What the World Needs Now

   I’m not going to say who told me this, but apparently my blog posts are too long. It’s given me writers block. I’m a wordy person, albeit on paper only. However, I've been advised to make everything short and sweet. “Just the basics” I’ve been told.  So I’m going to try to make this short. Today I want to talk about popcorn. 

    There’s nothing special about popcorn. It’s something we all had, back in the day, at the movie theatres. Great flick. Date purchased a “large” popcorn and diet soda. Which we shared. Sometimes we would get one of those aluminum pan thingies with the metal handle that we would shake over a fire, (sometimes over a gas stove), until the expanding foil on top would just about burst.  That was always my favorite popcorn, although not all the kernels ever popped and I always managed to burn my hands on the metal handle. Seriously, putting a metal handle on something designed to go over an open fire was a stroke of genius. So we all experienced popcorn and it never was a big deal, until Mark entered the picture. 

    While in high school, I worked at the student store. We sold popcorn. Mark would come in everyday to buy a bag. But he liked the kernels, the half popped stuff that would slip through the little holes at the bottom of the popper. My teacher was amused by this and allowed me to empty the bottom tray into a popcorn bag and give it to him for free. Mark took this as a sign that I liked him. Ok, the story is much more complicated than this, but for the sake of brevity, I did like him. 

    While we dated, Mark would visit me after he got off work, and I would make him a batch of popcorn. My mother actually had this green pot that made the best popcorn.  It was known as THE popcorn pot. Blah, blah, blah, (making this short), we got married and we ate a lot of popcorn.  The kids arrived, and they ate a lot of popcorn. The grandkids arrived and my daughter and I would actually bite off the kernel part of the corn and give the soft part to her baby daughter to munch on. We aren’t weird, it really is a thing. 

     Then we found this chunk of beach in Costa Maya, (you knew eventually there was going to be a connection, right?), and we wanted to serve popcorn. By this time, Mark had discovered a small Amish community which happened to offer the best microwave popcorn IN THE WORLD. So we brought it to Maya Chan. After we actually had enough power to operate a microwave, we tried to serve it to our guests. But, being from Cali, we never considered the humidity in the Caribbean. It was so stale, right out of the microwave, we considered it inedible. Now I realize our family might be popcorn snobs, but there’s nothing good about stale anything. We tried a lot of weird things to keep it fresh and crunchy, but living on the beach does have its drawbacks. 

     As life rolled on, Julie became a welcomed part of May Chan and our family.  To make this short, I’ll just say she makes the BEST POPCORN EVER. The old fashioned way. Just like we used to make in the green pot.  I guess popcorn lovers have a way of finding each other. So the moral of this short blog post is we are all connected.  And sometimes that connection is popcorn.