How to Grow Up Read Online Free PDF

you’ve wet the crackahs, shove the casserole in the oven and bake it till it’s an unholy cauldron of cheesy goodness.
    If the broccoli Velveeta casserole was a metaphor for who I’d been, butternut squash with goat cheese and hazelnuts was a metaphor for who I was today. The recipe came not from my mom but from Epicurious, and was recommended by a foodiefriend of my sister. It called for the roasting of hazelnuts and then the peeling of their skins from their hot little bodies. In my family we called hazelnuts
filberts
. We also called dinner
supper
, the living room the
parlor
, soda
tonic
, a porch a
piazza
, and compost
swill
. The North Shore of Boston in the 1970s and perhaps still today contains pockets of curious old-world language and customs.
    I was excited to bring my bipolar, high-low side dishes to the Thanksgiving I’d be celebrating with my friends, the lot of them like me, people from low-income families who’d made it out of our depressing hometowns into lives as artists, teachers, nonprofit workers. None of us were quite sure how we’d done it, and many of us were plagued by guilt at the poor or alcoholic or mentally ill family members we’d left behind, haunted by the puzzle of how we’d figured out how to have such great lives when others, people we loved, hadn’t. It was luck—no, we worked hard. It was hard work—no, everyone works hard. We were very lucky.
    I knew my friends would appreciate and enjoy both dishes. I snuggled the butternut squash with goat cheese and hazelnuts in plastic wrap and took it with the Velveeta masterpiece to the fridge. I opened it up and peered into the graveyard of meals past, realizing I was going to have to toss a lot of leftovers to make room for my casseroles.
    As I started throwing things away, I noticed a fly. Gross. I kept working, tossing a half dozen half-drunk Odwallas, all past their sell-by date. Oh look, more flies. Weird. None of them were flying. They looked decrepit, more decrepit than your average fly. The fridge was literally crawling with flies, flies too cold, theirwings too shriveled, to fly. Gross. How long had they been in there?
    It was a terrible question—
How long has a swarm of flies been living
inside
my refrigerator?
Well, from birth, of course. There was no other way there could have been such numbers, all of them in the same crippled condition. Oh, and what are baby flies called? Maggots.
    The fridge had maggots. Or rather, it used to have maggots. The maggots actually were able to gestate and grow up into this marginally functional group of adult flies staring at me from the shelves. Flies healthy enough to have perhaps laid the next generation of flies—maggots—elsewhere in the refrigerator, perhaps behind that produce bag filled with brown, liquefied vegetables, to the right of the gallon of SunnyD that had a sell-by date of 2004.
    I shut the door. My heart was racing. I felt like a chick in a horror movie. If I were to open the door again, what would I see this time? If I’d previously been grossed out by the fridge, now I was terrified of it.
    I called my two best friends. Conveniently, they were girlfriends and lived in the same place, about a fifteen-minute walk from my maggoty flophouse.
    â€œHi, can I bring over our Thanksgiving sides and put them in your fridge? Mine has maggots.”
I didn’t sob as I said this, nor was my voice shrill with horror, as would be appropriate. I said it the way my friends and I share all of life’s miniature tragedies, the humiliations that pop up right when you think you have it together, to echo your psyche with a wicked cackle:
You’ll never bea grown-up! You’ll always be a dirtbag! Your ignoble provenance is etched into your very
soul
, and any attempt to have a normal adulthood will be punished by a
plague of maggots
!
    I said it like it was sort of a joke, the dark domestic humor of a satanic Erma Bombeck.
    Of