I always thought our family was a run-of-the-mill, working unit that slaved eight to twelve hours a day to buy food, cover our health insurance and pay our taxes.
But when I look back, I realize we weren’t normal. In fact, I see now that our home was a seed bed for the garden of the pathetically weird.
I came home from work early. The smell of fried bacon was heavy in the air---in fact, there was a fog of bacon smoke. I discovered my youngest daughter in the kitchen making doughnuts—at least she said they were doughnuts.
The counters were covered, the table was full, the stove was brimming—they were everywhere.
"What are you doing, darling?" I inquired.
"Making doughnuts, Dad. Some of my friends are coming over for a party."
"Like the Chinese Army?"
"Don't be silly, Dad. Chinese don’t eat sweets. They eat rice."
I pulled a chair out from under the table and began to sit. My daughter screamed as if she had been stabbed.
"NO, DAD. DON'T SIT THERE!!
It was too late. I sat on five or six doughnuts. They didn’t feel soft and mushy like other doughnuts on which I had sat, but they certainly were nice and warm.
"Oh, sorry, honey. I didn’t know you had doughnuts on the chairs, too." She knelt beside the chair and examined her sat-upon doughnuts. She spoke to them as if to comfort a child.
"Poor little thing. Did that big bully sit on you?"
"Gee, honey, I don’t even think I hurt your doughnuts."
"Are you saying my doughnuts are hard?"
"Oh, no. I would never do that. It's just—well—how will I explain the circular bruises on my posterior in the morning."
I picked up a doughnut. It was everything a doughnut should be except soft, fluffy and light. I tapped it on the table. I could have gaveled a meeting to order.
"These doughnuts are a little too firm, aren’t they?"
She looked at the floor. Her eyes filled. I tried to cheer her.
"Don’t feel bad," I cooed. “We’ll sell them for baby buggy wheels. Or how about door knockers or paper weights? No, I’ve got it! We’ll sell them as ‘pet doughnuts’ like the pet rock fad. You could paint them different colors and sell them and I think they would go real great. You’ll be the first millionaire in the RicKard family."
My little millionaire wasn't happy. She stood in our kitchen, dressed in her camouflage suit of doughnut dough, which, if she was motionless, permitted her to virtually disappear against the smeared background.
She cried and mumbled that nobody loved her except her little poodle. She vowed to run away and attend cooking school and become head cook at Mr. Doughnut, or perhaps start her own doughnut company and then she would return to her hometown and drive around town in her brand new Rolls Royce with a picture of a doughnut on the side and she was going to be the marshal of the Spring Festival parade and she might even donate a tennis court to the town or something else real important and the town would build a statue in her honor right in the middle of the main intersection of town so that everyone would have to drive around the statue and whenever I passed the graven image I would think of her and how badly I had treated her and made fun of her doughnuts and that I would feel almost as rotten as she did right now....boo...hoo...sob...sniffle.
I told her that we could start on the statue today if we could find a brick layer who would lay little round bricks with holes in the middle.
Then my wife bounced in. "You made some doughnuts," she said vacantly.
"Yes, mother," my daughter blubbered.
"But we were out of cooking oil," my wife said. “What did you use to use to deep fry your doughnuts in."
"I used the bacon grease you had under the sink," she sobbed.
When my wife fried bacon she poured off the excess grease into a tin can and saved it beneath the sink until it got full, and then she threw it in the trash. My daughter used this old bacon grease to fry her doughnuts.
"I thought the house smelled strongly of fried bacon," I said. "My eyes watered." At that point I went to the front room to watch the news while my wife consoled the little doughnut maker and instructed her in the culinary arts.
Soon, my wife entered.
"You shouldn’t humiliate her when she does something like that," she admonished.
"I know, but there is a certain element of humor in bacon-flavored doughnuts," I smiled.
"You’ll think humor when you find out what you’re getting for dinner," she smirked. "Listen to her whistle and giggle while she fixes your supper. She’s having a ball."
"What's for supper?"
"You'll find out," she said.
Two minutes later, my daughter brought me the nicest, biggest DLT sandwich I had ever seen. Yes, I said DLT, not BLT. Those initials stand for Doughnut, Lettuce and Tomato.
My daughter wasn't crying anymore.
Marty RicKard Bio
Marty RicKard holds a BS degree in journalism from the University of Southern Mississippi. He also has a Masters Degree in photography. Marty was a technical writer for White Motor Company, and page one editor for four Iowa daily papers. He owned New Sharon Star, where he was twice named Iowa Master Columnist. For ten years, Marty’s regular column appeared in the Professional Photographer magazine. In addition to his writing credits, Marty has won numerous photography awards and has lectured in 48 states. He is a regular columnist for Lens Magazine, and a full-time writer of fiction and poetry. He has published three books. He currently is editor of his local newspaper in Florida.
Copyright 2005 By Marty RicKard |
