Dad was making his patented breakfast and in a pretty good mood. He had used a large butcher knife to slice mounds of potatoes into little squares, then fried them in boiling lard in a cast iron skillet. Two additional cast iron fry pans were filled with scrambled eggs and a fourth pan filled the kitchen with the heavenly aroma of bacon frying. There were several baking sheets of his invention, cinnamon rolls made from Bisquick dough with sugar added, rolled thin, spread with a thick coating of butter, pounds of homemade strawberry jam, raisins, more sugar and lots of cinnamon. He rolled up the whole thing and cut slices an inch thick, then placed them on a cookie sheet to bake. Those cinnamon rolls were his invention and a real pleasure to …show more content…
Good, I had him saying yes, great start!
"Well, I was thinking, maybe Steve and I could hike up there and go fishing."
"How would you get to the trailhead? It 's a long drive up the mountain."
"Well, I was thinking you could drive us up," I said innocently, working my way up to the real "ask."
"What, and have me wait in the car all day for you guys to come back? I 'm not interested in hiking up that mountain with you. You remember, don 't you, Frank drove us to the upper trailhead in his Scout and the hike from there was tough enough."
"Well, that 's it, see, I 'm thinking you could just drop us off on Saturday. Then you could drive home and come get us later." I sat there looking into my scrambled eggs and listening to the long silence that followed.
"Come back when?" he asked suspiciously.
Nervous and unsure, I 'd lost the thread of the carefully contrived speech I planned to use to talk him into this.
"Ahhhh, yeah, well, I 'm thinking...the next
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"Who else would be going?" he finally asked.
"Ummmm, just Steve and me...?" Time flowed like cold molasses, the silence broken only by the sound of his spatula as he vigorously stirred the scrambled eggs, scrape, scrape, scrape, scrape..... clunk......then bang...he knocked the residue from the spatula, and still facing his stove, he sighed a big sigh, inhaled deeply and spoke quietly over his shoulder, "You should take the dog with you and I wouldn 't say anything about this to your mother if I were you. I 'll talk to her."
As easy as that! I felt different already. We 'd slipped into a new world, a bigger and slightly scary one, but one pregnant with the promise of real adventure! No more mini-adventure, this one would be a big one! Steve and I immediately shoved our chairs back from the table and jumped up, intending to run off and begin planning this epic. There was so much to do, but before we could get far I heard Dad call from behind me, "Don 't forget to clean up these dishes."
Dang, not everything had changed, "Okay!" I said, but cleaning up was a small price to pay for his cooperation. Not only did we not forget; we didn 't have to be asked