This is one of M's favorite expressions. Not in the sense that he says it often, but in that he heard it once in his early days in the USA and it just struck him as funny. Some dude walking out of Ponderosa stamped his glutinous sigh of defeat onto my M's brain.
"I ate a lot."
Guess you had to be there.
We have so many of these. They're our classics... the inside jokes of our courtship. There's the "Let me get this straight, you want it with bacon," sarcastically said by the waitress in upstate New York after the guy ordering dropped the words "with bacon" at least 16 times while ordering his hamburger.
Or the simple yet equally entertaining, "RUN!!!!" screamed at the top of the lungs by a mother to her tender offspring as they sprinted one Minnesota winter day from their minivan parked in the Mall of America parking garage to the mall entrance some 15 yards away.
"We see the cooling tower of a nuclear reactor" was the response overheard on the radio that started us giggling as we sailed lake Ontario, having stared at this same damn tower for the better part of an entire day in our efforts to reach Oswego. The distressed people had left Canada to explore the Thousand Islands without navigation maps, gps or even a compass.
"We ain't callin 911" was on a sign hanging from a gun that was hanging above a cash register at a restaurant we stopped at in Oklahoma. We weren't going to rob the place, but I'm sure they thought about shooting us just for laughing so hard.
Anyway... I didn't really start off to tell you the intimate tickings of my marriage. I just meant to say "I ate a lot" which caused me to chuckle and I thought, well, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't let you in on what I was chuckling about. Yikes... bad day for tangents.
Point is, I ate a lot, AND I'm still cooking. Muffins. I found a recipe for muffins and I'm giving it a go. They smell SO DAMN GOOD. If this works out I may never have reason to return to the states again.
Except of course Minnesota winters and Oklahoma hospitality. Those are hard to come by. Oh, and Italy doesn't have any nuclear reactors either.
and no marshmallows
ReplyDeleteEAting well is supposed to be sign of good fortune and fortitude !
ReplyDeleteAtleast i believe so !
;)
LOL! good start for this morning...now it's my morning coffee time! bye! :)
ReplyDeleteI love the in-jokes and shorthand that marriage leads to.
ReplyDeleteisn't it great to have that intimacy with someone, to just know they get you?
ReplyDeleteI chuckled, as your little inside joke story reminded me of one I have with my daughters, which is also a restaurant experience.
ReplyDeleteWhen we were in Barcelona last summer, on our first day there, tired and hungry after our flight, we found the first restaurant we walked to. The menu was a variation on a theme: a half a loaf of bread with a bazillion different toppings to choose from. There was this other section of the menu which appeared different and I thought I might be able to get sausage with peppers and onions NOT on top of bread. So I ordered it and asked for bread on the side - the not very friendly waiter looked at me with annoyance and said "what, bread with bread?". I guess what I ordered was yet another variation on the same theme! When my girls and I eat out together, one of us will invariably ask "what are you going to order, bread with bread?" with an accent of course! :-)
Actually, I never once had good bread in Barcelona, even when the rest of the food was good!