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Blueberry Muffins
Blueberry Muffins (December 1994) While my first few year in Midwest were less than auspicious, and lead me to develop to dislike America and most things America on general principle,there were some aspects of my new surroundings that weren't quite so bad. Particularly those involving blueberries. Despite having spent the first 14 or so years of my life living amongst American ex-pats my experience of Western food was very limited when I arrived in America. For the first 9 years of my life I spent more time with my Japanese grandparents than my own parents, and I ate more meals with them too. After that my general desire not to be in the Kyoto compound generally meant that I didn't eat there either (My Mother wouldn't have cooked, even i was there, she simply wasn't that kind of woman), and that I instead lived off of a mixture of food that I purchased from street vendors and train stations, or which was cooked by the mothers of my school friends (most of whom I was closer to than my own Mother, which says a lot about how defunct our relationship was even at that time). I'd eaten burgers and fries, the occasional pizza, and a couple of variations on roasted meat and vegetables, but not much more than that. This was until I moved to America and discovered blueberry muffins. Owing to my mother’s insistence that the entire family had to get up at the same time that she got up, which was criminally early, I generally had a lot of free time in the mornings before school, and I had a much longer wait between breakfast and lunch than most other people, so I often used this time to have another breakfast. This is where blueberry muffins came in. Soon after we arrived in town most of the local residents figured out that, by adding our house onto the school bus route, everybody would have to get up at least fifteen minutes earlier to get to school on time. This caused some rather loud complaints, particularly in the winter, none of which my mother listened to, but which one of the local residents did. In her neighborly way she decided that, since she worked three mornings a week in one of the local stores, and since she had to pass by our house to get to work, she might as well offer me a lift to school, and Lucy a lift to wherever it was that she was going at that particular age, without telling our Mother about it. This meant that, three days a week, we didn’t tie up the school bus, but also that we arrived in town too early for school, but early enough to have breakfast again in the local diner, which served blueberry muffins. While having a regular supply of muffins made me a very happy boy, it infuriated my Mother. Despite working a desk job, my Mother was extremely fit, and I mean in the same way that a professional athlete is extremely fit, and she liked her health food. She also liked me to eat like a professional athlete because it added to my fitness for martial arts. Blueberry muffins, however, are certainly not health food. What they are though is all American. My Mother could never stop me from them; not without defying her drive to make me more American. This infuriated her, which of course meant that I also took every opportunity to eat them, whether she knew about it or not. Whenever we ate breakfast together in the diner, which was actually quite often because of our weekend routine, or whenever we were in any other place that severed blueberry muffins, I made sure to order them. I even made sure to sit very close to the poster in the local diner that had the American flag on it and the words “All America” emblazoned above a picture of a blueberry muffin. It almost made steam come out of my mother’s ears to see her son, the martial art expert, eating a muffin filled with fat, sugar, and who knows what else, in place of a healthy breakfast. This made the experience all the more rewarding for me and more than made up for a lot of the other things that I had to put up with at that time. |
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