Quarter Hounder with Cheese

[Muffit]

Moments in time ebb and flow like our first sight of the seashore, and memory foam lies here and there. Each year is like a footprint in the sand, washed away as though our part in this ageless play were no more than a walk-on role. And our children’s children wade along that bygone shore, collecting shells of our pain and joy.



One moment lives with me still, a haunted house we lived in, ancient and crumbling, full of creaks and groans. My parents’ woe was our youthful happiness, edged with fragrant eucalyptus trees whose Phillips head acorns were perfect for slingshots that carefully hurt nothing but the heat-mirage air. In true 1800’s fashion, the kitchen was the dominant room, huge and besmeared with shafts of morning light. And in that light a little child that looked greatly like me danced in our dog Tarzan’s nocturnal golden pool, while someone’s distant Mom grabbed me from behind and couldn’t understand, though the same child she must have held somewhere hidden within her.



My brother who was all of 9 volunteered to make the afternoon meal that day, and my disconsolate Mom acquiesced. We the other children were asked to wait elsewhere, whilst my mischievous elder fabricated his idea of the haute in culinary cuisine.



Burgers. He had made burgers. We were overjoyed and shoved them down as fast as he could fry them, our tasteless watery Milkman instant nonfat milk their only companion. No one of us bothered to wonder where these had somehow materialized from, like engineering’s chicken soup to out of time Trek travelers. But of all our joy, my conniving brother seemed somehow the happiest, grinning so widely the edges of his lips tried to meet around the back. Hmm.



And that’s when it all became clear. For you see, my Mom came in sometime later to feed Tarzan, and his food had somehow disappeared. “I can’t understand it”, she muttered as she peered into empty cupboard after cupboard. “There was a whole pack of Gaines burgers here just yesterday…”



I need not tell you how those burgers suddenly felt in our stomachs…



The years have taken Tarzan and the little child in me, just as they took my Mom’s. But I still feel those prankish burgers when I see shows that (forgive me) pretend to be my BSG. The look, the taste, everything so very close, and yet somehow so very far. So sad it is that all that happiness of my childhood meal should turn to unlucky horses in our minds, or that a show that should please me made me long for the knob-twisting past instead.



So as I move my shaky hands across these beckoning keys, I ponder how with all our technological savoir faire, we still cannot fashion so simple a thing as a memory.



It’s something you must live again.



Affectionately and respectfully,

Muffit

[bsg1fan1975]

your brother made burgers out of what??????? oh god! If its what I read I think I'm going to be sick!

[Muffit]

Yep Bsg, it's what you think it was -- DOG FOOD!!! They used to have these hamburger-shaped patties for dogs called "Gaines Burgers". And well, the rest is history... :laugh:

[bsg1fan1975]

I remember the "Gaines burgers" for dogs. Oh man, boy do I feel so sorry for the then child Muffit. Your brother was rotten to play such a trick!