Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Lee made me a meatloaf



Yesterday while Fox and I were working in the yard Lee popped his head out of his front door and unintelligibly yelled something about meat. His tone was urgent and as he emerged holding an oven mitt in one hand and an old, wadded up t-shirt in the other, I figured he was cooking. I asked what he needed, and with an impatient gesture complete with rolling eyes, he returned into his home without a verbal reply. I continued weeding around my tomatoes while Fox was busy in the sand box, and after a few minutes Lee reappeared at his door and started my way.

"I've got'chall uh meatloaf I made; jus tookit out uh thu oven."

Without having fully comprehended what he had said, I said "Yeah. Ok", like it was the most natural exchange that had ever occurred, ever in all time.

"What I did is chop up onions, maters, sweet peppers, sum carrots n beans(?), broccoli (??) then mixed it up real good with thu meat in my bean pot, then poured pizza sauce on top of it'n baked it 'bout 40 minutes. I made two of um; a big un an a small un"

Still unclear of what was going on, I said "Mmmm. That sounds weird".

He said that it was cooled off enough to bring it over, and he turned back towards his house. A couple of steps away he turned back and yelled (as if he were all the way back at his house, and there was a wind storm or a thunder storm like that scene from Back to the Future when Marty was trying to tell Doc about his future murder) "If I bring yall one of um will you cut me off enough for a sandwich?"

I nodded and watched him disappear, then became worried when I saw him returning with his pan and a hand full of sliced white bread.

"Go in'ere an git a knife!" Lee demanded.

Fox was interested in the pan and started asking Lee for "meat please"

I handed the knife to Lee, but he just shoved the pan of loaf towards me and acted like the knife was a live snake. I sliced the loaf with Lee's explicit direction, and realized that this was unlike the dish that mamma used to make. First of all the vegetables were in huge chunks. It looked like some concoction to be stuffed into something else. It didn't slice at all, but crumbled back into it's individual ingredients, leaving the appearance of a missing main dish. The "loaf" was surrounded by a lava lamp style mix of pizza sauce and grease in the bottom of a warped, Teflon frying pan sans handle.



I arranged the heel on Lee's slice of bread which he immediately topped with another slice, then wadded with such force that when he opened his hand it looked like a hot pocket. He handed me a slice of bread between his fingers as if it were the ace of spades, and commanded me to "make 'at boy uh sammich"

Fox had been caught earlier playing with a bag containing a quarter loaf of bread. He had mangled the bread, leaving it unusable for whole sandwiches, but decent for child-size benders. I brought the bag outside to where we were pick-nicking. I used Lee's bread for myself and made Fox a sandwich from his play time bread.

Like all of Lee's creations, the meatloaf was delicious. We sat in my driveway and ate . I noticed that when Lee eats he makes pained, grunting noises much like a person having a nightmare. After accidentally staring at him for too long, Lee glanced over at me and declared "it's the broccoli that makes it"