If You Can't Stand the Heat, Get Out of My Kitchen

We haven't had a kitchen fire in my home for almost a week. I know that's not much of an accomplishment for most families, but in my household, kitchen fires are such frequent occurrences that not having one for six days is a reason to celebrate. In fact, kitchen fires happen so often in my home that these days they hardly faze the kids.


The last time we had a kitchen fire was when my sandwich burst into flames. I was pitching it in the sink just as my son strolled by.

"Hey, Mom, what happened?" he asked in the same tone he also says, "Hey, Mom, how are you?"

"My sandwich caught on fire," I explained in the same tone I also say, "Not bad. How are you?"

He looked at the sandwich and said, "Maybe your sandwich took one look at you and you were so hot, it combusted."

When a friend of mine who shall remain nameless heard that, she suggested I get the boy's eyes checked. At first I took that as a crack about my cooking then realized it was a crack about my looks. Not all of us can age as gracefully as you, PATTY!

Another time I was on the phone with someone while attempting the death-defying feat of cooking while talking. A wall of flames shot up off the stove-top, across the microwave and over four of the cabinet fronts. On the other end my friend heard the whoosh of the fire, followed by rapidly repeating clanking noises as I rearranged the pans on the burners and doused the flames with baking soda.

"Holy mother of God!" he yelled. "What happened?"

"Oh, it's fine," I said. "I just had a little fire on the stove. Speaking of mothers, how's yours?"

I recently learned that my own mother had similar challenges. Our circa 1940 "state-of-the-art" stove had a temperamental broiler that set dinner on fire on a regular basis. My father was always at work when this happened and since dousing fires was not my mother's forte, she would scream for our neighbor, Ray who would rush over and knock out the flames.

I'm not sure what it says about my mother that another man had to put her fires out while my father was at work. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what it says about my father. Oh wait - yes I am.

At construction sites they sometimes post a sign heralding their safety record. The signs say things like: 137 days without an accident! I'm going to do something similar in my kitchen. If I posted a sign tonight, it would read: Six days without a fire!

I know what the root cause of my kitchen fires is: multitasking - cooking while breathing, cooking while blinking, and as in my earlier example, cooking while talking. Cooking while not a cook sums them all up, I think.

I should be embarrassed about all this, but instead, I'll stand proudly by my sign: Six days without a fire! 

Actually, it's not going to be a sign exactly; it's going to be a dry erase board I can update every day, and any day now, reset to zero.   

One of the Better Mommies

What can I say about the woman who had my hands, my face and even my laugh years before I did? I can say she is a blessing. I can say she's still my friend and I can say she's still one of the funniest people I've ever met. And she's all of that to my children, too.

My mother in her glorious youth.

My mother was and is a rarity. When I was a child, I counted on her to know it all and she never disappointed. She could open every stubborn wrapper, soothe the bloodiest of toes stubbed on the barefoot runs of summer and sing just like Julie Andrews - to my ears anyhow. And in my child's universe, she and I were everything that mattered most.

I remember hiding behind her skirts when my father would come home playfully roaring, "Where's T.C.!" I recall wobbling like a drunken aerialist just trying to walk in her high heels, as if I could ever fill her shoes. And there was no safer place on earth than her lap when J.F.K. was assassinated and all I understood was that John-John's daddy had been so very badly hurt.

A year or so after the death of J.F.K, she took me to see Bambi and I turned and stared at her dumbfounded in the dark as she cried when Bambi's mother saved his life only to die herself and when Bambi called for her, not comprehending her absence. Years later, when I was a mother, I understood painfully well what had made her cry that day.

As I phased into adolescence, I liked her far too much to seriously consider rebelling, and would lie in bed with her at night, the two of us laughing ourselves sick until my father would come in, laughing at our laughing and boot me out. As my interest in film history grew, we went to more and more movies together. She saw to it that I was exposed to theatre, took my brothers and me to museums and lectures and saw me through college and my first foolish mistake of a marriage.

My brother often refers to her as, "One of the better mommies."

That she was, and is, and always will be.