Holiday Food Memory-- Katie

K Holzman

Food as Muse

9/16/10

Taste… "buds or foes?"

Holiday Food Memory-- by Katie

Now I like to think of myself as a fairly reasonable human being. One who approaches things with an open mind and perhaps understanding, but Thanksgiving of '07 brought me to levels I was unaware existed.

I grew up in a home where holidays were celebrated with the whole kit and caboodle. The entire family was around, there would be an extravagant meal being prepared in the kitchen, and soft music played ever so lightly in the background. And on Thanksgiving in particular, we shared a Turkey.

So, early in the morning I awoke to the aromas of casseroles and pies being cooked in the oven as my mother prepared for the coming of family. And as I got dressed in my room, something had occurred to me… "What is Thanksgiving without fireworks?" Yes, looking back, it is quite an unusual quandary but it blossomed into my prepubescent head nonetheless. Naturally having an exciting idea to that extent, I conspired with my oldest brother Stephen to make it possible.

Stephen… he's great… but, he's not going to major in neuroscience any time soon. His plans and blueprints for things always seem to come out… for lack of a better word… like shit. So we got in touch with a few of his friends who happened to have left over fireworks from the summer before and they dropped them off in a suspicious looking duffle bag. I took the bag and hid it under my bed, without checking it, until later on in the evening.

Once everything was settled and my family started to arrive, I joined my other two brothers in the living room to discuss the plan. We were going to set them off in the back yard into the lake once dinner was over. At the time this seemed like a reasonable idea. So Steven came down from my room in a hood with a bunch of fireworks hidden underneath. He then handed something small to my brother Danny whose face lit up spontaneously as a result. Apparently, Stephen's friends left a cherry bomb in the bag from left over from a fishing trip… yes, a fishing trip.

The rules in my house, like most others I assume are anti-BOMB. So Danny ran through the kitchen with efforts to make it to the garage to hide the little sucker. But, through a chain of comically unfortunate events, he ran into my mother, slipped on the floor- into the air, tossing the cherry bomb up only to fall behind the over heating oven. Please, replay that in your mind for a moment and fully grasp the hysterically dreadful scene this had caused.

Yes. Daniel Holzman. A person of whom, at that very second, I could not believe shared my DNA. Was that not the worst thing a person could do while holding a BOMB?! Reasonable- no. Understandable- yeah, if he just escaped a mental institution.

With that, my over dramatic mother rushed everyone out of the house and into the yard while calling the fire department to have a bomb squad remove the cherry bomb. Before long, two fire trucks and squad cars arrived only to tell my mom that it would be a while until allowed back in the home. So my mom ordered a dozen pizzas to eat on the front lawn while we watched as the fire men stood idly by and the bomb squad wet their pants. And that exists to be the day, I remember pizza as a Thanksgiving staple, and Danny as the idiot that made it so.