McDonald’s

By Ellie Levin,  a member of Get Your Wordsworth

It was my husband Jud’s birthday, June 24^th. We left our friend’s home in Maine early in the morning in order to get to Manhattan by evening.  Around four in the afternoon, Jud pulled into a McDonald’s parking space.

“If we just get a drink,” I said, “we can go to a really nice place for your birthday. I could see that he was not listening.  At the counter, he ordered two children’s plates.

“I don’t want one of those,” I mumbled.

“They are both for me. Order what you want,” was his instant reply.

MCDONALD’S AROMA No. 5

By Lydia LaFleur,  a member of Get Your Wordsworth

To me one of the most offensive odors is the smell of food from McDonald’s.  The culprit is probably the oil that’s used for frying the potatoes.  Truffle oil it isn’t.  I know the difference since I recently had upscale popcorn doused with truffle oil at the upscale Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center in Lincoln Center.  I can always tell as soon as passengers enter my subway car or the bus carrying a paper bag from whence they are coming by the pervasive McDonald’s aroma they bring with them.  And yet I have to admit that occasionally I have been known to enter one of its premises for a container of coffee (excellent) and a hot fudge sundae (delicious and only $1.84), but seldom for a hamburger after once having experienced a thin hamburger patty that tasted like what I would imagine cardboard would between a bun.  Strangely the cooking odor never bothers me while inside the restaurant; probably because then I”m part of it.

GRACE

By Diane Hope McAfee,  a member of Get Your Wordsworth

Our new house on Rockville Centre Parkway was a brand new split-level design. From the half staircase leading upward was a sea of turquoise wall-to-wall carpet flowing through an open network of spaces for entertaining and dining and sleeping. My mother’s choice of white French Provincial style furniture suggested formality. Properness. Pretty. Dainty. This in contrast to the unconventional and unpredictable structure of our little family. We were three women, each of a generation; my nana, my mom and me-living together.

 

After my parents’ divorce some ten years past, it was for financial advantage that we became this odd little family circus of three mismatched rings. Each of us had learned to walk an emotional tightrope. As the child my walk was relatively uncomplicated, but for Mom and Nana, keeping their balance was a day by day challenge. Within the circus metaphor it is appropriate to say that they had perfected “knife-throwing”, “sword-swallowing” and “fire-breathing” to so subtle an art that in social settings at which they were both present, I was often the only one to note the slicing blur of a well-aimed jibe or the sparks from a scorching retort.