluttony of the vegetal variety.
Tom served Molly our mixed noodles (white and wheat) bathed in garish red and ladled on the demur (spiked) creamy sauce at her demand. She prompted naked noodles on top of that. Avery discounted the baby’s sophisticated preference as simply wanting everything, no serving dish left out.
Callie polished off her kid portion in record time, after downgrading spaghetti from her favorite food to merely one of her favorite noodle dishes. Then she asked for some with my special sauce.
After a couple bites, she turned to sage Lucy and said, “Spaghetti is the thing where we just don’t talk about the onions in it. We know they’re there, but we don’t need to talk about it.”
So Avery, the oldest, was the lone holdout for the kid kind, and Callie, my tall, difficult, almost-eight and black-and-white, simmering pot of incitable emotions, is capable of more complexity than I had imagined.
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Well written! And very accurate, and funny as heck.
But… who does this REALLY describe? HMMM? Consider:
Who is it, really, that is sometimes a “simmering pot of incitable emotions…capable of more complexity than…imagined.” Who sometimes “leads into…gluttony of vegetal variety”, as a “great lover” of some dishes? Who is it that has a “sophisticated preference as simply wanting everything, no serving dish left out?” Who is the ultimate analyst, “discounting” some ideas, trying to get others to believe that some things are “[defiled or un-]”?
Well, I won’t name names, but her initials are…SHANNON! Sometimes I am terrified when I find myself morphing into my dad (or my grandfather!). But seeing a daughter percolating downward into the next generation, I think,“Wow!” Very gratifying.