A Dastardly Day

I have no patience with anyone who thinks they can cook in the kitchen while relaxing in the livingroom. I have even less patience with husbands who thinks they can cook a perfect steak on the deck barbecue while tracking a hockey game on TV in another room as Hub sometimes does. When stuff burns, or boils dry, there is no excuse now, and has never been an excuse, except the straight-forward confession of irresponsibility. Really, people should know better.

Now having articulated those thoughts, I will tell you a story.

Yesterday I was baking my weekly batch of eight loaves of bread. And so I mixed the dough, kneaded it, and extracted a small amount to make a pizza for lunch. I put the remaining dough in my big bread bowl and put that bowl in the oven to rise in the heat of the oven light, as I always do and have been doing for years.

My pizza dough meanwhile rose on the counter for a brief time and was soon ready for topping. That’s when Hub came in and asked when lunch would be ready. By then it was late, after two. He was very hungry and so was I so I quickly began assembling the ingredients for the pizza. And while rushing to do that I turned on the oven to high, cause you know, pizzas need high heat, right?

About ten minutes later my now delayed, rather than immediate, state of recall kicked in. In a state of panic, I jerked open the oven door. Big puffy bread, quick rise, oh yes, but at the same time, the heat liquefied the bottom of my plastic bread-bowl. That part of it was now draped in long streamers around the oven racks and the bottom heat element. What a bloody mess?

Hub immediately took action. Bread bowl out on the deck, oven racks out on the deck, ice cubes to harden the streamers, and then removal of the rest of the mess. Meanwhile yelling, “Clear out of here, woman, or you’ll burn yourself!”

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I’ve told you before that when my feet hit the floor in the morning, it’s entirely up to me if I make or break my new day. I broke this one good.

Why am I telling you this? So if you are having a bad day, you will know with solid conviction, that you are not alone. And if you have done some stupid irresponsible thing that has you beating yourself up, you should see me.

Hub is from the old school and he does not normally help with kitchen clean-up, but in the midst of disaster he is the Protector of the Vulnerable. As dependable as a rock and ALWAYS comes a-running. I’m grateful for that fixed protector-part of the old-school philosophy that made gender differences, as they used to be…rather nice.

So Thanks to Hub, right now my oven looks like nothing happened and so does my kitchen. I wonder how this what have panned out if Hub and I were entrenched in gender equality and the spin-offs that come with that kind of thinking. I think I might still be picking plastic off the heating element as penance for my own irresponsibility.

Maybe it is unfair, and even untrue, this thought I harbor in my head, that amidst gender balance and total equality, he would stand by silently thinking… “When I make a mess, I clean it up, so when you make a mess, you can clean it up as well.”