The rest of my family liked food, but no one else felt as vehemently about it as I did. I loved eating, and thinking about food, as much as I loved reading and writing, and somehow all these passions were connected for me, on a deep level. I loved putting things in my mouth and chewing them and swallowing. I was in no way a born gourmet, and my palate was not instinctively refined.

Maybe Tempe itself, this wild, strange new place that was so profoundly different from Berkeley, opened my senses to taste and texture, flavor and smell. Maybe my palate had developed enough finally to enable me to taste fully what I was eating for the first time. But at Wildermuth, something ignited a passion for eating in me. I stood dripping and shivering a little in the sudden desert chill at sunset, a wet towel around my shoulders, my hair streaming water between my shoulder blades, eating a cheeseburger as fast as I could shove it into my mouth and chew and swallow it, and wondering how food could taste even better through the chlorine clouds on my tongue.īefore we moved to Arizona, I was largely indifferent to food, except those few favorite things I loved best and requested constantly. Then Carol lit the grill and we had a cookout: hamburgers with melted cheese on toasted sesame buns with pickles and ketchup, potato salad, potato chips, Coke, and ice cream for dessert. I remember spending the entire day in their pool, all of us kids shrieking and jumping into the blue water, playing Marco Polo and racing from end to end, pushing against the side and shooting off like launched rockets to the other side of the pool, throwing ourselves on and off rubber rafts and inner tubes, and taking turns running down the diving board and belly flopping or dive bombing into the pool. Carol was divorced and she lived with her four pretty, perfectly blond, blue-eyed girls, Marcia, Julie, Jeannie, and Janelle, in a huge air-conditioned stucco house. Sometimes my mother’s friend Carol would have her consciousness-raising group, which included my mother, over for pool parties, with all their kids. Summer lasted year-round in Arizona, and therefore, swimming pools were a big part of our regular life.

Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen