The California Trip continues

And Olive Garden is way too fancy...

I was once sitting at a Kansas City Royals game and I don’t remember who they played or who I was with or the final score, but I do remember watching an elderly woman eat an apple and she was making a pretty thorough job of it. By the time she finished, you could have flossed your teeth with the core.

I remember thinking: “Now there’s a woman who lived through the Depression.”

According to the internet the Great Depression (and I’m guessing the people who lived through it wondered what was so “Great” about it) lasted from August 1929 to March 1933 which meant it started when my mom was four and ended when she was seven.

Just right now I can’t remember where I left my child psychology degree, but I’m thinking those are pretty impressionable years and my own memories of that stage of life are vague, but not as vague as the current location of my rental car.

(I’m staying at a hotel and every night I park my Toyota 4Runner in a different location and since it’s a Big Ass Black SUV it looks like all the other Big Ass Black SUVs, so I just walk around pushing the button on my car’s fob key and waiting for some tail lights to light up. And if I had another fob key to locate my car’s fob key, I’d be all set.)

Anyway…

When I was young we went through some rough patches and there wasn’t always enough to eat or if there was something to eat it wasn’t what you wanted and I once described eating “sugar sandwiches” to a friend, which is just two pieces of Wonder Bread with a layer of sugar between them, and my friend’s eye lit up and she said:

“Me too!”

Just in case you’ve forgotten, Wonder Bread was whiter than a Donald Trump rally, had the consistency of plastic explosives and you could take a piece of Wonder Bread and shape it into a ball or stretch it out like silly putty and I believe it was called “Wonder Bread” because after you ate it you wondered if it was actually bread.

Now here’s a commercial that explains how Wonder Bread helped build strong bodies 12 ways and in our house one of the ways your body got strong was fighting your brothers for a sugar sandwich:

Every once in a while my mom would buy a Chef Boyardee Frozen Pizza and a quart of Coke and it had to be split six ways, so the rule was whoever cut the pizza and poured the Coke got to pick last, so you were damn careful to make sure all the pieces of pizza were the exact same size and the glasses contained the exact same amount of Coke and I feel fairly certain there are gem cutters who are less careful when splitting diamonds.

Bottom line: you always got less pizza and Coke than you really wanted and I remember the first time I went to a Taco Bell and had some money in my pocket (because I had a job as a busboy at Sam’s Stagecoach Inn making something like $1.45 an hour which works out to the princely sum of $58 a week…before taxes) I remember thinking as long as I could pay for it, Taco Bell had to give me all the food I wanted.

And I wanted all the food they had.

Waste not, want not

The same thing can happen to two people and they can have two different reactions and my mom’s reaction to poverty is that absolutely everything must be saved because you never know when you’re going to need a broken rubber band, a piece of dirty string or a Parade Magazine from June of 1968 which I guess is an admirable attitude, but I’m pretty sure people who save too much shit can’t find that broken rubber band, piece of dirty string or Parade Magazine from June of 1968 when they need it.   

My reaction to growing up in what could have served as a model for The Hunger Games, was you better eat and use everything right now this minute because if you decide to save that second Hostess Twinkie because you’re just too full today, it wouldn’t be there when you came looking for it tomorrow.

(I’ve told this story before, but when has that ever stopped me?)

My brother Paul T (my dad’s name was Paul and my brother’s middle name was Thede, so he became Paul T) made a habit of raiding the food I had saved for my next day’s sack lunch, so in order to teach him a lesson I doctored a Hostess Ding Dong.

And just in case you’ve forgotten what those Hockey Pucks of Flavor look like, here’s a picture:

So I hollow one out and fill it with mustard and pepper and hot sauce and whatever disgusting stuff I can find in my mom’s refrigerator (and some things had been in there so long, that refrigerator could have been declared a biohazard) and seal the Ding Dong back up with shoe polish.

And my mom doesn’t stop me because she wants to see what happens next.

Which was everything we could have hoped for: Paul T spotted the Ding Dong, crouched down behind the refrigerator door so we wouldn’t see what he was doing and crammed the whole thing in his mouth.

The results were gratifying.  

It never changed Paul T’s lifetime habit of free range refrigerator raiding, but that perfect moment made it worth the effort anyway.  

The Family Lunch

If you’re like me (and I traditionally add a “that’s too bad” joke right here, so feel free to make up one of your own) you like to do things for your parents that they couldn’t do for themselves back when they were sacrificing to make ends meet, so I’ll try to get my mom to go out for lunch or dinner and to my surprise this time she said yes so I picked a middle-of-the-road restaurant that had a large enough menu to keep everybody happy.

We went to Olive Garden.

When my food came my mom looked at it and said: “You could have got that at McDonald’s.”

This is what I ordered:

I told my mom if McDonald’s had started serving Chicken and Shrimp Carbonara, I had yet to hear about it. Didn’t make a dent, she still thought eating at Olive Garden was incredibly wasteful and I’ve heard enough stories from friends who tried to do something nice for their parents with similar results to think my mom is unusual.

(Well, she is unusual…just not on this subject. Here’s a picture of her when she was young and that’s my sister Gloria when she was even younger and if they had been any cuter it would have been illegal.)

So you might think your parents are a lost cause when it comes to enjoying the Finer Things in Life, but one day I told her I’d being her some coffee because the coffee at her house might not have been brewed in this calendar year and without asking her permission I brought her a White Chocolate Macchiato with whip cream on top and she took one sip and said:

“Oh my…this is too good to drink right now.”

And went and put it in the refrigerator.

In conclusion

When it comes to understanding your parents you probably can’t do better than Crosby, Stills & Nash singing Teach Your Children and just in case you don’t watch the video or remember the lyrics, here are some of them:

And you of tender years
Can't know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so, please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die

Don't you ever ask them, "Why?
If they told you, you will cry
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you

That’s it for today and I’ve got to get going because I’ve got lots to do…starting with locating a Toyota 4Runner.