When I was nine, I used to feed it to the family dog to watch her do this.

******

In high school there was a female student, the guys referred to as Peanut Butter, supposedly because her legs were easy to spread. Classy bunch, teenagers. In retrospect, I wonder if the rumor was even true, since no one tells the truth about sexual conquests at that age.

******
The small town I grew up in declared itself to be the Peanut Capital. If you look the web, there are plenty small communities that think so highly of themselves in Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, and even Australia.

******

I knew a guy who ate peanut butter and tuna fish sandwiches. The salty sweet combination makes palate sense, but I’ve never liked tuna in a can. The smell is too strong. Fresh seared tuna? Save me a seat.

*****

Peanut Butter is useful for removing chewing gum from hair.

*****

It’s the only food item in the pantry I don’t offer guests. It isn’t based on a deep seated spiritual belief that peanut butter is the holiest foods from childhood. I never saw the image of the Virgin Mary in the shadowy scoops of creamy goodness. Mostly, it’s because I eat it straight out of the jar for breakfast on those mornings I don’t feel motivated enough to scramble eggs or cook oatmeal. I used to chase it with milk gulped directly from the carton….Yeah cliché. Not any more, though. So feel free to ask for a glass of milk. It’s safe. No cooties.

Rather than talk about why my hair resembles Lily Munster, how insufferably my cats are behaving, or how I will gnaw off my own foot if I am forced to eat quiche or smoked ribs before 2012, lets talk about how much I suck as a role model. But if my siblings didn’t allow me supervised visits with my nieces and nephews, then technically I couldn’t be a bad influence, so what we’re really discussing is how my siblings suck as parents.

Exhibit A:
My brother paid a visit to my Mom’s while I was there last week and he didn’t come alone. He came with his 13yo, the 13yo’s buddy (because they always travel in packs), and a bag of firecrackers. He also placed me in a supervisory position. Oh the pressure! I responded by cleaning out the refrigerator and filling aluminum cans with jello, and stuffing firecrackers into containers with brunswick stew. To my credit no one lost a digit, and the fridge isn’t the toxic landfill it was upon my arrival.

Exhibit B:
My sister brings her kids for a visit. Like typical kids bored by adult conversation, they go upstairs and amuse themselves by investigating closets, rifling through drawers and looking under beds for anything worthy of amusement. What they find is a collections of shirts I painted as a teenager.

Yet another indicator as to my loser status during secondary education. I painted my own shirts to wear at a public high school. No mystery as to why I was never elected prom queen. Anywho most of the shirts had images of other people’s ideas. Things like album covers, quintessential 80’s movies like, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Less Than Zero, or Some King of Wonderful, or comic strip characters, basically 80’s based pop-culture

So my nephew runs in with a Where’s Waldo? t-shirt, complete with assorted characters, painted front and back. My mother starts exhibiting twitchy behavior associated with having seizures, or seven year olds who can’t sit still. I realize she is dropping not so subtle hints that I should follow the kids and pick out shirts for each of them. Okay dokey. Kid One with Waldo shirt, dilemma solved. Kid Two….hmmmm. Kid Two is eight and will not appreciate the finer points of an 80’s teenage angst movie, nor is it appropriate to send her into a room full of adults with an “I Really Need to get My Ship Together” shirt.

I opted for the Martika’s Kitchen shirt. I picked it because it was bright. i painted the album cover on the back of a man’s dress shirt. Kid One dropped a subtle hint that Kid Two would not be able to wear the shirt to school and I thought duh, of course not, she’s eight and the shirt length violates the dress code. I neglected to consider the bare breast, I mean, Hell I wore it to school when I was a teenager, and I didn’t get sent home. They’re breast, so what? It’s not like people don’t know what knockers are supposed to look like.

After the other adults freaked and laughed, we picked out another shirt, though I’m not sure why we bothered, Kid Two, like me, was completely unfazed.