I Got 99 Flaps and This is One....

Greetings from Flaplandia, a land populated by happy, often frazzled folk doing not much beyond School, Work, and never-ending School Work . We have plodded pleasantly along, the Flap tribe, punctuating the rote business of living with music lessons and performances of one kind or another. Throughout these routinized days I have most enjoyed our evening meals. Cooking is my super-power, as many of you members of the flap nation are aware.

Sure, it’s Work, and I don’t always feel like making it happen, but most of the time I enjoy the routine of listening to crazy people scream on the radio while I putter and sozzle my way to an evening meal that will make everyone happy. 

And with most dinners I pull together, I often even impress myself. I make salads that any bistro would love to have on their menu. I have figured out ways to serve dinner that make my picky eater son not feel like a freak, because I can make a palatable-for-him version of whatever main dish the rest of us our eating.  But all winning streaks hit snags. Insert sports cliche here about not always serving an ace, or hitting it out of the park, or getting the hole in one, ect. Combine that fact with this one:

There is no other full-time food preparer save me in the Flaphold. It's me or multiple pieces of toast.

The Flap household has become used to my more-than decent dinners, yet one night a few weeks ago, instead of being summoned to sit down to some heavenly yum that cures all ills inflicted in a work and school day, dinner was instead a really giant brown cracker posing as a pizza, and what was intended to be homemade pumpkin ravioli in browned butter sage sauce was in fact an undiscovered species of jellyfish...living in a freshwater swamp in the Florida panhandle.

One dish dry and brown, looking like something CURIOSITY should be roving over, the other bubbling in the pot as brackish as the contents of a sump pump.

More problems with this scenario: we tend to eat dinner on the late side (close to 7p.m., usually). And we kinda live at The Back of Beyond-at least when it comes to deciding to dine out at the last minute. But when I saw what we were up against (Mars rover landscape pizza, jellyfish rolling around in pond water), my first reaction was to grab the family and flee to a mid-priced chain restaurant. But again, it was late, and we live Not Close to anything except a farm with a herd of beef cows.

What to do, what to do. Cut to the chase, we survived. We found a box of frozen pancakes. They had deep permafrost and were somehow still extremely damp after microwaving them. Kids nibbled at the damp edges, maple syrup flowed freely that night, I can tell ya.  I ate at the edge of the cracker pizza. Kids has tall milks. Found some cookies in the freezer, called it a day.


That meal was so awful, and I have no idea why it went so pear-shaped! I was spooked. I had no inspiration, no inclination to prepare anything the next night. That meal was so bad, I decided, the kitchen actually needed a buffer-zone meal that would not take place in the house. The next day’s errands and lessons stars aligned and I came up with this plan:

Bob takes lu to cello, Archer goes with and reads during.  We take the freeway, thereby dropping me off at hannies en route to cello.  Family circles back, picks up me and our foodstuffs, we head to 99, a buffer zone restaurant with decent kid’s steaks, and if
I did not hallucinate it, a salmon Caesar on the menu that I was hankering for. At least, that’s what I recalled. But could I rely on my memories of the last time I ate here? That last time was part of a single parenting jag while flapdude was out of town. 

Who can recall what you ate when you also order the Bottomless Birdbath Margarita for a beverage?

I flipped through the menu, reading the Entree Salads page carefully--noticing that no salad, save the Caesar was without bacon. Family restaurant chains and their salads...they are practically apologizing for serving you anything cruciferous...one salad essentially had cookies on it, in the form of cinnamon croutons. This chimera of a salad seems to have  been quietly removed, if it ever existed at all.

The server was a real pro, when I asked her if I was just on crazy pills or did I ever actually see a salmon Caesar on the menu, she told me with a straight face that I could get it, “ if I wanted it”,--gently explaining that it was “just not being featured this month” but “all the ingredients were available.”

 I let the suspension of disbelief hang there, for both my dignity, and hers. I find it hard to believe every month they change out their expensive, glossy, foot long menu, but crazier shit exists in this world than a chain restaurant reprinting their menus every four weeks.  So, I not only ordered it, but Flap Dude bailed on his Stuffed Clams entree (THERE IS A GOD) and gamely said, “gimme a salmon Caesar too!”

So in love with the flap dude, if we are gonna go down, may as well go together!

The meal was served, the food was eaten. The spell was broken. I came home to a clean kitchen --not just counters and floors, but clean as in there was not a whiff of the fug of culinary calamity that settled on me 24hrs. previously. And who the hell knows what we’ll do if dinner disaster strikes again-maybe next time I will prefer swamp ravioli at home to a salmon Caesar in a booth. Stay tuned.

Flap-Wiser: In Which My Son Gets a Well-Deserved Egg-Headed Easter Bunny

Picture the scene if you will:
I’m dragging my son through a medium sized shop-up at h’ford...we are on the home stretch, in the refridge/freezer section, I’m leaning in to get butter, I pop back up from the glass door just as an old lady whizzes past me with her cart. Instead of apologizing for almost clipping me, she starts shaking her head with the “There’s No Accounting for Some Assholes These Days" look on her face. What??! I long to track her down, ask where she got a sense of self-entitlement that allowed her to non-verbally imply that I was the shit head in our little freezer aisle do-si-do. It was only the fact that this is a small town, and I have a tax-payer supported job that stopped me from unloading on her.


Everytime* I long to start a verbal tirade that would cause moms to hussle their children away while other folks stand by watching with half-expectant smiles on their faces (born of the pleasure of having their boring grocery shopping spiced up with a mild altercation and the delicious feeling of realizing “Thank heavens this isn’t me"). I resist retorting because I don’t want to see the “Local Librarian Goes Loco” headline in the Around Town section of our local rag. But if it ever happens, I hope they have fun with it, work the citation angle, perhaps, maybe opine that I was OVERDUE for some R&R based on my tirade.


So, there I am pushing my cart, that, if it was powered by my umbrage, would be flying through the walls like a runaway mule team, mentally muttering comebacks like “ I hope your day gets better, lady, so sorry I almost ruined it all for you by somehow being too close to your shopping cart.” Minutes go by, I’m still steamed, so I say to A-Man: “Ugh, I am still so mad at that old lady!”

“What did she do?” he asks.

“Well, she was just getting so upset about such a stupid, little thing!” And then my boy drops the gentle wisdom bomb on me that made the entire black mass of anger and pissiness evaporate: “But now you are getting upset about stupid little things.” Huh. So I am. I have no intention of turning into the wrinkled mass of pure uck I encountered while buying butter (I didn’t think anything bad could happen while purchasing butter) so for maybe the seventh time in my life, I actually let something go. Thanks, A-man. I owe ya one.

Now, my kids rarely attend the shop-ups that go on in the gleaming, air-conditioned splendor of the chain supermarket we favor in town. Both have their own reasons for supporting the maternal solo excursion for foodstuffs. Little Flap Dude does not want to go because he gets so bored he nearly passes out. Flappette peppers me with requests for shit I refuse to buy** every 37 seconds until I nearly pass out. So we agree, I go alone and honor requests for Popsicles and the like. Stop asking for weird shit. Unless your Flap Dude dad is shopping, there won’t be any weird shit in the house.

In general the flap tribe tends to howl pretty badly with unavoidable supermarket excursions loom into their happy existence. However, their attitude about food shopping changed when we stumbled into the exciting world of the RT. 9 Discount store. Now, the actual lay-out is way worse than our regular food store, instead of wide aisles and cool air, you get narrow aisles, creepy, buzzing fluorescents and pitifully stinky bums. And the PSBs were often waaaay too helpful. “Ya need me to hold those ten jarsatomata sauce for ya honey?” One bum hopefully asked the flappette on a typical visit.


Despite the dismal surroundings, the atmosphere quivers with delicious expectation and possibility. From all of us. Myself, I am after Devonshire Cream for .79 (normally 8 bucks for a tiny jar), gorgeous, rough-shaped sugar cubes perfect for Old Fashioneds, fancy tea that folks weren’t willing to buy at the regular price. What I’ve realized about discount stores is that they have bottom barrel dreck, absolutely, but right alongside the dreck sits super fancy shit that was not only too expensive for the typical Yankee shopper, it’s just too odd, or difficult to use. A typical reaction from me at Rt. 9 Discount store: “Yay! They have jaggery!”


I think my kids like going to Rt. 9 Discount because no matter what we may find here, my children will hear their their favorite word over and over, whatever the request. Yes, they will hear yes. Yes, I will buy the giant bag of dum-dum suckers, the bucket of sour mesquite fruit twizzlers, the weird cookies from Guam, the Pineapple Colada Cola....why ever not, all these items together total four dollars and thirty-eight cents. And not only was the store a treasure cave of crazy candy for the kids, it was a museum of odd comestibles that never failed to fascinate and educate. Hannaford Supermarket holds no such surprises. There, you find bananas. Wow. Rt. 9 Discount? Banana ramen noodles. WOW.

It was in this atmosphere of glee at knowing anything is the store was Yours, yet having no idea just what it might be (or in many cases, what is actually was), that Archer and I stumbled onto the 50% poignant 50% hilarious leftover Easter candy bunny "The Professor". His chocolate head had broken away from his neck, the yellow candy eyes were pressed against the thick cellophane window. Who knows what kind of journey he had been on that landed him at the at this dead-end for all things edible. "The Professor "had a pathetic traveling companion on the shelf to hold his chocolate paw, "Parsnip Pete". He cost $1.49. We bought him, and Parsnip Pete. Pete was going for .99 cents.

Obviously we are always in a giddy mood when we are in this store (banana ramen has that effect) but the day we found "The Professor", the high spirits were fueled by that kind of crazed emotion that comes from knowing the fun will end soon. We were, in fact, shopping at Rt. 9 for the very last time. We had heard the rumors for a few weeks. The cashier with the tattooed neck had mentioned that it was slated to close. Something about how "they weren't making enough money". Huh, selling soup for .39 a can and you can't cover yer nut, huh? Who would've thunk? So, we encountered this uhh... Egg-Headed Easter Bunny (SORRY) and couldn't just leave him there. Not with his chocolate head askew, the blue candy pupils dilated in agony. It's all for the best, anyway. What kid today would want this Palmer relic greeting them on Easter morning? How did a stuffy intellectual persona even make it as a Palmer Rabbit mold?

If I was a good journalist I'd be on the phone to Palmer HR, getting the scoop on this antiquated ideal of a chocolate Easter rabbit. I bet they've been pouring this mold since the 1950s, back when our society fell in love with mocking the cerebral types. Hey, Palmer marketing types, time to review your rabbit molds!

 Now the Rt. 9 Discount store is closed down. Empty. No more size 45 pants, brown-stained, for dollar. No more diet martini mixer, no more wall of out-dated sugar-crusted breakfast cereal from supermarket chains through-out the Northeast.

I'm back to shopping alone at Hannaford. Pushing my cart while avoiding mean old ladies, missing the bums.

*happens about five times a day


**H'ford, I beg of you, stop with the beanie babies in the card aisle.

American Beauty?

Everyone agrees advertisers seek to place ads for their goods and services where the most likely consumers will find out about them. So what does it say about me* that the radio show I tune into every afternoon while making dinner has ads for viagra, services to help you register an invention you made in your creepy basement, offers FOR A LIMITED TIME to buy special gold coins, and GPS tracking devices so you can "find out the truth." I had no idea I was a paranoid, grandiose, impotent baby boomer. Into this putrid mix of angry man ads as our nation led up to Valentines day was a tantalizing product for the man who really wanted to get his third wife back. At first I couldn't discern these messages from all the other cacophonous enticements that offered this fear-based listening audience opportunities to show this fucked up world how much better and smarter they were than everyone else. But each evening, as I chopped onions, boiled water, and sauteed whatever was getting fuzzy in my fridge, all the noisy messages about Valentines day began to emerge from their urgent, nay frantic advertising brethren and an image started to coalesce. After hearing the ads for the 60th time, it finally hit me, visually: Wait, did they just say you could send a dozen five-foot roses to the special someone victim? And not just that but, oh christ, you can also send a six foot teddy bear? Why can't these misguided lummoxes -- who don't think it's insane to send over a gargantuan stuffed toy and roses the size of corn stalks -- get out of their dim basements and start inventing a way to live that does not involve terrifying those whom they feel deserves their attention? All of January the ads played on, relentlessly urging listeners to send these creepy things "right to her door." Yeah, right to the address she thought you would never get. But hey, you bought that GPS tracker, and dang if it didn't turn out she's holed up in that dismal apartment complex just a few miles from your condo. Great, maybe I'll drive by a few times tonight after heating up some manwiches for dinner. Just to see if she got my beautiful presents. And Flapnation, here's the most terrifying news of all: the roses cost $700.00 dollars, the bears around $300.00 and if you thought that was the terrifying news, read on if you dare. When I went to the website to see this crazy shit for myself, I found that most of it had sold out. Now, I'm no marketing guru, but if you really wanted to target a service effectively, I think it would be VERY elegant to add a link to a service that offers fast-track restraining orders. One-stop shopping for both recipient and sender.

*it says I have a weird reaction to yelling, anger, and invectives. For some reason I can unwind from my day spent with hundreds of children by listening to adults acting more childish than actual kids while they argue about politics. Something so relaxing to me about how bat-shit crazy everyone involved in the show acts. **Flapdude commented on both items. To the giant teddy bear, he suggested it's a sublimated desire for a blow-up doll on the part of the sender, and he opined that the giant roses were reminiscent of something from Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Which might explain their price tag. 700 dollars! I think they really DID get harvested from the center of the earth.