I was having a poke and stroll through the Google listings for my name the other day. I’m trying to figure out what keywords I want to use to optimize my site. And yes, that turned into a bit of vanity searching. What I discovered was a story I’d written for the Manitoban, the University of Manitoba Student Newspaper. Published in the literary supplement, January 21, 1998 was the following story:
“These perogies. These are the best perogies. Not like those store bought perogies. Those perogies look like they’ve been chewed on. Chewed on by rats. Look at how nice the corners of my perogies look. Smooth, fold edges – no rat edges here.”
I had mentioned that I had perogies for dinner last night. “My perogies,” she’d said. “Boughten,” I’d replied. Now her huge flower-printed frame was lumbering around the kitchen gathering and mashing, blending and mixing the perfect ingredients for her perogies. In Ukrainian, she reminded me that, “these perogies, these are the best perogies.”
Her glasses kept slipping off her nose from the sweat caused by sudden activity. Imagine, my grandmother, who sits for hours engulfed by the lazy boy, enraptured in her soap operas, had abandoned Young and the Restless, which she calls Young and the Rest of Us, not at a commercial break, but in the middle of an affair, where at any moment a secret could be told. All of this, just to make me perogies. To remind me that, these perogies, these are the best perogies. Not store bought, not my mother’s, who had to learn from her, and not mine who weren’t learned from anyone but made in a machine, sealed in plastic and microwaved for convenience sake – not to mention chewed on by rats.