M Is for the Many Meals She Made

Praying little prayers, like: "God, please let the service end so I can go eat. Amen."

Sometimes, He would answer those prayers sooner than later.

Church would end at 1:58 p.m. rather than the regular 2:30.

We would shake the pastors' hand. Wait for my mother to finish talking. Wait for the cars to file out of the gravel parking lot. Wait, in the back seat of the white Ford Granada, windows rolled down, hand stuck out the window, beating the waves of the wind, traveling all the way down to where Grandmother lived in a little white house up a broken driveway. There, the food sat, like a glorified offering.

Grandmother would open the door. "Come on in, baby. Help yourselves. Plates are on the table."

And we would dig in.

"Mother, this is so good," my mother would say. "You really put your foot in it today."

(Putting your foot in it means "This is an excellent meal! You seasoned it perfectly." But at these Sunday dinners, nobody but the proper cousins talked like that.) We would dip into the sweet, red Kool-Aid punch with its ring of ice floating like an iceberg. We would eat until we were bursting. No pretense was needed. No need to make small, polite conversation. No need to talk at all. You could just sit on a sofa and eat, and nobody would think you were rude. And when you became a teenager, you could eat, put your plate in the sink and leave without helping to clean up, and nobody would say you were wrong.

At Grandmother's house, it was always about the Food.

This was Soul Food, food for the soul. Sunday dinner was the glue in the family, like flour and water -- always spiced with drama.

I remember when the uncle brought home the new wife who was from "another culture, " and everybody stopped eating when the uncle put some chitlins on her plate. We waited for her to actually eat these meticulously cleaned, incredibly rich pig intestines. And when she did, we knew she would fit in.

As I grew and went off into the world, I would encounter other people's cooking at holidays and always leave slightly disappointed by the blandness, the lack of salt, the lack of seasoning -- the lack of drama.