Little Bites

I can hear my mom telling me, “Mareena, you don’t need to shovel food into your mouth like you haven’t eaten in 3 days. We feed you very well. Take little bites, please.” THAT is a memory that will pull me back in time. I can see myself as a goofy little kid sitting at our kitchen table eating, after my mom has whipped up lunch. But here’s another memory that I’m going to throw at you:

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches

If anything can make me reminisce on childhood, it’s peanut butter and jelly. The squishy white bread, the creamy taste of peanut butter as it sticks to the roof of your mouth, and the fruity burst of jelly as slides under the peanut butter and then blobs out the back of the sandwich, and cutting it into 4 small triangles, just for the fun of it. That encompasses the joy of being a kid.

I went through a phase where I didn’t enjoy peanut butter and jelly. Shocking? I know. I loved being a kid, but pretty soon, I was ready to grow out of it. So in a way, I grew out of peanut butter and jelly for a time. I cultivated more ’sophisticated’ tastes for sandwiches like Subway and Panera. But pretty soon, being older wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and I started to long for the tastes of childhood. So now, as much as I enjoy a good Spicy Italian sub or a chicken salad croissant, I sometimes have to step back into my childhood and eat some peanut butter and jelly. Just like I did tonight for dinner. And I even washed it all down with milk.