In my experience, pizza is almost always a good idea. This week, I'm honored to be guest posting over at the simply stunning website Life & Thyme. I'm sharing my favorite pizza recipe, plus a poem by Wilda Morris that will remind you of your grandmother. Head over if you're hungry.
As a former literature major, Libby Gruner established two rituals when she and her husband had children: family dinner and bedtime reading. Devouring her essay, "Shared Books, Shared Tables" from the recently published book The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage, made me recall memories I hadn't thought of in a long time, like curling up in my reading nook strung with blankets and sheets to read The Boxcar Children or Michael Crichton novels after school.
The essay explores several children's books with food themes, like Alice in Wonderland. "Food is the medium of transformation in Wonderland," she writes, where Alice is "subject to food rules that seem to constantly change." She relates this to the rules used in her own family, like insisting her son Nick "eat at least one bite of the burger he ordered before he had another French fry," a request that forced him to tears.
"Time mutates memory." This truth anchors the final stanza and springs from the page like a kicked ball bouncing into the street before you have a chance to catch it. It serves as a reminder of how memory shapes us, comforts us, and in some cases, angers us, especially when two people remember the same experience very differently.
The poem begins by setting the scene for a date night gone sour, including roses, attending a movie, and eating dinner at a restaurant, but a moment during dinner triggered an argument. By the end of the evening, the flowers were placed in the garbage, never retrieved. The memory had "mutated" in the minds of each person involved. He recalls eating turkey pot pie at Marie Callender's, she insists they ate vegetable soup at Chili's. The poet may know the topic of the argument, but doesn't share it with us, emphasizing that the point of all this is not the subject matter, but how we communicate to each other.