Years ago I was fortunate enough to share an office with one of my best friends. Heidi actually told me about the job with that as one of the perks, and honestly she could have said “we have this opening at work. It’s for a part-time puppy killer, but you’d get to share an office with me,” and I would have raised a fist to a resounding YES!
It was almost too good to be true. We shared silly little grievances and laughs all day. We vented to each other about hateful customers and made up secret names for them. After repeated abrasive interactions with the guys at “Safety and Boot Center,” we renamed it “Safety and Butt Center.” Several of the guys behaved like asses. They earned it. I don’t know anyone who has ever worked in sales or customer service that hasn’t had a secret mental underground of disdain for a few difficult customers.
The other passion Heidi and I enjoyed at work was food. We cooked and brought food in to share with each other. We’d often pick up breakfast for each other on our way into the office and always eat our lunch together. One thing I loved about our friendship was that we had entirely different upbringings, but somehow we still possessed such similarities in our childhood memories, especially around food.
Her mom made oyster stew, aka “hot, fishy milk,” for Christmas Eve dinner every year just like my family had. I could do an entire blog entry on the repulsiveness of that meal. Heidi and I would relive it, laughing and gagging as if we were two 7-year-olds under a blanket fort. I never met anyone else who ate oyster stew growing up so we bonded over that immediately. For her having grown up in Ohio, and me having grown up in the deep South, we had very similar tastes.
And then one day I saw her put jelly on a sausage biscuit.
Surprised, “Wait. You’re putting jelly on that? On your biscuit?” it was foreign to me. I grew up in a house where biscuits were eaten frequently, and there was always grape jelly on the table (never any other kind), and I’d seen people eat honey or sorghum molasses on a biscuit. I had just never seen anyone eat it in combination with a salty piece of sausage and scrambled egg tucked inside.
I kinda wanted to call the police. Or my mother.
My first inclination was to think that it was a northern thing, as in “she just doesn’t know how to eat a biscuit” because us Southerners think that we are an exclusive club that you have to be born into, and you can live here but that doesn’t mean you’re anything close to southern or that you know what you’re doing. And we will cut you no slack.
“Well, they’re Yankees,” followed by an eye roll and a deep sigh of disgust, was how we dismissed every misstep by anyone growing up. It was pretty much the ultimate insult when I was a kid which tickles me now as I can think of some real doozies I’ve since used as an adult. Sorry Kevin.
But Heidi did it. She smeared that buttery sausage and egg biscuit with a big blob of strawberry preserves and enjoyed every bite.
Now I am a firm believer in enjoying your food the way you like it. It should be in our Constitution, but it kinda felt like she put ketchup on a prime rib or put her house shoes on with an evening gown and of course I thought, “well, she’s a Yankee, but I love her anyway.”
Recently I was reading a little article about “things that your mother used to say.” I was giggling reading some of the sayings people were sharing from their mothers and grandmothers through the generations.
One person told a story of how her mother used to say “put a little jelly on it” frequently as a remedy to anything they didn’t like served at the dinner table. Her mother made homemade jams and jellies and there was always a surplus of them in the house that needed to be eaten so her mother had become a sort of jelly pusher. As the children in that house grew up over the years, “put a little jelly on it” went from a little dismissive phrase to a euphemism for how to make any bad situation better in life.
The sisters started throwing it out to cheer each other up or to lighten the mood in the middle of any crisis big or small, and in their adult years signing cards to each other “remember, if you don’t know what to do, just put a little jelly on it,” as a tribute to their mother’s suggestion on how to sweeten things up in life.
I found it to be such a touching story how this mom left her daughters and granddaughters with a little mantra to grab onto in moments when they felt challenged. A sort of “chin up” to check themselves with, and if they could hear it being whispered in their ear by their mom’s voice, even better. It was such a “sweet” legacy for them to draw strength from and maybe help them find the bright side of things when at all possible.
I immediately thought about Heidi always putting that jelly on her sausage biscuit. What if that was delicious, and I was missing out? After all, I had never really tried jelly on a sausage biscuit.
So during Mother’s Day breakfast I unwrapped mine, looked at it and thought I’d give it a whirl.
I dug through the fridge looking for the grape jelly guessing that it would be the flavor I would want to sample.
Found some grape, tried it. Nope.
Then I thought maybe I just tried the wrong flavor, so I dug out the raspberry jelly and tried it. Nope.
Now even as a card-carrying, anxiety-ridden pessimist, with a pretty mean side-eye, I do love the idea of going through life while looking for ways to sugarcoat its occasional bitterness. I understand the concept. I’m just not very good at it.
Lord knows, life can certainly dish out some inconveniences that we can get hung up on at times. It’s easy to get stuck right where those inconveniences happen and marinate in the heaviness. Some are mere inconveniences, some are life’s complete cruelties. But as humans, we get to chose how we look at them, think of them, and how we handle them. We have the power of perspective for any experience that we can slide as a scale when we chose, if we chose.
If we want to we can stay inconvenienced, angry, miserable and sad or we can…
put a little jelly on it.
I love it, and I think this theory holds true for everything but a sausage
biscuit.And my southern heart I will die on that hill.
*Someone please send Kevin at Safety and Butt a jar of jelly. He could use it.