White Button Mushrooms

It’s been a while since Minnie lived out here. In fact for all the years I’ve known her, she’s been away from our corner of world far longer than she’s called it home. Her latest jaunt into the US midlands began more than five years ago, and though I do hear sparingly from her, I wouldn’t say that we’ve chatted on the phone once since Christmas. That’s not to imply that I don’t consider her a very good friend, as I have many good friends whom I haven’t talked to in a while. Sometimes life spins you out of the circle for a while, sometimes it’s for the rest of your life—but that doesn’t mean that they stop being what I would call very good friends.

Very good friends leave traces of themselves all over, and in my book, it’s these traces that make the real difference between very good friends and everyday acquaintances.

And this also brings us, strangely, to the proper amount of white button mushrooms to buy—especially the proper amount to buy when one is about to make pizza.

You see, Minnie never really learned to cook.

Now that’s not to say that she couldn’t whip up a hamburger mac and cheese now and then, or cook up a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, but I don’t think even she would argue that the fine art of food preparation was somewhat of a mystery to her. I’ve always gotten the impression that Minnie’s mom was never all that interested in spending time in the kitchen, at least anymore time than was absolutely necessary to keep her family fed, and that’s what lead to her kitchen ineptness, but that’s neither here nor there. I’ve never met Alma, Minnie’s mom, and though she plays an obvious roll in Minnie’s lack of kitchen skills, it’s a road I don’t really want to go down—at least not here, not now.

The way it usually works around the singlewide is that Sweetie makes the pizza dough and I toss it. It’s a trick I picked up standing alongside the late actor River Phoenix while working on a movie (and it sounds much cooler to say that and leave it at that, then it does to explain the whole thing, trust me). I like to think that tossed pizza dough makes for a better crust, in the same way saying I learned to toss pizza dough with River Phoenix, makes for a better story. It’s just a lot more fun and that’s that.

So last night I got to chopping up toppings and found the bag of mushrooms Sweetie bought. In it were the seven mushrooms. There are always seven mushrooms in the produce bag when making pizza, because to buy any other number would be to defy the ghosts of the past. To buy any other number would cheat your soul of a good friend’s legacy—to buy any other number would be to lessen ones connection to who you are.

Years ago, when our friendship was still young, Minnie, Sweetie and I all lived together in a large house up on Phinney Ridge that overlooked Crown Hill. Minnie had always been a bit of a picky eater, but one thing she always pressed for was the hand tossed pizza we would make—pizza that she had grown fond of. The way I remember it was that once, after she had made an extended trip back to the Midwest, she came home and asked if we could have that pizza. I wrote her out a list of supplies that we would need and on the list I wrote “Mushrooms”. She asked how many, and I said I thought seven or eight would be fine, so when Minnie got home from the store, there were exactly seven white button mushrooms in her grocery sack. She never asked how many mushrooms to get ever again, and in all the subsequent years that I have known her, Minnie has always bought seven white button mushrooms, regardless of what we needed them for.

Now all these years later, there’s a place in my heart where seven mushrooms lie…I knew when I opened the bag of groceries Sweetie brought home that there would be a small bag of mushrooms in it. I also knew that Sweetie would get seven of them and that when she did, she would flash upon the memory of Minnie in our kitchen, of drinking whatever strange beer Minnie would pick out from its cool label and the smell of yeast and flour dust settling on the grey linoleum floor in the wake of kneaded and tossed dough.

That she would flash on that memory just like I would. Just like I did.

Minnie hasn’t bought mushrooms for our pizza for a lot of years now, and in fact the truth is that Minnie never even liked mushrooms to begin with.

Minnie gave Sweetie and me many gifts, but there are none from her that I love more, than seeing seven white button mushrooms in a clear plastic produce bag. Very good friends, like truth and beauty, are hidden all around us, buried in the bits and pieces of our everyday lives—only sneeking out every once in a while to say hello, like when found in the guise of seven white button mushrooms at the bottom of a grocery sack.