So it’s October. My back-to-normal-for-2020 schedule these days is: work in the morning at my church office, zip home, prep dinner (since my dinner fairies are AWOL), then go grab our two girls from school at their earlier COVID-19 release time, before the evening shenanigans kick in. Side note: the dinner fairies… they stink. Global pandemic, or otherwise, they are not shouldering their fair share at all. They can go join their cousin the tooth fairy whenever lazy fairies fly off to. Truly, my girls have teeth that have sat in tooth fairy pillows for years! And meanwhile I’m supposed to make all these dinners. What in the world!?
At any rate, I do the mid-day food prep because dinner is eaten somewhere between the hours of 4:30 and 8:30 p.m. So it has to be made such that it can be quickly warmed up, or, of course kept cold and fresh. It depends. Also, it may need to be a handheld dinner unless it can totally not be a handheld. I can’t explain this, I just know it’s true.
So on a recent morning, after working, and, just for fun, having a quick dental visit to check on a “soft spot,” I was already feeling at my best … by not feeling the left side of my face. I got home and made a quick and easy dinner that was neither quick nor easy. It included chopping, dicing, thawing, heating, re-cooling and then assembling into our giant wooden salad bowl so that no ingredients touched, yet could be quickly tossed into a yummy, fresh salad whenever the family paraded through.
Then I left for my afternoon as an unpaid taxi driver. Our dinner sat ready to go in the massive bowl; a fortress for our food with walls so high not even the largest salad was in danger of spilling over.
And here, Regular Reader, is where the story takes a dark turn.
We got home (driven by the newly permitted 16 year old, which is not any less harrowing with a half-numb face in case you were curious) and entered the kitchen. I picked up the tongs to toss and serve dinner into all the various containers that would go forth into the North Shore like so many salad ambassadors.
But, though the bowl sat there exactly where I’d left it, something was deeply, deeply wrong.
“NO!” I screamed.
“NOOOOO!” I yelled in, let’s call it a guttural rage. And then, well, as a person who teaches the Bible frequently, words were spoken that might fall under the category of “not guarding my tongue.”
Because you know why!? My tongue was enraged! The dinner was gone. GONE. Except … the corn and tomatoes. Notably missing? The two pounds, (T-W-O!), of chopped rotisserie chicken, the entire package of cooked and crumbled bacon, and a diced half of a red onion.
Standing nearby was Moose, our almost 4-year-old Berner. The only creature in the house who could have stood up and reached inside the fortress with his gigantic, remorseless, head. The only dog who would dare to be so picky as to forgo the corn and tomatoes.
“I am turning you into a rug! This is totally unacceptable!” I fumed at Moose. Blue, our elderly Berner, sat nearby feeling all the guilt that Moose should have felt if Moose could contain such emotions in his body. Instead, he contained two pounds of chicken in his body and clearly felt pride with a hint of perhaps the slight need for a snack — big dogs get hungry you know.
I couldn’t look at him.
And do not start with me about the fact that he ate an onion. I am well aware that onions can be toxic to dogs. You know what else is toxic to dogs? Mothers who made dinner at 11 a.m. only to have it inhaled by a creature who had what can only be described as a smug look on his face. Plus, if you must know, Moose didn’t get sick — of course he didn’t — you may recall he swallowed baby Jesus a few years back and survived just fine.
There were no good answers to the entire situation — just as there was no dinner. We ordered takeout from DoorDash which recently extended its business out here to the hinterlands of Boxford. And that is the only good news I can report.
Like I said, it’s October, and I guess things are more back to normal than I thought. I’m always rushing, sit-down family dinner is a thing of the pandemic past and no fortress is really strong enough to hold back the chaos of Moose or, sigh, 2020.