Ever since I can remember, popcorn with a diet soda or beer has been my mother's favorite food (she is a actually a very health-conscious person though, so don't get the idea that all she does is eat popcorn and guzzle beer). Sunday nights when she was growing up were popcorn and soda nights. They would have a big Sunday lunch and to give my grandmother a break, have popcorn and soda and gather around the television in the living room or around a table to play a game, a weekly tradition if you will.
So naturally, my mother still loves to have popcorn and soda but now it's on a less regulated schedule. She has passed down her love of the popcorn and soda combination to her children (even to my older brother who is quite the picky eater). Of course, we were only allowed to have pop on the weekends so we never became quite as in love with it as she is.
In Marcel Proust's The Madeleine, he uses a madeleine the shell-shaped, fluffy cookie to symbolize something that triggers a memory. The taste and aroma of the cookie induces a flood of memories. "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory- this new sensation having has on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal." And while eating popcorn doesn't provoke that deep of memories for me (mostly just my mom sitting on the couch in our TV room with a big bowl of popcorn on her lap and me snuggling up against her to steal bites of popcorn) they still are meaningful.
No comments:
Post a Comment