Prose Poem: Who Makes The Grilled Cheese Sandwiches? (Dedicated to Emily Heil.)

 

Amy puts them under the broiler, and uses mayonnaise.

Me, I fry 'em in a pan, using lots of butter.

So who's right, and who's wrong?  Me or my wife.

We both can't be right. When it comes to grilled cheese sandwiches.

It just ain't natural.  It's contradictory.  An anachronism.  Subversive.

Thinking outside the universe.  Like H.P. Lovecraft.

The cheese really doesn't matter.  We get a block of processed cheese each month

from the Food Bank, so we use that.  We tried cream cheese once.  Not a pretty sight.

Go ahead and laugh, but I'm thinking of taking this issue to the Supreme Court.  Or the Food Channel.  Or my old friend Crazy Henry.  

He lives on grilled cheese sandwiches, and Kraft's Mac & Cheese.  Nothing else. Not a salad or an apple or hamburger.  He drinks skim milk.  He's been called Crazy Henry ever since tenth grade, long ago, when he ordered a Capuchin monkey from the back page of a comic book and kept it in his bedroom until his mother made him take it to Como Zoo. Did you know it was Ted Fingerhut -- the guy who owns the Fingerhut Catalogue Company -- who first started selling little monkeys in comic books?  From there he went to plastic car seat covers.  Man, those things got hot and sticky in the summer, back in the 1960's.

And my mother never made us kids grilled cheese sandwiches.  Not once.  She could have made the effort.  Made us a normal lunch.  But she had to make tuna salad instead.  Nothing but tuna salad.  Amy and I both agree, at least, on that:  The only good tuna salad is a thrown-away tuna salad.

Did I mention the cheese really doesn't matter?