Red Velvet Wisdom

So Mama is in the hospital again with pacemaker complications, and in an effort to take her mind off things, we took her a laptop so she could finally see the website and see what we had been working on.  Nobody is sure if it’s the morphine or her feeling extra sweet after chats with nuns up there, but she was upset that we didn’t really have anything about Daddy on here.  I tried to explain to her that this was a site related to food and recipes and frankly the only thing Daddy knows about food is how to eat it.

This is him at his recent birthday party.  If you remember from a previous post, he appears to have no taste buds as evidenced by his ability to just eat whatever is available for sustenance.  He grew up in a time and place where you are what you had when you had it, and this carries on to this day.  She specifically told us not to mention the time he accidentally ate cat food (too late), or the time somebody set an individually wrapped Electrosol tab too close to the Halloween candy dish and he was halfway through the “nastiest candy” he ever tasted before Mama could tell him it was a dishwashing tablet.  Never in my life have I seen Daddy so much as make toast, but there is one food story about Daddy that is totally worth telling here.

In 2001, Mama had an accident where she fell down and fractured her elbow and shattered the bones in her forearm AND upper arm.  She was in a cast from her hand to her armpit and was pretty much incapacitated.   It was at this point that Dad had to take over the cooking in the home.  Cooking is a strong word, perhaps it was his job to forage for to food is a better term.   The nest was empty and it was all up to him.  He prepared the only meal he was totally capable of: Tuna fish mixed with mustard, and a banana on the side.  To Daddy a banana could be the appetizer or a desert, side dish, whatever.  It’s his favorite thing to eat and he thinks it’s delicious, so he assumed she would too.  He was sadly mistaken.

This meal was breakfast, lunch, and dinner for days and days on end.  Days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into her teetering on the edge of having a total breakdown because she needs a little more variety in her life than he does.  (On the plus side her cholesterol was non-existent during that time).  Mama tried everything she could to drop a hint to Daddy that she needed a little more spice in her life,  but he didn’t get the hint.  During this time he learned how to make coffee so he figured he was on his way to being the next Julia Child.  Well, after Mama had taken all she could of tuna and bananas, she called me in tears because she had SPECIFICALLY told him to pick her up some chicken.  He returned home with………………..tuna fish and bananas.  She called me crying like there was some sort of major tragedy taking place in the world.  I believe her words were, “ALL I ASKED FOR HIS SOME FRIED CHICKEN……….IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK????”  I literally had to get in the car, go to KFC and pick her up a bucket to console her.  Once I made it down there, she was much relieved to actually have some grease return to her diet, and after that any time she has gotten sick, I have made sure to see to it that she has a supply of chicken at the ready  (On a side note, she was totally devastated to see that her favorite KFC branch was closed recently.  Fairly certain it was condemned).   The moral of the story is that weeks on end of tuna fish with a banana for dessert is the recipe for a psychiatric emergency.