My Three Friends And The Foods My Mother Cooked

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones Deck prompts — “I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them.” (The Round House, Louise Erdrich)

Erdrich was in deep concentration writing this wonderful book. Why not start by using her line as a topic? See where it goes. Ten minutes. You might want to read the book too. It’s good.

My neighbors, when moving to a new town, were my friends in elementary school, then one of those friends was a good friend in high school, as she and I were the only married females in high school. They didn’t know what to do with us.

And sometimes it was hilarious as we would be sitting in the principal's office together, and I would say, “You need a note, right?” And we would laugh. As couples, we would party together.

My good friend and her husband would act as hosts when we wanted to spend some time alone, or go to bed before company was gone, because we had the party house when she and I were still in high school. Our husbands were out of high school, and my husband was only recently out of the Navy.

The other two friends, I practically lived at their houses growing up. One started in middle school, and when I met my husband, it felt like he was a substitute for her, and much of what we did together. We drifted apart during this time.

Another friend I lived with her family in the tenth grade. That is when I met my husband. I was 15 and he was already 21. Living with my friend was always fun, and we had the best of times, as they lived on a lake, and we did lots of fishing, and her grandparents lived next door and had horses.

It was at a time when I had four younger siblings, and it felt like it was my job to take care of them. What a relief living there at times.

All three friends were like my sisters. I had one sister who was three years younger, but these three were my age, and we had so much in common. We spent a lot of time together. When we went out, it was with friends we had in common, but no one as close as we were.

The only problem, I think one of my friends slept with my husband. There was a lot of free love going around back then. I didn’t know about it at the time, but once divorced, my middle school friend and my ex-husband lived together for a time.

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones Deck prompts — You might need some fresh stimulus. Open a book, a magazine, a newspaper, then grab a line and go. This is called “writing off the page.” For example, I stood in front of my bookcase and snatched four books off the shelf:

“The smell of the liver searing in the pan is heavy in the back of my throat, even through the bacon grease…” (Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward)

“What did I expect?” (The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen)

“I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie.” (Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon)

“After a breakfast of poached eggs, fried ham, grits with butter, a half grapefruit, and a short stack of buttermilk pancakes, of which he only ate the grapefruit, he was sitting alone on the porch.” (The Foreign Student, Susan Choi)

Take a quote and go. (Also, reading is an important part of writing. And a great pleasure. Don’t forget that.)

“The smell of the liver searing in the pan is heavy in the back of my throat, even through the bacon grease…” that my mother used when cooking everything. She even put bacon grease on our oatmeal.

I didn’t know that people would use milk on oatmeal until I started school and saw how others ate oatmeal. I didn’t eat much liver when there was a choice. There wasn’t always a choice.

Years later, I was on Weight Watchers, and liver was a weekly “have to”, and you could use a homemade sugarless ketchup. It was gross, and I vowed never to eat liver again after Weight Watchers. Thankfully, the next time I tried Weight Watchers, it was a point system, and no more liver.

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First published by Mercury Press on medium.com