flashback: comfort in a can.

today was not a good day. it was just stressful and disorganized and by the time i left work (twelve hours after i started work) i was a bit of a frazzled mess. i got home and went to my cupboard to pull out the big guns, my ultimate comfort food.

deviled chicken in a can.

yes. i, the elitist foodie, absolutely love the deviled chicken that comes from that little paper-wrapped can you find in the creepily-named "canned meat" section of the grocery store. there's usually a can tucked in my cupboard, kept there just for those bad days when nothing goes right.

i didn't grow up near my grandparents. i got to see them maybe once a year as part of epic cross-country drives in the family van. my dad's parents lived in southern utah, my mom's parents near seattle. at the little yellow house in southern utah, i feasted on home-made banana-nut cookies and fresh apricots and ate dried bananas while i sat on my grandpa's knee. in washington, at the green house with the big bush out front, it was cocoa pebbles in the morning and deviled chicken sandwiches on wonder bread for lunch, accompanied by carrots pulled right out of the ground, dusted off on the thigh of my grandpa's slacks. (washing the carrots ruined the flavor.) i was the only person in my family who liked the chicken, besides my grandfather, so he and i would split a can and enjoy our special, secret, delicious sandwiches, half-pitying all the crazy people who didn't know the joys of canned chicken on wonder bread.

i had a special kind of relationship with my grandpa green. i was closer to him than any of my siblings were, right up until the end of his life. it makes me sad, sometimes, that no one else got to know him like i did-- not as the stern, vaguely-scary version of him they saw, but the mellowed, sweet man he became later in life. the man who played my little ponies with me and took me to feed the ducks (wearing his green cardigan and fedora, which i remember still, clear as day). the man who would sit on the sofa with me and ask me to talk about god with him. the man who shared his favorite sandwich with me.

that's why i really love chicken sandwiches-- not because of their actual culinary value, but because they remind me of all of that. because, with every single bite, there's a memory. and that's why, for those bad days, i keep that little can in my cupboard, so that i can tear the paper off and remember that things are okay after all.