Trump and Hamburger Gravy

And so we come to the end of another long week. Only this week, everyone got sick. Including me. Matt is the single one standing. Everyone else is lying prone, moaning and complaining about every single little ache and pain, opening wide the mouth to gain any kind of breath. I’m not exactly complaining. It’s the first real cold we’ve had all year and it’s already the end of February, so that’s not too shabby.

In between dispensing medicine and telling kids of stop crying, and making the Easy Hamburger Gravy of my mother and grandmother,
[grandmother: shuffle into the kitchen after a long day of teaching kindergarten, defrost ground beef in pan, ladle in canned mushrooms, don’t worry about the salt, make it thicken up with something or other, serve it up over noodles, fill entire family with nostalgia for the bad old days of home cooking]
[mother: travel 8 hours south from Mali to Ivory Coast to rescue child from boarding school and some kind of mental breakdown the source of which child never fully puts her finger on, except that dorm parents were too weird for anything, assemble easy hamburger gravy in mission guest house in some kind of way that child knows not of, except for the immense comfort of eating it away from school dining hall mingled together with joy of staying up all night with flashlight reading Grace Livingstone Hill]
[me: finely mince garlic and onion, sweat that gently and then add lots of fresh, sliced baby mushrooms, add browned ground beef, then a goodly splash of vodka, then a large swirl of cream, let it all mellow together and ladle it over elbow pasta, sit back to be irritated because it was supposed to make all the sick children well, they weren’t supposed to be too ill to eat it, and they don’t understand the historical significance of important dish, crawl back to bed in anger]
I’ve been reading the Internet and feeling depressed about politics. It’s too bad that every single website everywhere has as it’s lead picture the large face of Trump, mouth puckered, arm outstretched, hair whatever that is. And Trump, of course, has not paid any money for this to be so. The entire journalistic world has just gone ahead and had him be the headline, whether they like him or not, and apparently nobody likes him, but there he is, with his face, everywhere. Soon, after he’s elected, I’m sure we’ll all have to purchase the official state copy of Trump’s Face and hang it in every home and establishment, slightly too high up near the ceiling, along with one of those weird little calendars. And when anyone comes in with a camera to ask us how well we like the government, we will all anxiously nod and smile and murmur about how happy we are. If politics is all personality, and no ideological ideas at all, isn’t that the necessary and logical end? I pray very much that I am wrong.

I also think, though again, I hope I am wrong, that the word “evangelical” doesn’t really mean anything any more. It must have meant something once, but nobody can remember when that was. Pollsters shouldn’t ask whether or not people are ‘evangelical’. They should ask for the name of a pastor, and the exact location of the church website. And when the voters blinks and can’t remember, or gives the name of something mega big in size but tiny in theology, they shouldn’t get to be lumped in under “evangelical”. And I use those scare quotes as scare quotes.

And on that note, I will go dole out some more medicine. Have a lovely day.