Happy New Year!
Tonight my family and I ate a wonderful dinner of pork chops, collard greens, and black eyed peas. I thought of grandma and how each year she would make enough hop-n-johns to feed a small army. She would enlist my help and fill tubs of Tupperware of this weird food to feed each member of the Cleary clan. I remember the neon green bowl with the clear top she would hand over to my mother each year before our car ride home. The best part about all this food was the trip to our local grocery store, the Red and White, to purchase the beans and collards which would have to meet grandma’s specifications before being placed in the cart. As we carted the groceries into the house and lined the bags up against the cabinets on the floor, grandma would tell me to clean off the stove area. This meant that I would take off the tacky Santa decorations which littered the stovetop. These were metal covers that grandma would promptly lug out of the attic every year around Christmas to add some festiveness to the stove. These hideous things would dwindle down throughout the years because when Grandma turned on the wrong burner, Mr. Santa would burn up and smoke would fill the kitchen.
I felt like my grandma tonight too. Every time we had pork-chops she would chew on the bone as if it was the last piece of meat she would ever have. When grandma looked over at me from across the den, she would snarl and ask me why I wasn’t eating the rest of my dinner. This was an insult to me, the human garbage can, who put away anything and everything that she had cooked that night. I would then, not wanting to disappoint her, pick up my pork chop bone and chew on it until she had finished hers.
What can I say? Like Grandmother, like granddaughter.
