Skip to main content

Retro Roast Beef?

            I just bought a roasting pan, the black one with white flecks. It is almost identical to the one I grew up with. I’m 54 and this makes me ever so happy.
            I am not sure that a beef roast evokes such strong memories in everyone.
            Growing up, we had roast on many a Sunday at home, or when I was very young, a roast at my grandma’s house on Sunday. That was the best meal of the week.
            The whole process today of searing the meat, cooking the onions, carrots, and mushrooms in a little red wine before they went into the big roasting pan, the whole thing was awesome.
            Right now, it’s all sitting in that fantabulous roasting pan at 325 degrees and I know better than I know my name, that shit will be delicious.
            What was it that made me not go out and buy a twenty-dollar roasting pan about 25 years ago? Why is it so important that it’s taken me my whole life to make that purchase?
            It’s been nothing to spend $100 at a time at Walmart or Target on deodorant, toilet paper, and laundry detergent for the past 30 years. I don’t know why that stupid roasting pan was so hard to buy.
            Now that I know it will provide dividends for years to come, unlike a stick of deodorant or toilet paper, I’m even more curious.
            I just served the roast beef surrounded by potatoes and carrots smothered in gravy. I could not be more proud. Some people carry a legacy filled with business acumen or a really big inheritance. I am completely happy to finally know that I can roast a hank of meat as well as my dad did. I did not fall far from his tree. Or my mom’s tree, for that matter. I can flare my nostrils like it’s nobody’s business and I pity the person who thinks they can prove me wrong. Hell, no.
            Now that I’m 54, I revel in all of this. I see no wrong in the way I react to a situation the way my parents did. I see no conflict between myself and my parents, especially Doris, my mom.
            When I was 18 this was not the case.
            If I said A, she’d say B.
            If I said B, she’d say A.
            We were not on the same page, which is why it’s so ironic so many decades later that I can totally read her page.
            Doris was (is) my idea of the ultimate strong woman. She didn’t shit around, as she’d gladly tell you. She calculated the income taxes of our family and the families of her siblings. She worked for the IRS and the post office, and she had all of a tenth-grade education. I still wish sometimes that those government jobs were easier to get these days. She took it step by step with sheer determination and her own innate intelligence. Like I like to say, you didn’t mess with her.
            So much later I know now that her intensity about saving for a new refrigerator or a dryer really reflected her own ability and desire to make it all work. Back then I just thought she was an idiot who was obsessed with having a brown refrigerator to match the stove.
            More than anything I wish I could have five more minutes with my mom so I could tell her I get it now, so many years later.
            Thankfully, in my heart, I know she already knows that. The best part might be that I hope beyond hope that my own daughter buys a roasting pan when she's 54, or maybe even when she's 34.


           
           

            

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

He sells sea shells, I wish

   So now rather than being obsessed with fake fingernails I can’t afford, I’m becoming obsessed with checking this blog. I’m pretty sure all 52 views were made by either me or my husband.   That leads me right into the current situation at hand. We need friends. We’re desperate for them. I’ve started handing out my telephone number to people I meet while doing my meager freelance work. They think it’s for the story I’m writing but really it’s in hope that someday they’ll find a reason to call and then I can hit them with, “By the way, do you play cards? Bingo? Gin Rummy?” If I wasn’t so arthritic I’d throw Twister in there.    It’s not so much for me, it’s my husband who likes to have people around. I have become hermit-like since moving here while he has become convinced we could die here and not be found for months. He had friends back in Syracuse but he chose to stay home at night with his loving wife. Now all of a sudden I get the impression he’d h...
6 comments
Read more

I Like to Call Them Ow-Bows

   It’s a toss-up. Do I write about the fact that if you search “jobless goddess” in Google the dairy goddess and the library goddess come way ahead of me, or do I write about the fact that my husband is incapacitated due to a broken elbow? I guess I’ll go with the broken elbow. Besides, who the hell breaks their elbow anyway? My husband of course.    It started out innocently enough. I, in my desire to lose weight and become the wrinkly, thinner woman I was meant to be, decided we should start up the morning walks again. I prodded him while he was still under the covers. “Come on, let’s do it. You know we have to do this,” I said while tugging on my really sexy yoga pants (which, by the way, never get used for yoga).    To his credit, he got up, pulled on his pajama pants and went with me. We got about a 16 th of a mile past the driveway before he landed in the gravel. I’m talking a bed of gravel. Gravel embedded in the palm of your hand. Gravel ...
2 comments
Read more

Parish the Thought

     I love small towns. When I lived in Parish, New York, there was no end to the reverie, not to mention the constant parades.      We had a Halloween parade through town featuring people of all ages marching in costume along a rather abbreviated parade route. It all culminated at the fire barn where a couple of old draft horses would pull along a hay wagon. Most all town festivities featured the fire barn.       Monday night bingo held there. The caller was a volunteer firefighter prone to bringing on fits of laughter when he drew N 44…which he pronounced as "N farty-far," whereby producing great gales of cackling from the middle-aged women who showed up every week, I think maybe just to flirt with the caller and the other male volunteers who collected their money. Don't get me wrong, I'm not making fun. I spent more than a few Monday nights there myself.      The gas stations served as restaurants in Parish. You...
2 comments
Read more