Monday, July 10, 2006

The eighth deadly sin...

When I was a kid one of my favorite food groups was paste. School paste. In my old age I'm pretty sure that I wasn't the only kid eating out of the paste jar but back in the day - sitting at my desk trying to figure out how to get that little paste paddle from the jar to my mouth without drawing attention to myself, I figured it was something akin to one of the deadly sins! Almost as mortifying as wearing all seven Avon fragrances on my mother's dresser because the boy I sat next to in music was the love of my life. Course he could barely sit next to me *that* god-awful day, but I digress...

Heaven only knows what those paste manufacturers put in paste but let's face it - they *made* it tasty to sell more of it. Half a jar for the art project, the other half for lunch. I'm sure that's part of the reason why most of my childhood years were spent being constipated. Between paste and swallowing my gum it's a wonder I ever pooped between the ages of 4-10.

I don't claim to be a paste connoisseur but I was a picky paste eater. I liked one in particular because of it's minty aftertaste. Heaven help the art teacher if that was the paste we were using that day. This jar is MINE! But it had to be a new jar - not the one with the grey crumbly crud stuck under the lid.

I also loved that flour/water concoction my mother mixed up. I don't think it ever stuck anything together but that was some good stuff. Like pie dough, which I also ate. And cookie dough and cake batter. Flour/water paste was practically a dessert at our house.

Once I hit puberty I fell in love with a different adhesive - Elmer's Glue. The stuff tasted like crap! But you could spread it on your fingers and then peel it off like fake skin when it dried. That was so cool.

This has been kind of cathartic, but I'm actually bored of paste talk, now. I was thinking maybe, on my next rant, I'll tell you about how my Auntie Coe made me deadly afraid of birds. Til then, bon apetit...