Recipe for Happiness
Based on Indianapolis's Le Peep restaurant's Gooey Bun

2 frozen waffles (Eggo, Aunt Jemima, whatevah)

Spread with butter-sugar-cinnamon mixture (just like the kind you'd use for cinnamon toast) and listen to me now: if you think you've slathered on enough, you're probably wrong. Don't just fill the nooks-n-crannies of the waffles; it shouldn't be level. It should be just slightly more than level. A little heaped up. It's almost like you can't have too much. And if you get squeamish at that much butter, just remember:
1. that you left the land of the heart-healthy the moment you busted out the Eggos, so you might as well get hung for a sheep as for a lamb, and
2. the title of this recipe.

Top with a single layer of sliced almonds.

Bake in a 400F oven on an ungreased baking sheet until bubbly and golden and the smell kinda makes you want to cry a little because goddamn life sure can be beautiful when your kitchen smells like bubbling butter and cinnamon and almonds and thank god it's time to take it out now. When that emotional state is acheived, remove from oven and place on plate.

Serve with whipped cream cheese on the side, and what you do is you slather each bite with just a little cream cheese, see, and then you gotta have a good dark roast coffee on the side to wash it all down with and if you serve fluffy scrambled eggs covered in melted sharp cheddar right next to it, and it's a Saturday afternoon in an ass-cold December after 14 hours of desperately needed sleep and you plan to chase it with a lavender-scented bubble bath, a good book, and a pot of tea left heating on the radiator where your bath towel is also getting nice and toasty? Then you've pretty much reached a kind of nirvana.

And if you put a dollop of the cream cheese on the cat's paw so she'll leave you in peace while you eat, then you're sorta spreading the nirvana around. Which you should totally do.

But that's nirvana. Happiness can be acheived with just the gooey waffle concoction.

Now go on and make it. You know you want to. I'll go run the bath.

Yay SBD woo hoo everybuddy go read
Kate
and
jmc
and
BSC
and crème de christ sur un cracker, as I like to say - I can't believe tomorrow is another day. Jaysus.

The real life, she is no like the romance novels.

I will, however, retract that statement the second that a very rich, handsome, and mindblowingly-great-in-the-sack nobleman shows up at my door with a steely glance and through clenched jaw, grits out: "Damn it, I've always loved you. Must you torture me? Either you come away with me to my cozy yet servant-riddled castle nestled in the mountains of an obscure yet breathtakingly beautiful country that no tourist has ever heard of, where I can praise the gravity-defying qualities of your breasts for hours on end, or I'll slake my lust on some blowsy blond bimbo in an attempt to forget you, in addition to drinking and general debauchery until I die cold and alone and muttering your name with singular longing. Now MAKE UP YOUR MIND, the Leer jet is waiting, you vixenish tease."

And that's my SBD.

Dreamt last night about kids leaving home, leaving their parents. The goodbyes and the inadequate Welcome Backs. Dreamt of my when I was nineteen and came home from Italy, my mother's hug, the strangeness of homecoming, and how everything was different. Utterly changed, forever. How my mother's hugs never felt the same.

And somewhere in the dream was me as an adult, going to a college dorm - some dorm I was familiar with (five floors, always use the bathrooms on the fifth floor and the laundry on the second) but it only exists in my dream. It's not from my real life. And downstairs on the first floor were tables, and the bustling come and go of parents dropping off their kids and their kids' meager possession. Freshmen arriving. And one girl sitting with her family - her mother (blue collar and gruff, my kinda peoples) sat across from her, and her grandmother and maybe some siblings or cousins. I sat next to them and watched, listened. They talked of ordinary things -you always talk of simple ordinary things at big goodbyes, have you ever noticed? Yes, I remembered the dryer sheets. Hey, don't forget that you're out of milk. Look at that woman's hideous skirt. That was a good show on the Discovery Channel last night. And then it's time to go.

This woman, the mother - she didn't even hug her daughter. She said Well, I better get on the road if I want to be home before dark. You got everything you need, and if you need something else, just call me. And she walked out, ducking under a lamp and a plastic bag full of clothes that someone was holding high as they passed through to the elevators. When the mom left, there was a little silence at the table, the grandmother and cousins embarrassed by the abrupt goodbye of the mother. They began to fill it up with chitchat and I looked at the girl and knew that she knew. The same thing that I knew: her mother had to leave before she began crying. Her mother was probably crying right now in her beat-up car and would cry in her bed tonight. And I also knew the girl was thankful for her mother's method of saying goodbye and wanted to tell the others that they were idiots, they didn't know her mom or how she felt, etc. But instead she was going to concentrate on just not crying herself, not yet.

And that's when I realized I didn't belong there, sitting down at some random table to watch a girl move away from home the first time. Total strangers, and I don't belong there. So I quietly left.

And then next, some silliness about dressing up. My hair long and done in a style from the 40's and I was in the bathroom, trying to pin it up. I had a cell phone and a friend was on the other end, telling me about his own family, his sister and the trouble there. Friendly unburdening of woes as I struggled with hair clips and hid from my unlikeable sister-in-law. And to the bathroom door came a niece and a nephew joyfully shrieking my name and wanting hugs, wanting kisses, wating Aunt Beff. Not sure who the niece was (the oldest?), but the boy was my oldest nephew. The one who's 18 now.

But in my dream he was five or six again, soft blond hair and huge brown eyes and he'd just come back from visiting his biological father. A weekend visit. His suitcase was open in the room across the hall. And my nephew hugged me - he has arms that, even at that age, wrapped around a person in the most perfect way. I missed you, Aunt Beth, I'm so glad to be home, is what he said. And I thought of my friend on the phone and how rude to have just laid it down when the kids attacked, and then my nephew was clinging. He wouldn't let go. Some song on the radio, some mawkish thing about coming home (for the holidays, maybe), and my little nephew squeezed me tighter and cried into my shirt, his head just reaching my breast and my hand smoothing his hair and I knew he didn't want to pull away because his tears would be evident and he'd have to say what I knew was making him cry: that there's nowhere like home and though he loves his father, it's not the same, nothing's ever the same, why do things have to change and how is it that nothing is ever purely happy anymore? Why do people always have to leave? It hurts when they go away and life is changed forever.

I woke up with the sensation of his head pressed against me, his hair under my hand, his tears just starting to soak into my shirt. My first thought was of how much I miss him at age 5, age 6. He was an absolutely lovely little boy.

He's a Marine now. Fresh out of boot camp.
They blow up Marines on a regular basis.
In case you didn't know.

His little sister is the one about whom I'm so distressed lately. Which maybe explains the dream.

And I have to go to work now.