Prison Food

Once in a while my dad and I like to hit up this little hole in the wall breakfast spot. We met there this morning and each ordered the Big Breakfast: 3 over-easy eggs, sourdough toast, 4 slices of bacon and a pile of hashbrowns. We proceeded to murder our food, leaving barely a trace of our crime, nearly wiping out our digestive systems with animal fat. My heartrate is still a bit elevated and it's nearly 12 hours later.

Are hashbrowns Canadian? Do people from other countries refer to them as fried potatoes? Jason used to call them hashBROWNS, putting the emphasis on the last syllable which drove me insane because I've always known them to be HASHbrowns. I could never let it go, either. He'd ask about hashBROWNS and I'd reply, "you mean, HASHbrowns?" I'm pretty sure it's not the final reason we pulled the plug but it may have been pretty darn close.

It's like that with everything, though. Right? Each person experiences life differently. Jake begged me to have a boy/girl sleepover tonight, lamenting that "all the other parents let their kids go." Now, obviously over my dead body is Jake going to any sort of co-ed sleepover within the next 40 years and naturally Jake began to lament his current condition, claiming that compared to most kids his age, he has way less freedom.

Thus began our discussion of perspective. What might feel like prison to him is in fact keeping him safe. Just because he feels the cold bars pressed against his face doesn't mean that he's locked up. That one day when he looks back at this moment, he will see himself standing on the freedom side of the bars, rather than the prison side. It's the danger that's locked up, not him.

I think he got it, as much as a 13 year-old boy can get it, for now.

It might taste like freedom. We can gobble up the hashbrowns, but who knows? One day we can look back and see that all we've really been eating is a bunch of fried potatoes.