The Burger Summer

I didn't post yesterday, and I have a good reason. Really. I was having too much fun and it made me tired. See my college roommate and her husband came by and we hung out for most of the day. She's one of the few people in my life that I can have fun with just by sitting on the couch.

We really only lived together for one summer but when I remember college, I remember that this lady was my roomie. She is a wonderful artist and I blame her gift for at least ten of the extra pounds I was packing before I dropped the flab. See, in high school, she had painted a picture of a cheeseburger. It wasn't just a burger, it was the definitive burger, the last word in burgers, the reason people eat burgers...

The canvas represented a soft, fresh bun replete with sesame seeds. Nestled inside the bun halves was a glistening beef patty, perfectly cooked and dripping with juice. Melting on top of the patty, a slice of cheese was just starting to lose its form and become one with the meat. A pickle slice peeked out beneath the cheese. Although the artist claims it was a jalapeno pepper, at the time I couldn't fathom a burger without a pickle so its a pickle. I was young.


Anyway... that painting hung on the wall by the kitchen we never used and for a month I found myself snarfing burgers whenever I got the chance. Thank heavens she didn't paint a hot fudge sundaeor I still wouldn't fit in my jeans! The appartment had two bedrooms off the living room and there was a kind of wooden screen that separated the living area from the sleep zone. We stuck peacock feathers in the screen holes and told everybody to be calm, our pet lived back there.


We must have had open, honest faces back then because lots of people believed us. They would nod knowingly and whisper "What is it?" We'd say "We're not really sure, we found it, but its pretty big and it eats kittens." Guests never stayed long but we didn't care; we had so much fun together.


Of course our landlady, who lived across the driveway, thought we were hookers because we had a lot of male visitors. We weren't hookers. its just that a lot of our friends were guys and we were kind of centrally located. My roomie and I were in the vanguard of the designated driver movement because we did't let anybody drive if they'd been drinking. Since it was college after all, they'd usually had at least a couple of beers so we'd make them sack out on the floor.
We were very civic minded and who knows how many lives we saved. Plus, if they weren't too hungover the next day, the guys would sometimes buy us donuts - or burgers.

We thought the landlady was weird and she thought we were hookers. It seemed like a fair trade. My roomie had a banjo and I hada guitar. Sometimes we'd jam and we sounded awful because neither one of us could play worth a damn. The landlady hated our jam sessions because we would laugh so loud that it would disturb her cats. We just said we were trying to lure food for our pet. She did not find us nearly as funny as we found ourselves.

At the endof that summer, when we went to tell the landlady we were moving, she called my roomie pompous and me cheap. My roomie saved my from a stint in prison because I nearly went through the screen door at her. Later she seemed sad and asked what pompous was. I told her an she said "Oh - I though it meant fat." That was the second hardest we ever laughed.


Later that night we were packing and all our lights were off. Rookie mistake - we packed the lamps first. We looked out our window and into her place and there was the landlady, sitting on the couch in her place, in front of a big confederate flag we'd never noticed before on the wall. She had cats crawling all over her. Now, in her defense, she was fully clothed, but, ew. That took the sad out of moving out of that place.


Now Roomie and her hub-unit live in Oregon. We get together sometimes and I always need a burger when we do. We still have a lot in common. We both had strokes so we compare notes from timeto time. We both want grandkids so we borrowed some from friends. We still crack each other up and nobody else can figure out why. And, oh yeah, we both have cats.