The Boyfriend

The lifestyles editor of the local paper asked me for a Meet Your Neighbor interview. One of the questions asked where I worked…having evaded employment since 1992, I must say I work at home, or confess to being carelessly lazy. The question that followed: What do you do? My answer: Lunch. While the lifestyles editor professed to enjoy my interview answers, for some reason--perhaps she felt grown folks don't hang around the house all day thinking about food--, she decided some adjustments must be made. She changed my answer to the first question. I became a free lance writer, working at home. She deleted lunch altogether.

This is my disclaimer.

All my youth and into my adulthood, I wanted a boyfriend, a good one. My husband is better than good. He is the perfect answer to those famished years of desire. He also works three minutes from our house. My neighbor once told me concerning her own husband’s retirement, “I married him for better or worse, but not for lunch.” If your perfect boyfriend works three minutes from your house, doesn’t require you to ply a trade, is kind of blind where dust and minor clutter is concerned, and gets off work at three and snacks through supper, lunch assumes the language of gratitude and love.

Like every language, it comes with some perimeters. He is allergic to everything with a brain stem. Read vegetarian (and since he quit eating meat, he no longer has chronic indigestion, diarrhea and heartburn, and he stopped losing hair on the crown of his head…the reversal of hair loss is a vegetarian phenomenon I first read about in The Kamikaze Cowboy by Dirk Benedict). He doesn’t like chili. Not fond of lemons. Tart and salty, the basis of my own food preferences, sends him rummaging through the honey buns. Did I say he doesn’t like cilantro?

I have read books about women who are suddenly alone after years of familyhood. They quit cooking. They eat singular things. I particularly remember the woman who nourished herself with only a pan of cornbread every evening. I relate. When I cook, I cook for him. It’s part of my nature, the part that made a boyfriend so imperative to begin with. And he, the only cigarette-smoking, coffee-drinking vegetarian in America, isn’t really interested in food. He could live for years off of macaroni and cheese, but since his daughter dreamed he had a heart attack, he rarely requests it.

Several years ago, I put together a 280-page cookbook with all the recipes my large extended family used for over fifty years. Though people told me they enjoyed reading the cookbook, many also told me they don’t cook any more. Eating out has become a way of life, and maybe we would eat out more, too, but we live in a small Southern town, and our choices are limited. Usually to meat. Which means we don’t eat out so much.

Though lots of folks have said they like my cooking, it’s never been natural to me. I am not precise and discriminating in anything I do. Clumsy and haphazard is a more apt description. Also a friend told me years ago, if you don’t have something called for in a recipe, use something of the same color. I can tell you it works nine out of ten times, but when it doesn’t work, it fails spectacularly. For some reason I cannot seem to follow a recipe, though I faithfully pull them out whenever I cook. Perhaps the dish will be okay the first time, it usually is, and maybe even the third or fourth time. Then I will do something unexpectedly with totally bizarre results. And, even though I cook nearly everyday, I will hit that dry patch when I can’t even think what I used to cook, much less what I am going to throw together today. I am not the only one with that problem. If you read cookbooks by Personalities you will eventually discover the author has some simple recipe she or he uses three or four times a week. Lunch can be a serious and debilitating business.

Thus, Ms. Lifestyles Editor, I work at home, granted, as little as possible, and that little is usually lunch. This blog is my proof, as well as my nod to being a free-lance writer. It is also a reminder of what can be cooked, and a record of ‘oops, best not do that again.’ And it is an invitation. If you can do a recipe better than me, let me know. Or if you do cook, and you know of something quick and healthy, tell me about it. And if you do eat out, give me a call; I do restaurant lunch with glee, piggy happy about eating other people’s food, though I will probably leave that rice and spinach thing on the stove for the perfect boyfriend, because lunch is what I do .