Of Pasta Salad and Prop 8

Tonight we dined.

Barbecued chicken breasts and day old pasta salad.

Day old pasta salad doesn't sound like a culinary delight, but oh how wrong you are.

Give the pasta salad a day to absorb all the flavors from the dressing. The fresh garlic, the extra virgin olive oil, the balsamic vinegar, and the fresh thyme. A day to soak up all the fantastic tastes (including the bacon slices) and the day old pasta far exceeds it's day-of younger brother. A glass of wine and a little cracked pepper, and you, my friend . . . are in heaven.

It would be nice to say that its an age old recipe, brought to the new world from my scottish-italian forefathers.

(Note: there's really no italian in my ancestry, but my son is half italian and that makes me sorta honorary)

But this pasta salad is really a concoction of ingredients invented by my father and I.

To start . . . we were kind of poor.

Not "mismatched shoes from the goodwill" kind of poor, but we did have a van that used a coffee can as an oil filter.

Pasta salad was a dish that my dad and I could make on a friday morning and still be nibbling on by sunday afternoon. We used to eat barrels of the stuff and the recipe always changed depending upon what we had in the fridge. Sometimes it had broccoli, sometimes chunks of cheese (Monterrey jack was my favorite, but extra sharp cheddar was my dad's). Sometimes celery, but always carrots.

Most of the time there were bacon bits, and Dad always splurged on the marinated artichoke hearts and Bernstein's dressings.

Gotta love him.

(Thirteen year old debutantes riding on their new ponies couldn't have been more spoiled)

Pasta salad was my first introduction to cooking. How to boil pasta and check for doneness. How to wield a chef's knife and not cut my fingers off. How to make bad puns by confusing colander with calender.

Good times.

It also taught me, that sometimes, day two is the best. You gotta let things stew awhile before they reach perfection.

Proposition 8, the amendment to ban same sex marriage in the Californian constitution, was upheld this week.

I'm angry. and frustrated. and disappointed in my fellow human beings.

I needed comfort food and day old pasta salad fit the bill.

Now, I'm no activist.

I don't even like ordering specially prepared burgers in the drive-thru.

"Just pick the pickles off!" I say to the sixteen year old.

But a blog is a soapbox, even when the town square is empty. And I have personal vendetta against homophobia. A fire which unfortunately will never be extinguished.

When I was eighteen I worked in a bookstore. One day, a well dressed man in his late forties berated me for ten minutes about the homosexual content that was available in our human sexuality section. He didn't use foul language or raise his voice, he just spent ten minutes of my life to display his disgust with me and my bookstore, regardless of the fact that I had no control whatsoever of the titles we sold, and how ashamed of myself I should be.

Now, I've dealt with really god awful people in the retail world and I am fully aware that weak people seek out confrontations with sales people because they know that there are no repercussions from offending a bookstore clerk, but what really upset me isn't that I was powerless to argue with him, or even that I lacked the courage of such confrontation.

It was that fact that he had no way of knowing that I wasn't gay.

The miserable, stupid, condescending ass might not only been offending my pride but my whole existence. He could've incited violence. His monologue could have been the catalyst for an unfortunate confused teenager to commit suicide. His tirade had no purpose other than to hurt and to emasculate me as I stood there too unsure of myself to speak up.

So I've been thinking about this immensely since "Yes on 8" posters were littered across half the lawns in my neighborhood.

Why? Really . . . why?

In fact, what kind of society am I raising my son in where this kind of inane mental retardation is considered the norm?

And it occurs to me that the weak minded, the uneducated, the brainwashed by propaganda insufferable bigots of this world need a rallying point for their fear. It's a final stab at relevancy. It's Laertes' final thrust of the poisoned sword before they become marginalized by a progressive society that doesn't require their ilk any longer.

You have the activists (again, not me) to thank for the turning of the tide. It's their continued fight that will keep that poisoned sword from slicing into the delicate skin of our children.

As for me, I get to teach my son how to check for doneness, how to wield a chef's knife without cutting off his fingers, how to love, how to be far more sure of himself at three than I was at eighteen, and, hopefully . . .

that day two will be even better.