Sunday, June 15, 2014

love that father's day chicken

i had popeye's for dinner b/c, as previously stated, i wanted my father's day feelings to taste delicious. i have whiskey caramel frozen custard (!) for dessert later. feelings...nothing more than delicious feelings...

while i was having dinner earlier, i found myself pulling off the chicken skin to save it for last, which is something i've done ever since i was old enough to eat fried chicken, i think. actually, that's not completely accurate. there was a period in my life when all i ate from fried chicken was the skin. it drove my family nuts. mashed potatoes? done. whatever veggies were on my plate? gobbled. cornbread? you know i was 'bout that action. but the actual chicken? nope. it wasn't happening. luckily this was a phase i grew out of relatively quickly, probably b/c knowing my brothers, that "naked" chicken didn't last long on my plate.

fast-forward a bit to a visit to kokomo to see my former stepmother. i think i was about 9 years old. daddy & i had driven in for the weekend - my former stepmother hadn't left her job in kokomo yet and there was a weird long-distance/commuter thing happening. i'm sure that was part of why their marriage didn't last. at any rate, we were there on a saturday and i think daddy had decided he wanted popeye's for dinner. my former stepmother went to popeye's and came back, we sat down at the table, loaded up our plates, and started eating.

now, anyone who's broken bread with me knows that my tolerance for spicy food is low. there are certain foods that i will just sweat my way through even though i'm thisclose to passing out from pain b/c the food's that good, but that's a short list and my tolerance for those foods is a relatively recent development. i have a number of friends who, when i ask them for a sample of whatever spicy food they're eating, will tell me straight up that i shouldn't eat it b/c i will have all of the regrets. i trust them.

my former stepmother, in a sort of wisdom that is still lost on me, ordered spicy chicken from popeye's. i am 37 years old and i still don't fuck with popeye's spicy chicken like that, so you know 9 year old me  wasn't having it. at ALL. i took one bite and was in tears by the time i spat it out and told daddy it was too hot and i couldn't eat it.

oh, man, the argument that ensued after that. former stepmother's rationale was that i should just shut up and eat what was on my plate. daddy's point was that if the food was making me uncomfortable and/or was inedible, he wasn't gonna force me to eat. then former stepmother tried to play the "well, i've raised more kids than you and you're just spoiling her" cards and...y'all. i can probably count the number of times i saw my father lose his temper on one hand, and this was one of them. i got sent from the room so they could continue their "discussion." i don't remember which one of them made a second popeye's run, but i did indeed have some chicken i could eat that night.

funny how this memory has stuck with me all these years. i never saw it as daddy spoiling me so much as him knowing his kid enough to know that if i said something was too spicy, it was too spicy and therefore it was a problem. i remember once in high school when someone was teasing me about being spoiled (one of the hazards of being the youngest and a daddy's girl, i suppose) and daddy said that he'd work as hard as he had to and move heaven and earth to make sure i had everything i needed and, if possible, some of the stuff i wanted. i was old enough to appreciate the difference.

that night in kokomo, daddy knew that i needed something edible for dinner. (yes, i know, how very first world of me.) he knew it was his job to fulfill that need, and if that meant getting into an argument with his wife about fulfilling that need, then so be it.

it's one of the things i love(d) most about my father. if you said you needed something and he was in a position to make it happen, consider it done. i think some members of my family took that for granted b/c he never made a big deal about it, but after i turned 18 and daddy felt like he could treat me more like an adult, we had some conversations about it and i knew the lack of acknowledgment hurt him.

17 years after his death, i still feel so incredibly blessed to have been daddy's girl. happy father's day.
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father's day flashback

i wasn't kidding last month when i said that i'm an equal-opportunity hater w/r/t mother's day and father's day. here's what i had to say about it last year, and i stand by it now:














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