Word to Your Mother

Mike: Hey, do you know where that pen went?
Me: What pen?
Mike: That's--what I was afraid of.

This pretty much sums up Michael and I, this little moment from the Best Buy parking lot last night.

Inside the store, I'd set our camera research down to watch people play RockBand while Mike looked at cameras.

"Where's the papers?" Mike asked.

I tore my gaze away from an Aerosmith song. "Over there," I said, waving my hand down the aisle.

"Where's the pen?"

I glared at him. "I don't know! I didn't have the pen! You had the pen!"

The pen was right under the papers, where I'd left all of them.

I looked down at my feet. "I love you," I mumbled. Mike walked back to the cameras, pinching my butt on the way.

Abbie McGaha Cobb asked me yesterday what Michael and I argue about the most. After thinking a moment, I told her that it was the ways we were raised.

It's subtle, really. Michael and I grew up just outside a major city in suburbia. Our parents were and are very involved in our lives, and segued (almost) expertly from parents to peers. They're both generous in a beautifully balanced way; we have to work for what we want, but they'll slip in a twenty to our coat pockets or a little note. Our fathers are practical do-ers. We both have mothers that rival each other as the sweetest women in the whole world. Oh, and it must be said that our childhood homes both have messy garages that are like nails on a chalkboard to our moms.

But there aren't much more similarities, and it is often revealed on our dinner table. (I must add that Michael only raves about my cooking, and I've never heard a peep of complaint, though the smoke alarms are many.) Though we both had home-cooked meals with a meat, starch, and vegetable, I, for one, always had dinner with a glass of milk, which Michael thinks is gross. (I, for one, have never broken a bone, whereas Michael's wrists are that of an 80-year old transcriptionist.) It's a symptom of the heart of it:

The other night, I was boiling milk and water and butter in the skillet to ready it for some instant garlic mashed potatoes, a staple of my mom and I's dinner during my high school years. (We don't have a saucepan. See below post for more information.) I whisked in the flakes to make mashed potatoes and spooned them onto our plates as Michael grabbed some re-heated red sauce from the microwave. He turned around and saw me.

"Oh, mashed potatoes!" he exclaimed. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye while I scooped.

"Yeeeah...."

"I thought you were making a white sauce," he explained.

"What are you talking about?" He had just re-heated some red sauce to spoon over our breaded chicken parmesan roll-ups. "Why would I make a white sauce, too?"

"Well, I forget about these instant things. You're over there in the skillet and then--bam! Mashed potatoes!"

Last night, we were talking about the breaded topping to the beef and cheddar potpie I'd made. Mike asked if it was cornbread.

"Well, sort of," I explained absent-mindedly. "It's flour and baking powder and milk and cheese."

"Faux bread," Mike added.

"No, not 'faux bread.' I made it from scratch," I said defensively.

Mike then suggested that it was the boxed cornbread that was the culprit, the real faux bread.

"Well excuse me for not making cornbread from scratch with wheat from my backyard garden like your mother did!"

Very quietly, Michael said:

"Corn."

We both burst out laughing. Our differences won't always be this simple, this easy, this laughable. Even now, they sometimes are not. But we're learning to roll with the punches, and it's a blast.