A crazy busy day! We cut up fresh veggies and fruit enough for 100 people probably, and made pasta salad for the same amount in preparation for the third native's high school graduation party.
Regan and I went shopping a big hunk of the day. We weren't anticipating it taking as long as it did. We hadn't planned to stop and eat, but we eventually succumbed to the cry of our fainting bodies, and stopped at Burger King.
We were trying to eat as cheaply a possible. She got a $1 spicy chicken and I ordered a Jr. cheeseburger, we shared a small fry and a small Dr Pepper...
The first bite I took of my cheeseburger I was 8 years old again, or 9, or 10...one of my siblings had left home to do something...it could have been anything, something more interesting than staying home at any rate.
As soon as we had waved the lucky bum off into the magical beyond, Mother would turn to the rest of us with a conspiratorial grin and say, "Now, we can do anything we want!!", as if the person who had just left had been somehow shackling us all to the dreadful mundane existence that previously bound us.
That "anything we want" generally meant going to McDonald's one night during the absence of the person who had disappeared into the magical beyond, and was so rare and fine a treat as to rise to nearly the top of my favorite childhood memories.
I don't know what anyone else chose to eat, but I think I always got a cheeseburger and small fries, and a Dr Pepper. Sometimes I got a fried apple pie.
We never ate inside. We would go through the drive-through, and then, in half-darkness in the old Wagoneer, by the lights of the parking lot, watch the people who went and came, and relish every bite of our stolen freedom.
It was the best food in the world. And now and then, I am once more unshackled from the dreadful confines of mundane existence into a magical beyond of my very own, with just one bite.
