Just Let Her Cook by J. Lowenfels

She’s throwing tasty hunger-nades as she sails now toward the final abyss, chucking them behind her while she’s waving goodbye with her other wizened hand. In my youth, I had ignored the delicious bombs she concocted, overly concerned with the edges of food and not the centers. I was served many things in her quest to keep me fed, such as carrot salads, disguised as banana splits with three orange, haystack humps, which never did fool my keen, little eye. I would try in earnest to force each bite of her experiments down, ignoring the gag reflex in my never-ending quest to keep the boat from rocking. Finally, she’d given up, and began serving all my extraordinarily plain meals by separating the lifeless courses into several bowls. This is not how she had intended to construct me, not the nutrition she wanted for me. I was only eating what she could get me to accept and I suffered from the pyrrhic rewards of my stubborn oppositions.

As I flip several chapters ahead to our present situation, I now accept her bounty of gourmet products without complaint. I humbly eat with gusto the many fabled treats she offers with extreme enthusiasm. I ingest the succulent wontons, knowing that they are actually pieces of my own puzzle that have been missing all this time and a release of the energy still lodged in her fingertips. I see that she works in the medium of the flesh, and due to my youthful reluctance, she only now has the chance to prepare the meals she wanted me to eat in the first place. Just as a sculptor builds from imagination, forever making adjustments, she seizes the current opportunity, continuing to forge each molecule of this work called her son, which is still in progress.