Turkey Stuffing Cranberry Sandwich
There is one holiday food that I have liked for years.
It was the first seasonal food that I was:
1. Allowed to order or build. Everything is a request upon her and she charges you just to ask
2. Mother felt like could be used as a punishment. This means I can always get to eat it instead of her eating it. It also helped me get it more often because she thought it was less valuable
3. I did not think would be easy for her to ruin. Something that is served hot but I’m willing to eat cold, because most days I have the opportunity to eat cold things out of the fridge. Something that has enough inherent wrapper that I can just put in my pocket, maybe with a napkin around it
4. That I could sometimes build at home, ideally from leftovers and possibly bread or a tortilla
5. I actually liked
6. I successfully hid fact 5 from Mother indefinitely, and so never lost access to this thing I liked (in so much as I could control access at all)
Today I had a Piroshky Piroshky turkey cranberry stuffing pastry, served hot with cold berry jelly. This is the best version of that holiday food. Seattle sells it out a window onto the sidewalk in the downtown bus transfer zone. I will eat all of them next year. And probably one on the way to the airport. And several over Christmas if they’re still around.
This food had two punishment components for Mother, with different dimensions to satisfy multiple moods and fears. She imagines that cranberries are only barely edible and would ruin anything, whereas I know they contain as many calories and as much sugar as jam, and tastes only fanitly of bog berry. She in particular imagines that it would ruin many other foods if consumed together. She imagines I literally eat garbage – because I do – and that I prefer it that way, and this cranberry thing sounds like a combination she can only imagine throwing away.
She further imagines that slabs of turkey are inedible while cold (though thin slices of turkey can only be consumed cold). Beyond making this sandwich garbage food on another axis – at least when cold – it also makes her believe she can renegotiate access to this leftover garbage sandwich by controlling access to heat.
It was a great thing, my first favorite food. It’s why I can like foods but not colors or scents, even though they live in similar head spaces. It’s one of my better scams. It’s how I finally took control of one thing in my life, and choose and got what I preferred as an act of intentional control. I did not have to limit myself to survival choices and could, through planning and guile, make my life at least sometimes good enough to choose something for myself.
It’s why I imagine I’d like to live in a heist movie.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.