Tag Archives: Supper

Popcorn and Cake for Supper

I’d thawed meat for supper and pondered side dish possibilities. Salad. If I felt ambitious (and dangerous), fried potatoes.

I didn’t feel ambitious. I didn’t want to cook. Period.

The past 48 years, I’ve faced cooking 17,500+ evening meals. Lord knows, I’ve wanted to skip dinner preparation. But like women past and present, I champion good nutrition. Eating out blows the budget. I also want to set a good example.

If women were honest, though, they ultimately cook because they don’t want their kids to give kindergarten teachers the scoop about questionable meals … or see pictures they drew of a Cheerios-and-Cheetos^® supper on display at Parents’ Night.

However, Hubby and I, empty nesters, no longer tremble before kindergarten teachers. We don’t have to be good examples. We put our feet on the furniture. We sometimes skip vegetables.

After this tough week, survival deserves an escape.

Hubby doesn’t know we’re leaving. He figures it out, though, when I hand him a suitcase.

“We’re going to Paris.”

“I know it’s been rough,” he says, “but how about a movie, instead?”

Any outing, anywhere — short of North Korea — works for me.

“Supper.” I offer him cake smothered in ice cream. “I ate the other half.”

“I’ll eat quick—”

“Eat it on the road.” I offer to drive.

Hubby’s mother would never have permitted this. Throw a bowl of cholesterol at a husband and drive him to an expensive movie? She’d rather have driven a getaway car to a bank robbery.

But Hubby gets me. Taking Highway 22 through Gas City doesn’t equal jetting to Paris, but it’s enough.

Fellow adventurers huddle in the nearly empty theater. Everyday moviegoers? Maybe they’re spies, exchanging secret information while animated nachos and Goobers^® high-kick on the screen.

We didn’t go to Paris, so I have to create excitement, right?

As the movie begins, I put my feet on the rail and laugh out loud at funny parts. We devour exorbitant butter-marinated popcorn and drink buckets of Coke^®.

We cheer crazies who do life different.

Though movie characters never take five restroom breaks during their rowdy scenes. Nor do they lie awake with heartburn afterward, feeling fat and stuffed as their pillows.

But do they have more fun than we did on this cake-and-popcorn-for-supper night?

Never.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: What’s your escape plan after a tough week?

Less-than-Perfect Pilgrimage

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Years ago, I attended a Christian writer’s conference at a California camp located in redwood country. Before Palm Sunday services, worshipers made an early morning pilgrimage to a cross atop a mountain.

I skipped it. The drippy morning didn’t inspire my jet-lagged body to rise.

Later, though, I set aside the hour I’d been told would suffice for pilgrimage. I spiraled up the mountain road, marveling at enormous redwoods and giant ferns. Homes perched on mountainsides. No sleepwalker, this Hoosier observed, should attempt slumber here without wearing a parachute.

Higher elevations made my head throb, but I inhaled evergreen fragrances and a spring tang that still eluded Indiana’s leafless forests.

As GPSes were not yet common, I carried a map. When the road reversed, then reversed again, I searched the map in vain. What to do? I walked and walked, huffing and puffing like my asthmatic coffee maker back home. Finally, I admitted I was lost. The only directions I felt sure of? Up and down.

Perhaps I’d trusted a pantheistic mapmaker who believed all roads led to the same destination.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.

Supper aromas emanated from houses I passed. My stomach, unstuffed for the first time in days (“starving writer” doesn’t apply to writers’ conferences) demanded I return the way I came. But I’d climbed an hour and a half to view the cross.

No turning back.

I spotted a fellow writer jogging, hoping he descended from my destination. Smiling, he ran toward me.

I considered tripping him. But my mission drove me to civility.

“Did you find the cross?” I gasped.

“That way.” He pointed, still jogging. And smiling.

Eventually, I spotted the cross.

It seemed to dwarf the cerulean sky. Its thick, wooden beams looked like they could hold a Man in their deadly grasp. Jesus carried something like that through streets of jeering people and up a hill called the Place of the Skull to atone for the sins of humankind.

I carried a water bottle.

I rested on a bench, thanking Him for His sacrifice. For my salvation. I savored alternating lush and dry vistas in Scotts Valley and beyond to Mount Umunhum and Loma Prieta. Then, unlike Jesus, I left the cross.

But because of Him, I, despite energy drain and grouchy stomach, went back full.

Your Extraordinary Ordinary: Have you attempted a pilgrimage? How did that go?

OMG, It’s Monday! Prayer: Sacred Communion