Impossible Things Before Breakfast

My college reunion is later this year. For the "record book", we were asked for a 500 word essay. I thought I'd share mine with you.

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All of these things are true:

Cauliflower drizzled with olive oil and roasted in a hot oven until crispy around the edges is a wonderful thing to eat.

My boss once called me a horrible Mensa bitch. I told him I was going to put it on my business cards.

I still read the newspaper, the printed inky broadsheet newspaper. Sometimes I even rip things out of it, like recipes which I will never make, or typos that make me cringe.

My eight year old falls asleep best when snuggled up close to me. Consequently, I tend to go to bed earlier than I might otherwise, but I get a lot of reading done.

I love belonging to a CSA. Having no choice in the produce we get each week is curiously freeing; we're forced to cook and eat things we'd probably never buy otherwise. I still hate butternut squash, but I can now make a great dinner out of eggplant or sweet potatoes.

As much as I sometimes wish I were the stay at home parent, I love my full-time job, and we're oddly lucky that a perverse circumstance has led to my husband being home to take care of our daughter. He makes her lunch, puts her on the bus, drives her to swimming, and manages her social calendar. I come home and drill her on the times tables.

My cats hate me, probably because I'm not home as often as the other two humans in the household. I'm trying to seduce them with a private stash of freeze dried tuna flakes.

Buying jeans is a thankless proposition, akin to shopping for bras and bathing suits.

There is a difference between believing something to be impossible, and believing in impossible things. The latter is preferable.

If you give me the choice of a lemon dessert or a chocolate one, I will take lemon.

My daughter thinks I am the most annoying mother in the world. She also thinks I'm the best mother she's ever had - but is clever enough to point out that I'm the only mother she's ever had.

I've never had a manicure. I think I'll keep it that way.

I can't imagine what it's going to cost in 2021 when my kid is ready for college.

One gift of a liberal arts education is "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

The summer before I went to college, my mother and I made a quilt for me to use on my dorm bed. It's now on my daughter's bed, fraying a bit, needing repairs from time to time. I keep fixing it though, because it's our quilt, and my mother's too, and it wraps us in memory and thrift.

On the far side of fifty, I revel in idiosyncrasy.