Mountain Cooking

Last night I cooked a huge portion of spaghetti sauce and noodles for our group of ten. Food always tastes better when you've spent the day out in the open air, and the kids gobbled it up.

Every time I cook that meal, the result varies a bit, probably due to the varying ingredients on hand; but partly due to the fact that I don't like doing the same thing the same way twice.

In any case, you really can't screw up spaghetti, plus it always tastes better as leftovers. That tells me that mixing is the key.

People who give me feedback on my writing, especially here at Facebook, tell me it is "wistful" and "nostalgic." Some say it is "comforting." I'm not sure whether it reads better as leftovers, but I'll accept those compliments since my goal is to accompany anyone who cares to stop by during this period of disruption, when so much around us has changed.

Cooking that meal made me nostalgic for the recent past, starting 17 years ago until about four years ago when I was caring for the my three youngest kids half-time and they were still in school. On spaghetti nights, I'd start late afternoon, soon after preparing their bag lunches for the next day and after serving my youngest her favorite after-school snack: cucumbers, carrots and sometimes cauliflower and broccoli with hummus.

I'd carefully slice the vegetables and arrange them on a plate with the hummus in the middle. I'd always lightly salt the cucumber.

Some days she would have a friend come over and I would make enough for both of them. One friend questioned upon tasting the first slice, "salt on cucumber?"

"That's the way it is done," said my daughter, ever loyal to her cook.

The amount of spaghetti I served over the years was prodigious. My daughter and one of her brothers and I ate modest amounts, but their other brother ate the meal in amounts that are hard to fathom.

He's always been slender, so it would be easy to underestimate his appetite. But when it came to his favorite meal, he'd help himself to plate after plate. We seldom had leftovers.

It's many years later now and I've not been able to cook him dinner for too long a time. He is six feet two inches tall.

After dinner last evening my grandchildren shot arrows and carved sticks. Then they built a campfire and cooked marshmellows. Sparks from the fire rose to fly away as the stars began to come out above.

All of this took me back to my childhood over sixty years ago. How quickly time passes; now I am the old guy with a white beard in the swinging couch on the porch, and they are the ones staying up late and telling each other stories.

They contemplate a world of limitless possibilities, I swing slowly, remembering what never came to pass.

***

Summertime, in my youth, was a time to be bored. This was long before video games, social media and flash mobs. There was so much empty time back then thatmy only choice was to let my imagination take over. Often that meant, for me, inventing games.

Vacations were sort of boring too, much of the time, so while my father fished at the riverside, I went down to the beach, where the river emptied into Lake Michigan and sat on the rocks. There, I watched the waves break over the outer rocks and gauged each wave by its height and how far it splashed toward where I was sitting.

I made up teams and calculated their scores by those waves.

Sometimes, in the afternoons, the waves grew bigger and the wind picked up. Out there across the lake toward Wisconsin, clouds came into view.

At that sight I would amble back to my Dad, still working the fishing holes one by one.

"Storm's coming'."

We'd have fish for dinner.

***

There are days I think the whole world has gone crazy. Covid-19 cases are again exploding but people are resisting wearing masks or keeping a safe distance. Thus, the virus hops person to person like a manic bumblebee pollinating weakened flowers, hanging by their stems.

The President ignores this crisis; even worse, he dismisses it as nothing of consequence. He comforts not a single family who has lost a loved one. Instead he blames China, using a racist slur as a campaign slogan.

He desperately wants to get re-elected. He tries to sell to his followers a made-up story that mail-in ballots will lead to massive voting fraud at a time many voters may be too afraid of Covid-19 to go to the polling places. The scary thing is that some of them will buy it. They won't read the studies that prove it is a lie; they blindly follow the demagogue.

The set-up here is for a contested election in November. Biden leads in polls by an overwhelming margin now that may well lead to a landslide victory. But will Trump concede? Will his followers accept the result?

This is the chaotic time we live in. And our democracy is what is at stake.

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