Memoir Draft: Title TBD

Sarena Brown

When someone dies, sad people send you casseroles. Lots of casseroles… lasagna, too. The same goes for when your mom is in the hospital and your dad has no idea what he is doing when there are four kids to look after and household to run.

In the spring of 2012, that was us. Concerned friends and neighbors dropped off cookies, brownies, and more green bean casseroles than I’ve seen in my life, because we were kids and my dad was my dad and my mom was out of commission for some time. The food was so thoughtful, but in the same stroke utterly thought-less. I mean, casseroles don’t have the power to free my mom from illness, to find my love, or to fix my family. It’s all just food. A casserole is a casserole is a casserole.

Our freezer was overwhelmed with Pyrex containers and dishes covered in tin foil. We had to eat something from our new-found hoard every single day to make room. Of course I was most concerned with the double chocolate chunk brownies, but I can’t recall the tastes. I only remember how nauseous I was each time I remembered that mom wasn’t here right now. Dad couldn’t pull off being Mr. Mom for much longer. He wasn’t around much then, or maybe I had gotten so good at make-believing he wasn’t there that he actually went poof? Not likely.

All I know for sure is that his food sucked then and sucks now. He makes three signature dishes on rotation. Well, four if you count the 69 cent Ramen packages. Five if you count “Chicken of The Sea” canned Tuna.  Wait, I remember we used to have midnight snacks a lot, just him and me. His PB & J toast with extra butter always hit the spot. I can’t remember the last time we did something like that, where we enjoyed each other’s company and nothing was forced. Must have been before ninth grade, at least. Must have been before I knew him to be anything other than My Cool Dad™.  

Where he is concerned, my brothers are and have always been around. It was hard to have quality time with a parent when you’ve got four brothers and none of you have social lives outside of playing catch in the front yard. It is alright, though. I like it better that way, with my brothers here. They normally talk with pops about baseball and working out as I let my mind wander. It makes his food less terrible, being all in my thoughts. I’m a day-dreamer, you see. Kind of like my mom, but maybe more starry-eyed. I romanticize things too much, or so I’ve been told... things that don’t need romanticizing, like the musty smell of old books or the texture of burnt grilled cheese or my mother being in the fucking hospital. Spoiler alert: she was okay. She is doing okay right now.

You see I’ve been thinking about death. My mom’s father, we call him Dadu. So this weekend he was mid-flight, flying through Denver when he had an arrhythmia. I don’t know exactly what that means, other than his heart beat went out of whack and so they diverted the plane. He was taken to the University of Colorado Hospital, which is apparently very good. My mom said there was something off about his heart valves? I don’t know for sure, but last night he had a procedure to get a pacemaker. I don’t know how it went. I don’t know if he is stable. I think he is. I hope he is. He can’t just die, you know, with no warming.

Like, no thanks Mother Nature because that isn’t how life is supposed to end. The dream is to die in bed peacefully surrounded by your family and the people you love, even if you in life were hard to love. Dadu is hard to love. He is abusive and volatile, and sexist and a little racist, but he is still family and doesn’t need to die just yet.

I remember being in middle school when he’d come through the front door of my mom’s house on Saturday mornings, holding Burger King Breakfasts for us kids. He is typically an angry, tense man, but on these mornings his tiny smirk would light up the entire house. I still crave the croissant sandwiches with egg, sausage and cheese. Sometimes they’d surprise me by not burning the croissant. And there is something special about the orange juice cartons. It took forever to poke through the hole with my thumb. There is something about that thick red straw, and the tiny tater tot rounds that pop so quickly into your mouth. You don’t realize you’ve eaten all of them before they’re gone.    

You don’t realize what you had until it’s gone. Fuck. I guess that is life. You see I’ve been thinking about death. Hence the condolence casseroles. Then my mom and the tangent about my dad. Then thinking about what has been really eating me; Dadu possibly dying. Sometimes in the middle of the night fear takes over, and all I am is afraid. Not of death but of waiting for it to happen, and for the aftertaste. One day everyone I love, everyone I’ve seen, is going to die. I’m not okay with that. Maybe that is why my dad has found and lost god more times than I can count. Maybe that is why I’m not looking for Him.

Maybe this life is really just one big casserole: full of flavor but sometimes just too much to consume, made up of indistinguishable chaos. But you can find comfort in all the motion. And most times, even bad casseroles are still good. Hard lives are still lived. And life is supposedly a gift. Like the Reese’s cups my mom put in my backpack before school. Even melted ones are still good.   

Truth Telling in A Cook's Tour

Throughout "A Cook's Tour" by Anthony Bourdain, I couldn't help but laugh at how Bourdain directly addresses the reader. I truly appreciated how he broke the fourth wall and told the reader how it is. This is in part thanks to the nature of memoir, and the fact that this is a first-person account of food and travel.

My first interaction with this kind of writing is found under the header "Full Disclosure". Bourdain starts with, "Here's the part where I reluctantly admit to something about which I'm deeply conflicted -- even ashamed. I'd lie about it if I could. But you're probably going to find out about it anyway, so here's a little preemptive truth telling..." (12). He goes on to explain how during his travels he had two people follow him with cameras. Initially this isn't what he wanted, but he went along for it. It would be good for the book, they'd say. Perhaps it was a necessary evil, always being on call. Bourdain says, "I had, you see, sold my soul to the devil" (12). This honesty is repeated heavily in sections titled, "Reasons Why You Don't Want To Be On TV".

Bourdain's voice made me feel welcomed into this text, and as if we were on the same level. Some books like this give off an air of entitlement that I am not a fan of, so I was happily surprised when the speaking voice came off as approachable and imperfect. The direct voice caught my attention early on, and made reading about the festivities described in "Where Food Comes From" a little easier to digest. Bourdain walked into the scene feeling guilty and unnerved, but then accepting that this is the fate of every meat product he orders, and ends on a respectful note. He vowed to use as much of the animal as he could to honor it's life, something rather beautiful to me. If it has to die, why not go on to become gorgeous dishes for many more to enjoy?

  

Food & Memory in The Reporter’s Kitchen

As a writer myself, I related to a lot of what Jane Kramer explored in her short essay. She thought of the process of preparing a meal and eating food as a means of remembering, and it seemed that for our author, food and life experience whirled together into one muddy sense-memory. While Kramer is a journalist and a cook, at this point in my life I define myself mostly as a poet and a student. I am excited to be able to find a medium that compliments and questions my writing as Kramer has found in cooking.

Something that surprised me was reading about how food is prepared outside of the US. In fact, I am surprised that I didn’t realize in this reading that of course food is prepared differently outside of America. Sometimes I catch myself in this train of thought, where I assume out of ignorance or entitlement that the “American” way is supposedly the way the world makes and enjoys meals. I always try to snap out of those thoughts because I know they are exclusionary, and I have yet to taste some of the world’s more incredible foods.

Going along with this thread, I appreciated the fact that Kramer was not judgmental about eating things that may be outside of her comfort zone, out of respect for the culture and the people she is among. It must have been a growing experience for her, to be able to not impose her western habits surrounding meals to the various communities she visited in her work.

She beings page 168 with the thought, “Some dishes just don’t travel”. She goes on to say how you’ll never being able to exactly recreate the same meal you had, especially with differences in resources and cultural practices. This got me thinking about our cafeteria at K and how so many students hail from countries and cultures outside of Americanized pallets. My mom is from India, and so that has been my experience. I crave meals that remind me of home, and when our cafeteria has attempted to create meals from different cultures around the world, they unfortunately miss the mark. I hope that our school can find ways to move towards creating meals that are closer to home for me and my peers who enjoy other types of food.

I was also intrigued by the points when the author noted how she cooks something specific to the story she is about to cover, whether it relates to her mood or experience being in another environment. On page 170, she described how when beginning a piece, she is generally a bit panicked, and how her loved-ones “are able to gauge this panic by the food I feed them”. In this section she described how she cooked a “small Thanksgiving turkey, two Christmas rib roasts, and an Easter lamb” when panicked about how to tell the story of an Afghan Refugee.

Seeing this made me want to examine what I do when stressed in regards to my writing. I discovered that for my poetry or journaling, if I am severely overwhelmed I do one of two things: I either don’t write about it at all (my thinking is, if I don’t write it it’s not hurting me, right?) or I free-write in my journal for pages and pages, in an attempt to let it all out before sorting through my feelings. My journals then can be most associated with Kramer’s huge meals, I think. Both are indulgent. Both can be healing.