Scrape It Off
it'll be fine
When I was growing up and my parents were still together and my father was home from his global travel work, we always ate dinner together at the dining room table.
My mother was an incredible cook, had a lifelong fascination with the food of the world, whether she was eating it or learning how to cook it. She was one of those cooks who could elevate any dish to something special, she simply had that knack.
Except, that is, for grilled cheese.
After my family settled in Texas and my parents ended up divorcing, my mother, brother and I continued the sit down dinner tradition, at least whenever my mother was home.
We lived in the family house after the divorce until my mother sold the place and we moved about 30 miles south of town so that she could be closer to her beloved beach. In order to facilitate this move, my mother had to commute into Houston for her job. The drive took over an hour, thanks to Houston’s excessive traffic. In time, she started staying at coworkers’ homes during some weekdays. Once this started happening, there were weeks where my brother and I didn’t see her for three to four days. We thought it was cool at the time, or I did anyway, but in retrospect it seems insane.
My brother was in elementary school, and I was in high school. I was old enough to take care of myself (sort of), but the thought of leaving my brother alone at that time seems insane now. Times were definitely different in the ‘80s, which is part of it, but it took me many years to come to terms with the fact that we were essentially being neglected.
Don’t get me wrong. If anyone in my life approached sainthood, it was her. But she was also human, struggling, and doing what she could to keep her (and consequently our) head(s) above water.
On the weeknights that she was home, she often would cook something really fast and easy like a dish she called macaroni and milk.
Macaroni and milk was simply cooked macaroni noodles in a milky/buttery/salty broth. And that was it. It was extremely cheap, and it was extremely filling. I loved it. It never occurred to me that it was hardly dinner. But again, she did what she could, and we never went hungry.
Her other weeknight go to was grilled cheese. The beauty of my mother’s grilled cheese was that it was the one and only dish that she fucked up every single time she made it. That’s because she was usually distracted and left the sandwiches in the pan too long. We learned the art of scraping off the black part with a butter knife, ate our grilled cheese, and usually turned it into a chance for us all to have a good laugh about the great cook who couldn’t manage a grilled cheese to save her life.
It was not uncommon during these weeknights for the phone to ring while she was cooking. Often, when the phone rang, she was in the middle of berating either me, my brother, or both of us, for being the dickheads that we were. She would be yelling and the the phone would ring. She would pick up the receiver mid yell, and out of her mouth would come the most sultry and calm “Heeellloooooo…”
It sent my brother and I into paroxysms of explosive laughter, which would piss her off even more. Once she’d hung up, our relentless laughing would break her down and we would all laugh together while we ate our blackened grilled cheeses.
My mother and I had an agreement that if, by the time I turned 18, I was unemployed, I had to move out. It was basically her attempt at tough love. I was pretty much a degenerate at the time and I’m sure in her mind she thought a swift kick in the ass would motivate me. It didn’t, but I did move out.
I had money saved from a job that I’d held prior to turning 18, and so I used some of it to sign a lease in a slum-like apartment in Houston’s Montrose District. The landlord was an insane old man, and the complex was gross, old, and infested with creeps, but it was also cheap.
For months, I never stayed there, not once. I just stored my shit in it. I didn’t even keep the utilities on. I was too busy couch surfing and getting fucked up to care.
Eventually I did move in because I was dating a girl and we needed a place to live. She had been living in her stepfather’s mansion, a place so ridiculous the backyard had a hangar for his personal plane and a runway that ran the length of two rows of similarly gigantic mansions.
The girl had made a deal with her mother and stepfather (they were separated at the time, and living elsewhere), that she could stay there until she graduated from high school. It blew my mind, because much like myself, she was also a degenerate. But for several months we had the entire house to ourselves.
One day, while my girlfriend was away, I was sleeping in, when I awoke to the sound of people in the house. I was in the king sized waterbed in the master bedroom, and I freaked the fuck out. Before I had time to hide, I heard the two men in the house coming towards the closed bedroom door.
Because the waterbed was so big and cushy, and because we had a fuckload of blankets and pillows on the bed, I did the only thing I could and hid under the covers.
The men entered the room.
It was her stepfather and some friend of his. By this time, the house was on the market, and the stepfather was showing the place to his buddy. I was mortified and feeling very exposed. I knew that if the guy found me I might at the least get my ass kicked.
To my shock, I managed to remain unnoticed on the bed, and soon the men left the room and continued their little tour.
In my boxer shorts, with no time to dress, I ran to the bathroom, opened the window, and ran out into the backyard and hid behind the hangar.
There I was, a 19-year-old kid, in his boxers, in broad daylight, hiding between a hangar and an airstrip.
The men eventually left, and I went back to bed. But it wasn't long after that that we got the fuck out of there for good and moved in to my crap apartment in town.
By the time I had a fulltime job and she was in college, I started the first period of my life remotely approaching normal adulthood.
When we ate dinner at home, we ate on the couch, or in bed. I didn’t have a dining room table, and I didn’t want one either.
I lived this way well into my 20s, moved tens of times, lived with several other girlfriends and alone, and never once owned a dining room table until the mid ‘90s when I moved in with a relatively normal young woman who was my polar opposite in many ways.
She was a war vet, clearly suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, very conservative, and deeply Catholic.
I am none of those things.
It worked great for a while, until it didn’t work at all.
But she had a regular set of ugly burgundy stained furniture store furniture. For that brief period we had sit down dinners.
When we split and I moved out and into another tiny slummy shithole of a studio apartment, I had little more than a futon for furniture.
Come to think of it, that was literally the only furniture I owned. And this was more by design than necessity.
Eating for me was a survival tactic.
I love food as much as my mother, and thanks to her, I can cook halfway decently.
But I hardly ever cook. I am much too hand to mouth in my life to have my shit together in that sense.
Now I own the large French country style antique dining table that we used when we lived in France. It’s the same table we sat at when we ate our burnt grilled cheese.
It’s the same table I collected her reading glasses and notepad from after she died, sitting in her seat and turning on her computer to find the solitaire game she was playing still open on the screen.
I loaded that table into a U-Haul truck and drove it all the way back to Texas from Florida. It was the one thing of hers I really wanted, and it was the one thing she insisted I take whenever she died.
Now that table serves as a storage place for crap. We never eat at it. We eat all our at home meals in front of the television on the couch on the tiny table I salvaged from the trash because, if left alone, I am a total scavenger.
I’ve been poor to borderline poor almost my entire adult life.
Most of this is due to my apparently having inherited my mother’s utter inability to do anything more with money than suck ass with it. I am practically immune to normal life.
I didn’t go to college until my 40s, still haven’t graduated because I got burned out and also ran out of loan money and refuse to take out private loans and rack up more debt.
The most money I’ve ever made in a year would make most of the people I know laugh at me. But it’s the way things have always been.
Whenever I watch shows with my wife in which you see everyday people and their living habits, I am always shocked at how important things like hyper-tidiness, or gym memberships, or fancy sit down at-home dinners are to these people.
To me they’re like aliens. I don’t understand the drive they have to do what seems to me to be superficial.
I love food, as I’ve said, but I have never felt the need to be formal about it. Never.
I break a drinking glass and replace it with a jar. I keep chipped dinner plates. I have mismatched silverware. I couldn’t give a single shit about it.
The only thing I wish I had was a decent set of cookware, but I honestly don’t cook enough for it to matter, and I know how to work with what I have.
I don’t own a car I trust enough to go out of town, and I can’t afford one even if I wanted one.
I still don’t know what I want to do with my life other than to live it and be as aware at all times as I possibly can. That and to be a good person for my wife and children.
The rest? Big salaries, serious jobs, nice clothes, the best of everything, expensive dinners, big vacations, all of that is foreign to me.
I know how to travel, how to enjoy new places. I know the etiquette of formal dinner parties and things like that because I grew up with that stuff, but in my life, I don’t live that way.
I waste too much time wondering what things would be like if I was wired differently. It’s an exercise in futility. And hey, I’ve made it this far. For that, I feel very fortunate.
But man, I miss my mother. Like fucking crazy.
I even miss her shitty grilled cheese.
The real