There’s another thing that I’d like to tell you about my mother. She was a terrible cook. Okay, she wasn’t that terrible, but she wasn’t very good. There were basically two reasons for this: (1) She didn’t know how to cook, and (2) She was absentminded. The first reason is self-explanatory. The second needs a bit more explanation. You see, my mother forgot things when she cooked. For example, she sometimes added salt to a dish three times, forgetting that she’d added salt twice before. She might forget that there were vegetables boiling on the stove. By the time she remembered, there’d be nothing but a soggy gray mess in the pot.
Once my mother prepared a meat loaf and put it in the oven. About an hour later she forgot that it was in there and took us to visit my grandma. By the way, my grandma was a fabulous cook, and I’ve often wondered why that didn’t rub off on my mother. Anyhow, when we returned home several hours later, the kitchen was full of thick, dark smoke. “Oh, no, my meat loaf!” my mother shrieked. She turned off the oven and opened every window in our apartment. It took most of the evening for the smoke to clear. Of course the meat loaf was burned to a crisp. It was a charred, inedible blob, and we ended up having cereal for supper.
When I was working on a book, I remembered my mother’s meat loaf and wrote a poem based on it. It’s called “My Mother Made a Meat Loaf.” After you read the poem, I’ll tell you a bit about some of the techniques I used to write it.
My Mother Made a Meat Loaf
My mother made a meat loaf
that provided much distress,
she tried her best to serve it,
but she met with no success,
her sharpest knife was powerless
to cut a single slice,
and her efforts with a cleaver
failed completely to suffice.
She whacked it with a hammer,
and she smacked it with a brick,
but she couldn’t faze that meat loaf,
it remained without a nick,
I decided I would help her
and assailed it with a drill,
but the drill made no impression,
though I worked with all my skill.
We chipped at it with chisels,
but we didn’t make a dent,
it appeared my mother’s meat loaf
was much harder than cement,
then we set upon that meat loaf
with a hatchet and an ax,
but that meat loaf stayed unblemished
and withstood our fierce attacks.
We borrowed bows and arrows,
and we fired at close range,
it didn’t make a difference,
for that meat loaf didn’t change,
we beset it with a blowtorch,
but we couldn’t find a flaw,
and we both were flabbergasted
when it broke the power saw.
We hired a hippopotamus
to trample it around,
but that meat loaf was so mighty
that it simply stood its ground,
now we manufacture meat loaves
by the millions, all year long,
they are famous in construction,
building houses tall and strong.