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By Root 993 0

melted butter. Place in oven with heat as high as knob will turn. Clean rest of house for one hour. Throw potatoes and cabbage and peas and carrots into boiling pots of water. Eat some pie. Dip two celery sticks into jar of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter and eat. Check turkey. Probably not even close to being done. Begin cursing in English. Baste turkey with tons more butter. Place back in oven. Open the fifteen cans of jellied cranberry sauce and combine into one giant heap of cranberry sauce on a large table platter. Eat more pie. Call relatives in Ireland and gossip/slander etc for half-hour. Check turkey. Begin cursing in Gaelic/English mixture that sounds like a third and almost completely separate language. Serve large amounts of whiskey and beer to guests who have already begun to arrive. Serve pie. Check turkey. Still not done. Clean up kitchen for half an hour. Threaten to begin making peanut butter and cranberry jelly sandwiches unless drunken jackasses stay out of the goddam kitchen. Check turkey again. STILL not done. Threaten to move back to Ireland-include "If I never see another turkey again it won't be soon enough for me" speech. Remove potatoes etc. from pots. Place in bowls. Smell turkey burning. Curse. Serve.

Fridays were special because as Catholics we couldn't eat meat. So that meant my mom had to break out one of her fish recipes. Like this one:

FISH

One loaf Wonder Bread

8 sticks butter

Cabbage

Seven hundred potatoes

Six boxes Gorton's Frozen Fish Sticks

Two large bottles ketchup

Place fish sticks in flat pan in oven. Turn knob up as far as it will go. Place cabbage and potatoes in large pot of already boiling water. Wait twenty minutes. Take fish sticks out while middle seems to still be frozen. Pour ketchup over them until they disappear beneath a sea of red. Wait another hour for flavor to evaporate from cabbage and potatoes and they are soft to the touch. Make sign of the cross. Serve.

We never went hungry. We never were at a loss for drama and the men were absolutely never ever allowed or expected to cook or clean up. Our job was to shovel and bang nails and fix flat tires and kill mice and rats and giant insects. We played football and baseball and hockey right there in the street. No helmets no shin guards no crying. You got hit with a puck or a stick or a bat or a ball you walked it off and kept on playing.

Everyone had scars and broken bones and some kids even had strange dents in their heads and some kids stuttered and other kids lisped and some had weird walks-everyone had something wrong with them and nobody's parents could either afford to get them fixed or had the time to even do so. You sucked it up and kept moving forward. You couldn't do your homework you flunked out quick and went to work pumping gas.

It was the natural order of things-the food chain in action-the way God meant things to be. Those who could run faster got ahead quicker and the weaker links in the chain got eaten by the enemy.

Shit-I was late for work right after school one day so I ran across the street against oncoming traffic and got nailed by a Buick right on my left ass cheek-and if you think I have no ass now just imagine how small it was when I was fourteen years old. It was basically all bone. Anyways-the good news was I bounced right back up and the traffic came to a stop-including my bus-and I not only made it to work on time but I had no desire to sit down for the next two weeks.

And like I said before-that was when the front ends of automobiles were still made out of steel, not these pussy-assed plastic bumpers they have now.

I wasn't the only one, by the way-lots of kids got hit by cars and half the time the drivers were drunk. EVERY adult was drunk back then. It wasn't against the law to drink and drive. And there were no cupholders in cars-so if you wanted to drink and drive you had to be able to balance the goddam beer can or whiskey bottle and drive at the same time. Come to think of it-that's how they probably gauged whether or not you were too drunk to drive back then-if you