memories

This past week, I've been bringing to mind some memories from childhood that made me smile. Wilsons, you remember these?

We're all sitting or laying around the living room of the house on Main Street. It's late, and probably a school night. We are gathered for family prayer, waiting for Dad to say the prayer or to call on someone to pray so we can all go to bed. He didn't call on anyone, which usually meant he was going to say the prayer. So we wait. And wait. Did we realize Dad had fallen asleep? Or did we just wait, wondering what was going on. Suddenly, Dad leaps up from his seat on the fireplace hearth and is all the way across the living room in under a second. Everyone looks at him in shock (How did he more so fast?) as he says in exasperation, "Not one soul has gone to bed!" The kids look around at each other in amusement, as someone explains that we were waiting for him. (I'm giggling as I write.)

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Mom, in her commendable and ongoing effort to have us eat healthy meals (we'll all thank her later for cracked wheat for breakfast and three veggies at dinner when we don't get cancer), she buys The Worst Vegetarian Cookbook of All Time. The problem with this cookbook is that, instead of taking great recipe ideas from places with long traditions of no- or low-meat diets, like India or the eastern Mediterranean, this book tried to adapt the classic meat-and-potato diet of America. I say if you aren't going to eat meat, than just don't bother with hamburgers. That simple.

But The Worst Vegetarian Cookbook of All Time disagreed and tried to pass off Happy Chicken Burgers as actual food. "I tried these on my family, and they loved them!" the book beamed. (I'm making up that quote, but it could be true.) So one summer day, Mom whipped up a mess of shredded veggies, tofu, and who knows what else, shaped them like burgers, and plopped them on the table with all the regular hamburger fixin's.

To the pack of us wild and hunger kids, they did not look appetizing. In fact, they looked a little more like food that had already been eaten, if you get my drift. But Mom had had a hectic day, and was frankly tired of cooking dinner every day just to hear at least three kids complain about the food. So in a preemptive strike, she put warned us firmly, "Not. A. Word."

We were duly obedient and each took a bite of our Happy Chicken Burgers. They were the most awful pieces of slop we'd ever had, but in an effort to be nice to Mom, we swallowed.

To our delight, Mom started laughing. She, too, realized that The Worst Vegetarian Cookbook of All Time had given us The Worst Vegetarian Dinner of All Time. She acknowledged that the Happy Chicken Burgers were simply disgusting and excused us from eating them. We all laughed and laughed, and started making jokes about the burgers and how the author of the cookbook must be insane or lack taste buds to try to pass of this stuff as food. Randall, our resident comedian brother, dubbed the things "Vegetarian Roadkill," and the name stuck.