Twenty Years Ago, There was a Party

[The prompt, borrowed from Red Oak Writing’s Kim Suhr and given to the people in my new writing group was I am in _______’s kitchen and I am ______. Here’s my take.]

I am in my kitchen and I’m watching my husband Howard chopping raw garlic to be used, he says, as a garnish for the chopped liver he has made from scratch.

He is throwing a party for me because I got an award from my alma mater. He has decided to make the party the occasion to try a dozen new recipes, each requiring many steps and utensils we don’t own. It is crazy in the kitchen. Much stirring and direction giving, helpers bumping into each other. I watch from the door, not wanting to get involved in any way.

The guests are milling about in the dining room, murmurs of this and that, new knocks on the door. Our son walks in, his wild hair unrestrained by the company (mostly my professional colleagues and a few old friends) or his flat brimmed baseball cap. He is holding his two-week-old baby.

The baby is wearing a onesie and one sock. It is April in Wisconsin. I shoot him a look and point to his baby’s foot. He shrugs, covers the foot with his hand, and keeps talking to the political science professor standing next to him. He is nonplussed by my sideways glances that anyone else would read “Put pants on that baby!” “Wrap her in a blanket!”

In the kitchen, Howard is urging his helpers – our younger son and his girlfriend – to hurry up peeling the shrimp. His tone gets too urgent and our son drops the shrimp he is working on in the sink and goes upstairs, temporarily removing himself from the kitchen corps. His girlfriend soldiers on, having become much more adept at peeling. An older friend takes a break from watching the peeling to hand me a coffee mug that says “World’s Greatest Grandma.”

Meanwhile in the dining room, I overhear one friend whisper to another, “Watch out for the chopped liver. It’s loaded with raw garlic.”

“You can scrape it off!” my husband yells from the kitchen. He comes through the door carrying a tray of peeled shrimp. In the middle of the platter is a glass bowl of shrimp sauce which I can tell even from several feet away contains at least half a good-sized jar of horseradish. If the guests are intimidated by raw garlic, they’ll faint at the horseradish.

The guests ask to see my award. It is an official, university imprinted document mounted on a wooden plaque. It is on the mantle over our fireplace for the start of the celebration but when the professor who gave it to me learns they’d gotten my middle initial wrong, she takes the award off our mantle and stuffs it in her purse.

All night people ask me, ‘where’s the award?’ and I have to tell them the award is in the professor’s purse.

This puzzles people, including me, but we all decide to make the best of it. The party goes on as if nothing happened. Howard brings out dish after dish from the kitchen. He is in heaven, having orchestrated this extravaganza for me, so I don’t chide him about the garlic or the horseradish and decide that the people murmuring about one or both lack appreciation for spicy cuisine and culinary adventure. I realize I am lucky about everything in this moment.

Later, we find out that the garlic was to be sauteed. It is too late and we don’t care anymore.

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Photo by ji jiali on Unsplash