When I taught writing, I used to tell my students that often times writers don't really know what they want to write about until they actually just start writing and eventually find themselves in the middle of something worthwhile...but what happens when you find yourself in the middle of two ideas and aren't sure they go together...
Jan and I were taking Carly to a south-side La Crosse YMCA gymnastics class at 5:30 on mondays this past fall but it dawned on us that it was possible that the cross town commute at dinnertime so one or both of us could walk into the 'people zoo' wasn't going to happen again any time soon. Carly is talented at gymnastics. We don't want to pull her away from a sport because our hair is graying and our knuckles are starting to grow into the shape of a steering wheel, so we tried karate for a couple of months and waited until we found a gymnastics option that was held in the cafeteria at Holmen Middle School. The resources there are not the same – a couple of pads, a beam, a floor, maybe a vault? – but there were six or seven kids, two instructors, and four or five parents sitting at their round tables quietly tapping at their ipads. I was taking a few pictures; Jan had just arrived and sat down on an orange cafeteria chair. It dawned on me after a few easy minutes that we were watching her, when she was Carly's age, and she, Jan, was like her mom watching her! "Oh yeah, Mom lived at the Y." Carly had fun. We sat quietly and watched. Our blood pressure maintained. We don't know if Carly is on a fast track to the Olympics by training in an empty school cafeteria, but...
If you cook Pork Lo Mein don't follow the recipe for the pork loin or the house will fill with smoke because the initial 450 oven setting – dropped down to 400 for the rest of the bake – will cause the house to fill with smoke as the pork juice drips onto the sizzling pan below that is just too hot. The same woman who just made the revelation about the mini-me will ask why the house should be evacuated on a night that would be nice to stay inside, where it is warm, true, but not on fire. The chef though will readjust the temperature to 350 and get the pork to the proper internal pork temperature of 160 (beyond in this case by a bit), shred that, and eventually add it into lo mein noodles, a sauce of minced garlic, Asian Sesame sauce, Oyster Sauce, Soy sauce, carrots, a bit of broccoli, a hand full of mini corn cobs, and chopped green onions. The final product
will come to impress the wife, and she will stash away a little tupperware container of it for tomorrow. The writing instructor didn't really know what he was talking about anyway...
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