My Grandparents are spawns of the devil... Bio to Bs

My grandparents came to visit us, when I was six. When they got ready to leave, they invited me to come with them to stay at their house for a week. My first road trip without my parents...I was practically an adult.
As we motored through the rural lands of east Texas, my grandfather pointed out different types of birds and trees. Suddenly excited, he said to my grandmother, "Lois, look at those cat tails." Naturally, my head whipped around. I couldn't see them and yelled, "Pappaw...where?" He told me they were all along the fence. I looked back, but I still didn't see them. Through the rest of the trip I kept wondering why there would be cat tails on a fence. Who would put them there and why weren't my grandparents upset about this? The way my grandfather pointed them out, he actually seemed happy about the cat tails. How could these people that I adored, be happy that there were cats walking around without tails...or worse, maybe they had been killed for their tails. And now, I was about to be spending a week alone with these depraved people. How could my parents let them take me?

Later that night, when we were having dinner at my grandparent's house, my grandmother mentioned that she wished we would have stopped and gotten some of the cat tails so that she could add them to her collection. I said in a stunned voice, "You have a collection?" My grandmother replied nonchalantly, "Yes, I can't believe you never noticed them, they're all over the house. Come on, I'll show you." Morbid curiosity getting the better of me...I got up from the table and followed my grandmother into the living room where she pointed to several dried flower arrangements. You can't imagine my relief in finding out that cattails were plants and my grandparents weren't...spawns of the devil.

The three-bite-rule loophole - Bio to Bs

Back in the dark ages, when I was growing up, my mom had the three-bite-rule. We had to take 3 bites of everything on our plates. I can still remember several meals where I sat at the table, for what seemed like hours, staring at those cold lima beans. The thought of them made me nauseous. In my six-year-old mind, it was a scene right out of the Joan Crawford biography, Mommie Dearest. Of course in reality, it was nothing like that, but I still don’t like lima beans.

Years later, my sister was sitting at the table, staring at her English peas…she told my mom that she would throw up if she took a bite. We all smiled at my sister, knowing she was exaggerating. My mom politely said, “just take three bites.” My sister then slowly put the fork up to her mouth and took a bite. She immediately threw up all over her plate of food.



Needless, to say, that ended that meal for the whole family.

From that point on, whenever my mom tried to enforce the three-bite-rule, all my sister had to say was, “remember the peas.” My sister had found a way to beat the three-bite-rule. That was decades ago, and I still wish I had had the foresight to go ahead and put those lima beans in my mouth and just let nature take it’s course…then I could have been the one to discover the three-bite-rule loophole.

Look for a version of this story in one of our upcoming Emma novels!

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Assaulted by Romantic Food - Bio to Bs

A couple of weeks after we were married, I decided that I would make a romantic dinner for my new husband. I got out the tablecloth with matching napkins and set the table with our new wedding china, silverware and candle sticks.

I spent the day getting the spaghetti sauce just right and made tons of meatballs, trying to get a few that were actually round and not too dry.

I showered to remove the garlic smell from my hair and put on a pretty, floor length dress. As the romantic music played on the tape deck (maybe I should have mentioned, this was back in the Stone Age), I dimmed the lights and lit the candles. Everything was perfect.

When Barry walked through the front door, I raced to hug him and show him what I had done. It was going to be a magical evening.

We sat down at the table and placed the spaghetti and meatballs on our plates. A few seconds later, I heard this chop, chop, chop sound. I looked over at Barry and he was chopping his spaghetti into tiny one inch segments. I smiled sweetly at him and said, "Honey, you're really supposed to eat your spaghetti like this." With my big spoon in my left hand and my fork in my right, I began to twirl the spaghetti around my fork. Then I held up my fork and just as I was about to take a bite...a long piece of spaghetti unwrapped and glued itself, with a massive amount of red sauce, to my cheek. I was horrified and so stunned, I didn't move and neither did the spaghetti.

After Barry realized I wasn't going to burst into tears, he started laughing hysterically. For years after that, anytime we would have spaghetti, Barry would ask, "Now, how am I supposed to eat spaghetti?" To this day, I still wince a little when I see spaghetti. And if you see me eating at your local Olive Garden, more often than not, you will probably hear a chop, chop, chop...coming from my plate.

JC