Perfect Pasta

I guess I'll stick with the pasta theme and recount a story about when my dad had to cook dinner for us one night. I must have been in the 1st grade, we were living in Austin, TX and my mom was taking night classes. So that left my dad in charge of dinner a few nights a week, something that we were not accustomed to at all, because my mom always cooked dinner at our house. It was the way things were and to have Dad step into her shoes for a night filled me with a bit of trepidation.

So the first night we were left in our dad's care he made spaghetti. Pretty simple and straight forward and it went according to plan, right until the very end. As always, my dad took this opportunity to teach us something and at this moment it was how to make sure the pasta was perfectly done. We were standing around the stove as the pasta boiled, he reached in the pot, grabbed a noodle and flung it above his head and there it stuck to the ceiling. He smiled at us and said: "If it sticks, then it’s done." My sister and I stood there in disbelief. This most certainly was not the way mom made sure the pasta was done. We laughed at him and questioned his authority on this method but he convinced us with some fancy explanation (knowing him I'm sure it involved physics) and we believed him. After dinner as we cleaned up, I asked dad how he was going to get the spaghetti noodle off the ceiling and he looked at both of us and said, "Let's just leave it there. Let's see how long it takes mom to notice it. It will be our little secret." So, there it stuck. And there it stuck for days, maybe even months ... lets just say it was there for awhile before Mom finally discovered our secret.  But every time I was in the kitchen with dad, he would point up to the ceiling and we'd laugh and snicker at our little "secret". At our special moment in time where we came together and managed to fix dinner and survive without mom, well at least for one night.

I know that this isn't a life altering lesson in the overall scheme of things but he took an opportunity to turn a new and anxious experience in my life into a funny, silly moment that I remember often and always with a smile. So if you are ever at my house while I'm cooking spaghetti, you will no doubt see me grab a noodle out of the pot and throw it at the wall and say, "if it sticks, then it’s done". But no worries, I do clean up afterwards.