"Wherever you go in life, whoever you marry, whatever you do - your house is definitely going to be filled with laughter." -lilr So, as I tend to do on Saturday nights after church, I gave lilr a call to see about hanging out that night. She said, "Sure, wanna help me make pasta?" I said, "Sure, I need to get gas first - do you want me to pick up some bread or anything?" She said, "No, we have bread. Just come over." "Okay."
See, somehow, I forgot who I'm talking to with this one. If anybody else said, "wanna help make pasta," we're thinking it's spaghetti night, and the boys will come over later*, and we'll all have supper. Nope. See, lilr is the greatest minimalist I know personally. She's very much a 'use all parts of the buffalo' kinda girl, and whatever she really can't use, she gets rid of. She's also a crazy-quiet perfectionist. But somehow, this combination means that she'll make just about anything, food-wise, from scratch.
*Okay, this'd be back when I had a boyfriend. Lilr is married, but her husband's been pulling late shifts on Saturdays. Which gives us a chance to be even sillier. And it turned out that she'd found a pasta-maker the last time she was at one of our preferred thrift stores. Cool idea, she has recipes already. And she'd been hoping that I'd come over, and we could figure this out together, and take turns watching Schmoo, lilr's tiny son.
Schmoo is largely unimpressed with me. Lilr calls me his aunt, and tries to encourage him to like me. There's no active
dislike; he's just not all that interested where I'm concerned. I suspect that this is largely because I'm not lactating at the moment.
What can be said of the pasta making? "Fail," comes to mind. But, since it's us, a highly entertaining fail. I don't believe that there's ever been a time when the two of us were together and no fun was had. She'd already prepped the dough before I arrived, and I was rolling it out. We inspected this later, and I decided, "Less enthusiasm, more flour." Pasta dough is not like cookie dough, and was apparently making plans involving chemical bonding with the countertop.
Somehow, whilst separating said bond on one of the four, it came out looking like a pasty, wrinkled, halter-cut prom dress. Or, possibly a Schmoo-sized cape. The Adventures of Pasta-Man! took up the next twenty minutes, mixed with much laughter. We've figured out his powers and his domain, but we're really stumped as to who Pasta-Man would have as a nemesis. I suggested possibly Mr. Atkins, but neither of us really stomped on that one.
If you haven't seen a pasta-maker (and this was one of the little old-school ones), it's basically the same idea as the Play-Doh pushers we all used as kids. For some curious reason, this one's left-handed. You can put it on the right-hand side, but you won't be able to vice-clamp it to the counter. So, left hand it is. Actually started to feel the burn in my deltoid and left bicep after a bit, which made us laugh. Pasta workout! It's the anti-Atkins - you burn to make your carbs!
The problem was that after the noodles came out, they all stuck together, so you had to separate them, which was time-consuming, and somewhat unsuccessful. We managed to make about forty-eight noodles before concluding that, given time and energy, this was one case where it was indeed a better plan to buy a box of spaghetti from the store. Sigh. But wait, this left us with over half the pasta dough left!
(I don't know why, but I now feel obligated to recount a day five or six years ago, when the snow was melting in spring. Lilr, in those days, was driving a car that we had elegantly christened, "Butt," as in, "Haul butt across town." The delightful bit about living in a state where snow builds up all winter and doesn't actually thaw until, oh, say, early spring, is that, when it does melt, everything floods. Lilr and I had gotten out of school, met up, and gone driving, because I knew of a place, from biking around, where on Flood Day there might be a large puddle. Or, in this case, it turned out, a rather epic puddle. A puddle larger than the average parking space. Taking up the whole road. Upon seeing this, we drove carefully up to it, and were looking at it. "Whoa." "Yeah."
At the same time, we both decided that we needed to haul Butt through this as fast as possible. Well, we didn't have a whole lot of room to build up momentum, so it was decided that we needed to go around the block again. Fantastic! Great wings of muddy water shot up on both sides, the puddle lapping over the gutter-banks on either side, Butt absolutely soaked down, froth left in our wake. Let's do it again!
We went around the block eight times, accelerating, until the ninth time, when the Sheriff's car was sitting next to the puddle, and the Sheriff standing on the side of the hill, looking down at the filthy runoff in the grass. We quietly crept through, and went off to find other adventures.
The only real moral of that story, for the two of us, was that it's a good thing she's a minimalist, because whenever we have extra resources and no clear plan for what to do with them, silliness ensues.) Well, I reasoned, we could just bake it and have pasta bread. Oh, better idea - Pasta Biscuits! I explained this to lilr. You take extra dough, and roll it flat. Get a cup or something round, and make little cutouts. Grease a cookie sheet, arrange them about an inch apart, pop 'em in the oven at 350, and see what happens!
She'd followed along with that, right up until that, "See what happens," bit. Badname, my other close friend from high school, was often my mentor (a notion I now find somewhat disturbing). He has what he refers to as, "The gift of BS." And apparently, he taught it to me without meaning to. I don't realize I'm doing it, but, with the exception of K, I can make almost any harebrained idea sound not only plausible, but as though people regularly do this. I wasn't trying, I was actually just thinking out loud on how this might work.
Lilr pointed out that said pasta biscuits wouldn't rise - there's no yeast in pasta dough. I answered her that they would simply be unleavened pasta cookies, which were what the Italians ate the night before they fled from Egypt. Further giggles. Lilr and her husband teach Sunday School (they're Mormon, I'm Christian), and I teach campers, so we started making up new lessons, on what the Old Testament would be like with different people groups standing in for the Israelites.
In case anyone was wondering, the Scots did not blow horns for the six days of marching around Jericho, they blew bagpipes. And the walls fell because the people of Jericho detonated them from the inside, preferring death (because God told them to destroy the city, take no prisoners) to one more day of bagpipes.
So, we rolled out the dough, used the mini toaster-oven (I want one of these. And an air popcorn popper. When I get my own apartment, they will be my housewarming gifts to me...if nobody else gets them first.), used an itty-bitty cup to make cutouts (tasty pop-in-your-mouth size cutouts), and arranged them on the cookie sheet.
While we're waiting for these to bake, lilr and I started talking about the plans for me next year. They involve moving out-of-state for awhile, and it's going to be some of Schmoo's swift developmental years. I commented to her, watching him wrestle with his blanket on the floor, "Y'know, the real thing Schmoo's going to remember about me is that whenever I came over, Mom and Mom's friend were loud and just laughed a lot more."
And she stunned me. She said, "Actually, we don't laugh when you're not around." And she was serious. I was absolutely dumbfounded. I have more fun with lilr than almost anybody I know. I knew her husband liked me coming around because she's not terribly social, but I didn't know that she didn't really
laugh. And later, she talked about having a day when she smiled this week - like a whole day, or days at a time, could go by without her smiling.
I had no idea about this, and I've known her since we were fourteen. We're always laughing at my house, my sisters, parents, and I. Sure, we disagree and scrap sometimes, but there's so much silliness, and joy, and just a lot of love that turns into laughter. And she and her husband are happy together, and really, they don't fight the way my sisters and I sometimes will. But, to not laugh? To have whole days where you don't smile?
How?
And how did I not know about this?
More silliness came later. It turns out that pasta cookies are bland by themselves, taste okay with honey, pretty good with peanut butter and honey, and fantabulous with peanut butter. It turns out that if I wear an apron to protect my clothes, every spill I get on myself will be below the knee. Especially melted peanut butter. Sigh, but yum. We played with Schmoo, me making faces in response to his faces (he's at the stage where he's exploring what his expression-muscles can do), which makes lilr giggle. Hearing her laugh always sets me off - it will frequently happent that she starts laughing, and then I do too and have to ask her what we're laughing about. She's such a sweet person; all of her joy is infectious.
I started thinking about it on my way home. I laugh because there's a lot of joy in the world. I also laugh when things are messed up - like, the worse a situation is, the more I'll be trying to find some part of it that I can share with someone and laugh about. I'll sometimes just laugh because I'm really happy, like running in the rain - not because something's funny, but because there's so much joy that I've gotta do something to let it out. And I knew that my family laughed a lot - but I didn't know that there were other families that barely laughed at all. It seems such a lonely concept.
They've been thinking about taking in a boarder, and she said that if I wasn't leaving in six months, I'd be the person they wanted. Then, I knew that lilr and I had fun together, and her husband knew that I respected them both and had what they think of as good values and solid morals. All excellent reasons to want your friend to be the boarder you're looking for. I didn't know that this was part of it - that to her, I'm the one who brings laughter in.
Ironically, I feel kind of sad now.