Welcome Home!

Home Sweet Home

(This posting is the Introduction. The actual blog starts below.)

Yeah… So, this is where I get to live.

Actually, it’s my mom’s house. I’m in my 40s and after 20-some years of living independently, circumstances have forced me to move back in with my mother. (You can read some of the details on the “About” page, if you’re interested.)

I know many Americans are in tight situations right now, and it’s not uncommon for formerly self-sufficient adults to find themselves having to move “back home.” Some may think this is an easy way out, but I’m here to tell you, this is anything but easy.

This blog, as I intend it, will chronicle (hopefully in a humorous way) some of the trials and tribulations of an average middle American adult returning home to live with mom. Or as I like to say:

“Hi mom, I’m home!”

“Happy” Thanksgiving

I thought we were having a lovely, quiet Thanksgiving dinner. It was simple. Just me and mom, a couple of special dishes, no big deal. We were having cocktails, Gibsons of course, and a cheese course while the food was cooking. Mom had the TV on and though we weren’t really watching it, whoever was filling in for Dianne Sawyer was blabbing away about something or other.

Suddenly mom says she has to go check on the food. The oven in the kitchen has been broken for 20 years, so she had the food in the spare oven down in the basement. She’s gone for some time, and then when she comes back into the room, she immediate attacks me. “Thank you very much for your help!” she snarks. I just look at her in disbelief. She had not indicated in any way that she needed or wanted any assistance. “What?” I ask. “It would have been nice if you could have opened the door for me. I was yelling and knocking on the door. . .”
“I didn’t hear you,” I explained.
“Well you knew I was going downstairs to get the food didn’t you?”
I just stare at her, still shocked by the sudden aggression.
“And you know I have trouble getting up the stairs sometimes now, don’t you?”
“Yes. But all you said was that you were going to check on the food. You didn’t say you were bringing anything up now. You didn’t ask me to help you. You said you didn’t think it would be ready quite yet.”
“Well it was ready and I was banging and banging on the door and yelling for you to come open it for me!”
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Well it would have been nice if you could have seen your way clear to come and help me.”
Gawd, I thought. Does she honestly think I was sitting here intentionally ignoring her cries for help? What kind of a flaming jerk-head monster does she think I am?
“I said, ‘I DID NOT HEAR YOU.’ Do you honestly think I would just sit here doing nothing if I’d heard you?”

Well, she had nothing at all to say to that except, “Well you might have known I’d need help.” Excuse me, but I refuse to apologize for my inability to psychically intuit her need for help. Now I ask you. . . if someone says they are going to check on something but they don’t think it’s ready yet, would you automatically assume they needed any help? And… we’re not talking about a 20 lb. turkey here, we’re talking about one casserole for two people. How difficult can this be?

“Hand me your glass,” I said, refilling her Gibson.
She said not another word for the next ten minutes or so, but by the time the glass was dry, she was all chatty and happy again. Happy Thanksgiving, Mom!

Hazelnuts of Wrath

When I went to take Oscar out for his morning constitutional, La Madre was on the phone in the den. I could tell by the tone of voice that this was not a social call. She was in business mode — a deep, constrained, inflectionless monotone. When I got back, she was still on the phone. I was waiting for my friend, Eddy, to come and pick me up. We were going to go out to breakfast. I had a few minutes before he was due to arrive so I poured a cup of coffee and sat down in the den. Mom was sitting at her computer desk with her online banking page pulled up on the screen furiously scribbling notes on a piece of scratch paper.

“B. O. N — . . . what was that?” she asks the rep on the other end of the phone.
“B.O.N.A.B … is it B or V?
“OK… B.O.N.A.V., I’ve got that part . . . V.E.N?
“Is it two Vs or just one?
“OK, B.O.N.A.V.E.N.T… E?
“Oh, U. … R.E.?
“OK… I’ve got it now, Bonaventure. B.O.N.A.V.E.N.T.U.R.E., Bonaventure. Is that right?
“Good. Ok. Got it. Ok. Thank you. Bye.”

“What was that all about?” I asked, even though I know better.
“Oh, you won’t believe it,” she began.

I struggled to refrain from rolling my eyes. There are storytellers in this world, and then there are storytellers, and then … there’s mom. She’s one of those people who honestly cannot tell the difference between pertinent details and inconsequential ones. You know the type. There’s one in every crowd. The kind of person you never ask questions to because you know they can’t give you a short answer. But I forget this from time to time and I ask a stupid question like, “What was that all about,” even though I know full well that I will then have to hear all about it.

Suffice it to say, mom had seen a number of items she wanted to purchase from one of the countless holiday gift catalogs we get so many of at this time of year. She had placed the order online the evening before. One of the items she wanted was on back order. The bill came to $133. Now this morning, because mom is as obsessive-compulsive about her bank account as she is about everything else, she logged in to her account and saw that in addition to the original $133 she was charged for her order, there’s a second charge for $153. She also looked up the website where she’d placed the order and discovered that back-ordered item was now in stock. So this apparently was their way of adding the back-ordered item to her billing statement.

Now normally, when one item is back-ordered, companies bill you only for the items they are actually shipping when the order is filled. Then, the back-ordered item gets billed separately when it comes in. But in this case, for some reason, the company rebilled the entire order, probably because the back-ordered thing had come in and the entire order was going to be processed all at one time after all. So not only was that unusual, but they also neglected to void the first purchase price. In effect, then, they were double charging her for five of the six items she ordered.

See how easy that was for me to explain? Two short paragraphs. Ten sentences. Nice, simple, clear, concise. But after ten minutes of circular explanations and superfluous detail, I still only had a vague idea what the problem was, and I had no clue what the company had said they were going to do about it, aside from the fact that somebody wanted her to fax them something but said she could block out any personal data (La Madre wasn’t too clear on this point). But long about this time, my ride showed up.
“Well, Eddy’s here. I have to go,” I said, upon seeing Eddy’s car drive up to the house.
“Oh is he coming today?” she asked.
“He’s here right now.”
“But I need you to help me figure this thing out,” she pouted.
“Well, he’s waiting for me,” I said. “I’ll be glad to help you when I get back. I’ll only be a couple hours.”

She did not say goodbye, which is very unusual. Even more unusual than that, she didn’t wave, as is her custom whenever anyone leaves the house. She was pissed. But hey, it wasn’t my problem, after all. She could just deal until I got back if she couldn’t figure it out on her own before then.

When I got back from breakfast, I honestly expected her still to be angry, but she really wasn’t. She met me at the door and waved as I came up the walkway. (Maybe this was the wave she owed me from before -?-) As I approached the door, I see she has something in her hand. It’s about a half-pound chunk of chocolate with hazelnuts.
“Want some candy?” she says as she closes the door behind me. Without pausing for my response, she continues, “I am so stressed out, I just had to have some candy.”
We went into the den and sat down as she proceeded to reiterate the whole story.
“After you left . . .” she began, gesturing normally, ignorning this huge chunk of chocolate in her hand, ” I called the people back. I talked to Veronica this time. Before I talked to … Natalie Somebody, but she didn’t seem to really know what she was doing . . . .”
And fifteen minutes later, I had finally heard sufficient pertinent details to piece the story together. At last I had gleaned an understanding.
“So anyway,” mom concludes, still waving her now half-melted half pound chunk of chocolate with hazelnuts, “it’s all resolved now, but I just got so stressed out, I had to have some chocolate. Do you want some too? I’m eating this piece myself, but there’s more in the kitchen if you want some.”

Bone-rattling Thunder

Saturday evening it was rather stormy out. Stormy for this early in the season, anyway. This winds were up, the rains were steady and mom and I were all nice and cozy in the den enjoying a cocktail before dinner. Saturday evening cocktails are an old tradition in our family. Mom is partial to Gibsons and says nobody makes them like I do. Grandad was an amateur mixologist and started this tradition even before I was born, so it’s my duty to uphold it. I don’t mind. Mixology is a close cousin to cooking, and you don’t need a kitchen to do it, so it’s a much safer endeavor, under the circumstances.

So we’re about three sips into our Gibsons and suddenly there’s a flash of lighting at the window. “Uh oh,” I said. “Oscar is not going to like this.”  Now Oscar looks like a great big, ferocious, tough-guy kind of a dog, but in reality, unless he’s defending his territory, he’s pretty much of a marshmallow. Loud noises like vacuum cleaners scare him. Very loud noises like fire crackers, thunder or gun shots terrify him. There’s not a whole lot more difficult to handle than a quivering, whimpering 90lb. dog who’s trying desperately to burrow under the bed or hide in 10″ space behind the sofa. Needless to say, weathering a thunderstorm with Oscar is a harrowing experience. So I was hoping against hope that just maybe we’d get the lightening without the thunder this time, but no such luck.

At the first clap of thunder we braced ourselves, but were still hopeful that maybe this would be an isolated incident. We didn’t hear anything from Oscar. We kept our fingers crossed. A few moments later, another crackling flash. We count down one-one thousand, two-one thousand, three-one thousand . . . . BOOOM! rattle-rattle-rattle. Then a few seconds later, scratch-scratch-scratch at the basement door. We exchanged apprehensive glances and put our cocktails down in anticipation of exactly what, I don’t know. Then FLASH! . . . BOOM! and the sound of claws scraping furiously against the door.  ”I have to go down there,” I said. “I can’t leave him alone down there when he’s this scared.”

So we packed up our pitcher of Gibsons and moved down to my space. I have a little sitting area with a sofa and a coffee table. It’s small and a little bit cold but, we settled in and did our best to comfort the pooch. If you know dogs, you know that’s basically impossible to comfort a frightened dog. They just don’t hear you. So Oscar was shaking from head to toe and panting furiously. I tried to wrangle him down the stairs and into our room. I asked mom to open the bathroom door for him. He likes to hide in the bathroom because it is very small and dark and about as close to cave-like as it gets. So there we were, chatting and sipping away at our Gibsons whilst Oscar was whimpering away in the bathroom.

Fortunately for everyone, the thunder did not last long. After a while, Oscar calmed down and we went back upstairs to get our dinner. As I was on my way upstairs, I went into the bathroom to wash up before dinner. I noticed then the lid to the toilet was put down. I said to mom, “Did you put the toilet lid down?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you afraid he’d drink from the toilet?”
“No.”
“Well, why did you put it down then?”
“I just thought it was the proper thing to do.”

Organics vs. Corn

As you know, because I’m sure you’ve read all About it, I’m recovering from a major bout of cancer. Since I have had my fill and then some of surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation and all the various undesirable affects of these drastic modalities, I have been doing some research into what the medicos are saying about recovery and prevention. I happened to see a PBS special on Dr. David Servan-Schreiber and I bought his book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life.

One of the main things this book advocates is organic food. Most especially, it is important to have organic dairy, eggs and meat products. This is because grazing animals, when they are allowed to graze, are healthier and the fats they produce are high in omega-3 fatty acids, which are desirable for human consumption. Animals that are not allowed to graze are fed large amounts of corn, which is not a natural diet for them. It causes them to be unhealthy and the meat, milk or eggs they produce are full of omega-6 fatty acids, which are known to contribute to all manner of human diseases, including cancer.

So I decided it was easy enough to choose organic dairy products, eggs and chicken — I don’t really eat red meat, but if I did, I’d want that to be organic as well. It costs a bit more to buy these products, but the cost of being sick is far greater on many levels. It seemed simple enough. So I had a conversation with mom, since she does most of the shopping.

I explained that I’d been reading up on this and that I didn’t want to get sick again, and maybe it would help or maybe it wouldn’t but there was certainly nothing very difficult about making this shift and I thought it sounded like a really good idea all the way around. Well, mom, as you know, is very opinionated. And the organic food industry was something she had long been very vocal about.

Back in the ’80s when we first started seeing organic fruits and vegetables appearing in the markets, many of them, frankly, didn’t look too good. They were more expensive, often bug-eaten, scrawny, dirty and generally undesirable.  So mom decided it was a big hype that she wasn’t about to buy into. Later as the organic products became cleaner, brighter, prettier and looking more like the traditional fruits and veggies on the market, she was convinced that farmers were just claiming that their produce was organic to get more money for it. “There’s no regulation on this,” she said, “and they’re just calling everything organic so they can get more money for it. It’s just a scam.”

It may be true that, in the beginning, organic produce was not regulated, but QAI was up and running by 1989, and I’m sure other organizations were in place by then as well. Organic certification is not a simple matter and farmers go to great lengths to earn and maintain their organic status. It is true, yes, there can be leaching of chemicals from neighboring farms and some pesticides may drift over from neighboring fields, but this is a far cry from intentionally treating the food with poisons. But, as we have well established, there’s no arguing with mom.

So when I told mom I wanted to go organic, she pitched a fit, reiterating 20 years’ worth of arguments (most of them irrational and unfounded) against organics. It wasn’t pretty. But I learned long ago that it’s just a waste of time and energy to try to directly change her mind about anything. Her mind can be changed, but it has to be done subtly. Bit by bit, information has to be stealthily introduced to her, like a trail of bread crumbs leading to the cottage in the woods, so that she doesn’t notice she’s being led to the inevitable conclusion of my desire. I’ve done it before, a number of times. Sometimes it takes months, even years, but there is such glory in it when one day she finally comes up with it all on her own. Then I just smile and say, “sounds good to me.”

Anyhow, I got it then that she wasn’t going to be buying organic products, even though I said I would pay for the difference in cost. So I went to the market and bought some milk, eggs, cheese and butter. I thought, when she realizes it was important enough to me to go buy them, she’d use them and eventually start buying them. Well, in a word, I was WRONG! Enter: The Butter War.

She refused to use the organic products I had purchased. One evening as we were preparing dinner, for example, we were having green beans for our vegetable. “Are these ready?” I asked.
“Yes. I just need to put butter on them,” she said, reaching for a stick of standard butter.
“Could you use the organic butter instead?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I like the regular butter.”
“Well,” I’m eating them too, and I want the organic butter,” I said, sure that this reasonable request would be honored. But much to my dismay, she proceeded to throw a huge wad of non-organic butter into the pot. I said nothing about it, but to make my point, I declined to eat the poison-buttered beans. I did not make a big deal out of it, I simply didn’t put any on my plate.

During the meal, mom comments on the beans, “Aren’t these beans delicious? They just looked so good at the market.”
“I didn’t take any.”
“Why not? They’re really good.”
“I asked you to used the organic butter.”
“Woah!” she snarked. “That really teaches me! It teaches me that you are missing out on some really fantastic beans.” Well, she was pissed off then, gave me the cold shoulder throughout the dinner and excused herself as soon as she was done eating. The incident was never mentioned again, but I had made my point.

After the Butter War, she no longer buttered common food, but “left it blank.” So she would put a portion on her plate and butter it with traditional butter and I would butter my own portion with organic butter.  Same went for toast or anything else. I thought, OK… whatever. I can’t get her to consume the organic products but at least now she’s letting me use them on my own food. And then, shortly after that she began to buy the organic products when she did her regular marketing.

Some weeks passed then, and one day she suddenly came to the conclusion that organic dairy is really the way to go. Why the change? In a word, “Corn.” Mom has been anti-corn almost as long as she’s been anti-organic. Corn is in everything these days. It’s true. One day I’ll have to write a post entitled: The Evils of Corn According to Eve, but I’ll save that for another day. A few days before this revelation of hers, I had mentioned casually (because casually is the only way that works) that I had seen another special on PBS about nutrition and the food industry. They were talking about how much corn is in everything. For example, they said, if you order a hamburger, fries and a coke at a fast food restaurant, you think you’re consuming a variety of different food stuffs but you’re actually consuming vast quantities of corn. The beef is fed on corn, there’s cornstarch and probably corn sweeteners in the bread, the fries are fried in corn oil and the soda, aside from water, is mostly corn syrup. Corn, corn, corn, evil, evil corn!  Also discussed in the doco was the problematic nature of the mono-crop — there are literally miles and miles of corn fields in the middle of the US and as with all mono-crops, they attract pests — pests specific to corn, so the pests thrive in a big way and are difficult to manage except through the use of massive amounts of pesticides. The pesticides, in addition to being all over the grain and ending up in our food, wash into the rivers and end up in the Gulf of Mexico, where there is a large and growing dead zone where nothing can survive because of all the toxins that have washed down from the corn fields.

So for mom, the issue of organic vs. non-organic really boils down to the lesser of two evils: Organics vs. Corn. Organics win out because there is nothing on earth quite so evil as corn. But here’s what I really don’t get — she still won’t use organic butter. Go figure.

Finances, Pet Food and “Traitor Joe’s”

Finances
When I first moved back home, I was not yet getting disability payments because there’s a six month waiting period during which you never get paid, and then they just take an additional six months to get started, so that, if you’re too sick to work and you qualify for SDI, you basically are stuck penniless for a year, which, quite frankly is an abomination. How you’re supposed to survive for a year on nothing while you’re sick is beyond me. But I digress…

I had recently moved in and, at that time, I had no income. But I had done a little project for an acquaintance who paid me a small sum of money — in fact, he paid me handsomely for the task, but it was only a small thing I did, so, we’re not talking big bucks here. Nevertheless, I wanted to contribute the money I’d received to the household. “Here,” I said to mom one day, “I got this money from Aaron. I’m giving it to you for groceries.” Which, I thought was a decent thing to do, after all, it’s not right that mom should be paying for my groceries out of her social security check. But she didn’t see it that way, for some reason. “No. I don’t want your money. You keep it. You earned it.”
“I want to contribute it to the household. Use it for whatever you want.”
“Well, maybe I’ll use it for cat food.”

Well, I thought she was kidding, but as we all know, there’s no point in arguing with mom. Her mind is like a concrete fortress, and when it’s made up, it’s made up. You really can’t budge it. So… I tucked the bill behind the phone in the kitchen. I figured it would be there and at some point, she’d either use it or give it back to me. Nothing more was said about it.

Then a week or two later, I noticed the bill was gone. She didn’t say anything about it. A little while later, the bill was back. Still, she didn’t say anything about it. So I said, “I thought you used that to buy cat food.” She was NOT amused.  I never did figure out what eventually became of that money. It really didn’t matter to me.

Pet Food and “Traitor Joe’s”
Eventually it came to pass that my SDI kicked in and now I had some money coming in. It’s not a lot but it will buy groceries and keep gas in the car. So then we had to renegotiate the financial agreement. I wanted to pay some rent, but mom would not hear of it because then she would have to declare it on her income tax and that would put her in a higher tax bracket and she would have to pay more taxes and it would end up costing her money in the long run. (Whether that’s actually the case I am not sure, but that’s mom-logic for you.) But she would agree to accept grocery money and a small amount toward utilities and pet food.

I mentioned before (The Many Faces of Eve) that mom makes her own cat food. So, now that I had a little money, I asked her if, as long as she was making food for the cat, could I pay her to make extra for Oscar. (Now this is a little more than just “making some extra” because Oscar, as you know, is a 90 lb. bull dog and eats probably 10 times what the cat eats. But, it’s still mostly just a matter of cooking up some chicken and a few other things and chopping it all up, so . . . .) Anyhow, she was willing to do that because she loves dogs and underneath all the craziness, she is a good person.

Little did I realize, at the time, just exactly what it was that went into this pet food of hers. I was pretty sick back then and never paid much attention to what she was doing or how it all came about. My wife used to cook for the dogs before she got sick, but she always just went down to Costco, bought a big bag of whole chickens and boiled them up, gizzards and all, and the dogs ate off it for a week, no big deal. Well, not so with mom.

Now the purchasing of food is a big deal with her, as you might imagine. She hates supermarkets with a passion. So, when she shops for people food, she goes to one market for veggies and fruit, another market for chicken, another for fish, another for cheese and bread, and only when absolutely necessary, will she go into a supermarket for canned goods, paper products, cleaning supplies, that sort of thing. It is beneath her to venture into the likes of an Albertsons, PW, Safeway or Lucky. These are last-resort stores. But the store she hates more than all other stores put together is Trader Joe’s.

The thing is, TJ’s is the closest store to our house. It’s also pretty cheap. So over the years she has condescended to buying a bit more of her staples there, including the ingredients for pet food. She will also go there for last-minute things if she’s out of an essential ingredient and it’s not shopping day. But she doesn’t like “That Joe” — she refers to the chain as an individual — and is quite vocal about it.

Initially when we made this arrangement for her to cook food for Oscar, I think it was something like $6 a week. The other day mom had to renegotiate. “That Joe is putting more and more water into the chicken meat,” she sneered. “He’s always doing a lot of fancy talk about how great his products are. He keeps telling everyone they’re getting the best stuff in the world for rock bottom prices, but it’s all second-rate. That guy has a lot of nerve.” So the bottom line is that a 40 oz. bag of chicken meat used to last a week and now it only lasts six days. The price has gone up a dollar too. “That stuff cooks down to nothing now, he puts so much water in it, ” she says. “That Joe really is a traitor.”

The Dish Snit

So, long about last weekend some time I ran across a recipe for microwaved poached eggs. I had been really wanting eggs for breakfast, but mom’s stove rules are so meticulous and cumbersome, I long ago gave up any desire to ever try and cook anything on top of the stove. (If you think the toaster oven thing was bad, that is nothing compared to the stove thing.) Consequently, I was very excited when I read this recipe online and the reviews were really quite good. All you do is take a small bowl, put some water in it, a tiny bit of vinegar, crack the egg in and nuke it till it’s done. Voilà, poached eggs.

So while mom was out gardening (and hence I had some time to do something without being scrutinized) I stole into the kitchen and poached me some eggs. I used two glass custard cups, one for each egg. When I finished cooking the eggs, I rinsed out the custard cups and stuck them in the dishwasher. Well, when the dishes were done a day or two later, they came out a little moodgy … not quite factory-clean, as it were. But instead of just dealing with it or asking me to re-wash them by hand and put them away, they are just suddenly sitting there on the counter. Not a word about it.

A day or two goes by, and the cups are just sitting there on the counter. This is extremely uncharacteristic, because aside from the coffee maker, the toaster oven and a couple of canisters, nothing is left sitting out on the counters. Then one evening after one too many gimlets, mom suddenly speaks up. “See these?” she snarks.
“Yeah.”
“They didn’t get clean. Look … here, here, here . . . here . . . there’s something on them. You didn’t wash them before putting them in the dishwasher, did you.” (Yes, one of the house rules is that all dishes must be washed by hand before being put into the dishwasher. I know . . . I know . . . .)
I don’t respond. Neither does she.

The following day, I see the custard cups in the sink with water in them. I assume they are just soaking until the next time she does dishes, but nothing is ever said about them. There they sit. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . you get the point. She’s done dishes at least twice and hasn’t put them in for another washing. Finally one morning when she is again outside gardening, and I have again stolen into the kitchen to make myself some breakfast, I decide, OK, enough of this passive-agressive shit, I’m going to wash the damn things and put them away. So I did.

That night, she finally mentions the custard cups. “I noticed you finally washed those custard cups.”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, they were soaking for quite a long time. It should have come off pretty easily.”
I don’t say anything. Then a moment later, she continues, “Did you have to use steel wool to get them clean?”
“No,” I say.
“What did you use then?” she asks. I hold up two fingers and wiggle them back and forth.
“Your fingernails?” she asks. Ok, works for me. “Yeah,” I say.
“Well I used to be able to do that too but now I’ve got this disease . . . ” she says, showing me a fungusy nail.

Don’t Be Snarky, I’m Not Psychic

This morning as I was making my way upstairs for coffee and toast, I meet mom her way to the garage. She has a paper bag and a box of some kind in her hand. “Going out?” I asked, after saying good morning. “No, just to the garage.” So I figure she’s putting something away or something.

A couple minutes goes by and I hear her opening the kitchen door and struggling with a big bag of redwood bark — 3 cubic feet of the stuff. “Oh my gosh!” I say as she closes the door behind her (it’s a house rule, the door must be “tightly shut” at all times). “Yeah,” she snarks, “I could’ve used some help.”
“I didn’t know what you were up to,” I explained.
“You didn’t ask,” she said sharply.
Hello… I am NOT psychic… I did ask if she were going out, didn’t I? Could she not have said, “No, I’m just getting the bag of bark. Could you help me?” But no, that would be too easy, too rational. It would make too much sense. Better to set up the whole morning to be one gigantic snark-fest. Which it was.

By this time, I’ve already got my bread in the toaster oven toasting. Had I known earlier what sort of a mood she was in, I would have probably opted to forego the toast. You have to understand, mom has a peculiar emotional investment with this toaster oven and she’s extremely protective of it. There’s a whole kitchen protocol I haven’t gotten to yet, but I soon will, I promise.  The toaster oven thing is just one part of a much bigger picture.

Anyhow, I take my toast and coffee into the den and sit down on the couch in front of the TV. I don’t really know what’s on… a news broadcast or something. “Did you burn something?” she demands, sniffing the air. “I smell something burning.”
“No.”
“Did you wash the crumb tray first?”
“No . . .” I say slowly, the way I do when I realize she is trying to pick a fight. (Resist, resist, I say to myself. Don’t give her the opportunity!) She sniffs the air a little more and then settles down a bit. “Well, maybe it’s just the toast,” she backs down.

Now I know for an absolute fact that I did not burn anything in the toaster. I did not get melted butter on any part of the toaster. I can say this with utter certainty because we have been down this road before and my own personal toaster policy, born strictly out of self-denfense, is that I put nothing in there other than dry bread. You see, mom’s objective here is to have everything look as though it has never ever been used. The toaster’s crumb tray is coated with some sort of nonstick stuff so that it’s easy to clean. But to mom, this translates as “can’t be scrubbed to within an inch of its life.” And she has some weird mutant ability to smell a single molecule of melted butter inside the toaster from 50 yards away, so you can say anything you want, but if you’ve gotten one tiny speck of butter in the toaster, she’ll know it. I guarantee.

A few weeks ago, in fact, we got into a big row over this very thing. After that, I would not use the toaster at all for a while, but I’ve since gotten my bravery up at least enough to do the dry bread thing. It came down like this:

I got up one morning and my mom was having a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. I thought toast sounded good, so even though I’d been trying to cut back on refined foods, I made an exception and went for broke. Well, mom had left the crumb tray pulled out of the toaster. It had melted butter on it. But whilst I was pouring myself a cup of coffee, she wiped up the butter from the crumb tray. Then she left the room.

I made my toast, put it on a plate, got my coffee and brought it in to the den and sat down with mom.
“Did you wash that crumb tray?”
“No… all I put in there was a piece of dry toast.”
“That tray has to be washed first. It had butter on it.”
“You cleaned it before i used it. I saw you.”
“I just wiped it off. It should have been washed before it was used again. Once anything gets burned on there I’ll never be able to get it off.”

I did not respond. How could I? I mean, shit! How am I supposed to know that she cleaned it but not well enough for it to be used again? Now I’m supposed to wash the whole damn toaster oven BEFORE AND AFTER I make a stupid piece of dry toast? I think not! If she wants to get all obsessive-compulsive about her toaster oven, that’s her business, but leave me out of it. I already won’t put anything in there other than dry bread because I know she is going to go apeshit and grill me on my toaster cleaning procedures if she even suspects I’ve put anything in there that might spill, splash or drip a drop or cause a crumb to fall or stick to the rack or Heaven-forbid land on the heating element — Good Lord! —
that’s bad enough, but now i’m supposed to psychically intuit whether she has lived up to her own outrageous standards of kitchen protocol? I think not!

So now, here we are again, the exact same argument a month later. Not even the best slice of home made sourdough rye is worth this hassle.