Al Dente

I was cooking up some spaghetti tonight to have with homemade sauce and meatballs.  Someone said something that flipped my switch from "cooking dinner" to "What the hell?".  I turned back toward the stove and took a breath letting some of my irritation out through the spoon stirring the pasta.  And I flashed back to a story I wrote for Creative Writing while I was in college.

I used the imagery of the boiling pot of spaghetti as an anchor indicating stability over time.  Yeah, I know but my professor liked it and I was pretty proud of it then.  Might even be proud of it today if I could find it.  I had my hands on it about a year ago but I'm afraid it went out in one of the great purges.  (You know -- as an aside--sometimes I've been sorry that I threw something away but have never been sorry I kept something)

The scene was Mom cooking spaghetti for dinner at the stove in the kitchen at the house on Buffalo Street getting ready to tell us we were moving to Walton.  The story was told from Mom's perspective and came back to the comfort provided by menial tasks such as boiling pasta.

Remember that kitchen?  It was a pretty great kitchen--that house was actually pretty cool for a lot of reasons.  The picnic table  tucked right into that subby hole and the 8 of us fit there pretty well.  Most vividly I remember the dinnertime discussion about Chris' knee surgery.

Anyhow. looking into that pot today and flashing back on the general theme of that story immediately calmed me down.  Not much has changed over the years about preparing store bought pasta so I'm pretty much doing what Mom did.  And there's great comfort in that alone.