Butter Holders · 21 August 2011
My wife, The Mindboggling Mrs. Miyoshi, likes to bring up her mother’s eating habits whenever we have corn on the cob. Apparently, my mother-in-law likes to eat a stick of butter with her corn – a slab of butter with every bite. According to my wife. It is not an insult, it is just the way it is, and I admire my mother-in-law because I agree with her that corn on the cob, bread, and many other items are just food that go well with butter.
Now before a bunch of health nuts say anything bad about butter, I must give a short bit of wisdom from Mrs. Pitman, a woman who saved my life. Mrs. Pitman has said that butter substitutes cannot be good for you. “After all,” she says, “if you stick a bit of it on the wall, a fly won’t even touch it.”
Now, while all of our kids are like their grandmother and think of corn on the cob as butter holders, our middle son, Thing 2, probably likes butter more than most. He and I think of muffins and rolls and just about any bread as butter holders.
As a case in point, one time, our son was helping The Mindboggling Mrs. Miyoshi make supper. She had cut up a loaf of French bread and was going to toast it in the over. Thing 2 put on what he thought was the proper amount of butter. When the meal was served, the bread had butter on, under, and through it. While it is true that the pieces of bread had holes in it (making it easier to get the butter everywhere), the amount of butter on and in each was amazing. Those pieces of bread were not really toast but true butter holders.
When he was much younger, Thing 2 did a couple other things to show his love for butter. One of his baby sitters, Kristina, was amazed that he just ate plain butter one time. She was one of my students and even when I see her now, she just marvels that he would do such a thing. To be fair, Thing 2 was very young at the time and I am sure it was less than a pat of butter you might find at an old diner. But the more the story is told, the more butter he ate. Currently, I think he is purported to have eaten a stick of butter while Kristina was babysitting. And Thing 2 appreciates a good story. After all, he was probably showing off when he did it and the more butter the better the story.
While it is not completely a story of butter or butter holders, Thing 2 actually likes to bring up a mistake that he once made. He was young and wanted to help make toast. It was probably Mother’s Day and he wanted to help prepare breakfast in bed for his mom. (If it was not Mother’s Day, that is okay. It fits the story and helps with the setup and my wife thinks I am a liar anyway.) I must have been doing something else to prepare (because nobody leaves a four- or five-year old in the kitchen alone) when Thing 2 found what he thought was butter and spread it on the toast. He was all excited as he sat next to his mom and anticipated her first bite. On TV shows and movies and such, people who taste something nasty which has been prepared by their loved ones seem to put on happy faces and say something wonderful that makes said loved ones beam with joy. That was not what happened when The Mindboggling Mrs. Miyoshi bit into the toast. She got one of those Mr. Yuck faces and wiped her tongue with her napkin. She probably went to the bathroom to rinse out her mouth and wipe her tongue with the towel too. What had happened was that Thing 2 found congealed bacon grease and spread it on the bread. It was not the yummy bacon grease found right after cooking, but the separated fat found after cooling the used grease. (I have that Mr. Yuck face on now just thinking about that toast.) Needless to say, it is a vivid memory (perhaps laced with a bit of fiction) even if it is not a fond one.
It might seem that these stories of butter holders are a bit farfetched (you might have already heard The Mindboggling Mrs. Miyoshi yelling, “Liar!”), their essence is true. Thing 2 did create butter holders, did eat plain butter, and did spread congealed bacon grease on toast (Mr. Yuck face again). And the truth is that like his father, Thing 2 really does think that corn on the cob and bread products really are just things that go well with butter. They are butter holders. And before anybody starts telling stories about my mother-in-law, we need to go to her house to have corn on the cob and see how much butter she really eats with that butter holder.
© 2011 Michael T. Miyoshi
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Michael, I enjoyed reading your most recent post “Butter Holders” Very Funny!
— Tracy Lenore Jackson · 24 August 2011, 05:40 ·