Mission Inedible

The tomato sauce would run like a rolling red, anti-oxidant river...

The spaghetti would twine like the flaxen hair of trumpeting angels...

The wine would flow like the vats of jolly Bacchus on a bender...

The garlic bread would crunch like Italian leather cowboy boots over a dry Sicilian riverbank.

This was the image my college friends and I projected the time we decided to cook ourselves a real spaghetti dinner in the dorms. When you're half-starved, having subsisted most of the year on ramen and Dr. Pepper, imagination can take you pretty far.

What imagination cannot do is conjure you actual things like pots, or pans, or a stove or utensils or bowls. Which, among our group of eight, hadn't been a priority.

I mean, speaking only for myself, I knew how to heat up a mean Chef Boyardee beef ravioli in my coffeemaker.

This should give you all a reasonable sense of the quality of things to come in this tale.

So in spite of no household equipment and very little money, the spirit of youth would not be deterred for our Spaghetti Extravaganza. This dream would not die.

We would improvis, we decided. We would MacGyver ourselves the best dinner we'd had in months!

We divided the tasks like an elite special ops team. My friend Austin and his roommates were in charge of ingredients for sauce. Upstairs, Ed had connections with wise and grizzled 21-year-olds; he'd snag the wine. Scoobie and I would round up some utensils. Dan would work out serving logistics and pasta. We pooled our money, and disippated like fog.

We reconnoitered later in Austin's dorm-room, dropping our supplies in the center for appraisal. Some bought. Some borrowed. Some smuggled from dining service through elaborate covert tactics and distraction techniques.

In moments, we had the first bowl of pasta bubbling away in the microwave in a lifted plastic bowl.

It would need to bubble there, we discovered, for the better half of the next semester.

But other problems also bubbled before us. Because it was as we started to assemble the sauce that we realized we only had one bowl to do everything in and we were already nuking in it. How would we heat the sauce if the first half of the pasta was still in it?

And while less ambitious people would have just used the styrofoam plates we'd invested in, we felt this lacked the glamor, the size, the sturdiness, and the, er, non-meltiness we required.

Then Dan got a lightbulb idea.

Er, rather, Dan noticed the ceiling fixture had kind of an... oh.... large glass bowl sort of shape to it.

And that's when the guys decided to climb up and use their light shade as the mother of all pasta platters.

Well, as the token girls in the group, Scoobie and I, we had our standards. We said:

"You can't use a light fixture that's been up there for years as a pasta bowl!!...

It's had bugs and dust and lead paint chips in it and who knows what else?!...

Blank faces. Crickets chirping.

"We have to wash it first."

So Scoobie and I went off to the dorm bathroom to give it a good scrub down and bring a little sanity and sanitation back into the festivities.

But by the time we returned-- the serving bowl chandlier removed of fly specks and 50 years of cigarette smoke-- there was another scent in the air. One of real home cooking!

Yes, after the pasta nuked for the better part of an hour and a half until it was glowing green and if not exactly al dente, at least alright-ish...

After the garlic bread popped hot out of the toaster slots and the oregano stopped flaming...

After the jar sauce was hot and thickened with bits of produce chopped with a plastic knife...

After all this... We sat down to dine.

Oh, as we passed the shaker cheese and Ed poured the box wine into Dixie cups, we sat on the floor of Austin and the guys' palacial manor dining room, we leaned back, sighed with weary contentment, and suddenly knew...

This was how The Other Half lived.

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Fig Newtons, False Gods and Free-for-All

Supernatural phenomena normally steered pretty clear of Mr. Gardner's eighth grade social studies class.

Maybe it thought it could do more good on the dodgeball court, where some of us needed all the help we could get...

Maybe it saved its eye-poppers for the kids at the Catholic school down the street, so it could enjoy a really jazzy entrance...

Or more likely, it was just as face-hitting-the-desk-bored as we were, from learning about the American Revolution eight stinkin' years in a row.

Mr. Gardner himself, however, was a pretty cool guy. Each day, he'd let one of us out of class a couple of minutes early, if we could answer one of his trivia questions.

Now, this was extremely valuable tender for our young years. See, with two extra minutes of liberation, in the 80s, you could easily:

• Drink your weight's worth of lukewarm fountain water
• Whip someone in the butt with your Trapper Keeper notebook
• Tease your bangs straight up and top-coat them with AquaNet
• Swap three Garbage Pail trading cards for some Joe Bazooka gum
• Or any number of other critical social interactions
  

No other teacher had ever given opportunity for such unbridled freedom. So, yes, Mr. Gardner was a little unconventional. And one day, the man even extended to us the open hand of trust:

"I just have to take these papers to the office. I'm going to leave you all unattended. But you stay here quietly in your seats and read chapter 12 while I'm gone. And we'll discuss it when I get back."

Of course, the moment he left, the paper airplanes were flying. The boys hand-wrestled. The girls squealed over the latest 16 Magazine photo spread featuring An Abundance of Guys Named Cory. And general mayhem broke loose.

The classroom looked like it was directed by John Hughes.

But suddenly, the giggling, the shouting, the sound of running high-tops all stilled...

...As a deep ancient voice resonated from the very heavens... or, you know, the classroom PA system:

"This is God! You should be reading chapter 12! I command you!"

It was striking how much this Maker of All Creation... this Do-It-Yourself-in-Seven-Days World-Builder.... and Mr. Gardner doing a Charlton Heston impersonation sounded alike.

And that's when one boy— a kid we called "Fig" Newton, whose vast talents included making the perfect sound of the bell and convincing substitute teachers he was, in fact, a new student named Tyrone— decided this whole Chapter Twelve Commandment thing could be resolved with a single philosophical explanation:

"We're atheists!"

The classroom exploded with laughter.

When Mr. Gardner returned, his Magnum P.I. mustache was turned up in a smirk.

Funny, we never did speak about the important spiritual moment we'd shared in his absence.

You'd think something monumental, like hearing the crackly voice of God, would have been worth filling the man in on...

If, you know, if we'd believed in that sort of thing.

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Apologies to my fellow blog friends that I haven't gotten a chance to come check out your posts lately. It's not that I'm ignoring you or became a blog-snob or anything. I've been crushed with two work writing projects due at the very same time. It's a little like playing dueling banjos, only I'm the only banjo player for 50 miles.

I promise I'll be around to see what you're up to, soon, once I can get that banjo duet down to a manageable one player riff.

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