This is Deputy Digby Pancake. I can be blamed for a lot of things around here. The mystery smell. The mystery mud on the wall. Waking everyone up in the middle of the night for a long tall drink of water. But never. Never have I made anyone go coconuts. Yet.
Girl Person likes to cook. You know that. You may also know that she likes vegetables. They eat a lot of vegetables. It’s not often that it gets cold in this Florida place. So when it does, the persons like to make soup. And Girl Person made some soup. She called it butternut squash soup.
But it had no butter. It had coconut milk though. And lots of it. It took her a long time to make. She had to roast the vegetables and put stuff in a blender and stir it a lot.
And she was real proud of it. She made some bread and her and Boy Person were real excited about the butternut squash soup with no butter. Just fake butter made from cashews. Who comes up with this stuff?
It may not be my cup of tea, but I don’t drink tea anyway.
Boy Person had had a rough day. He hit his head on the mirror of the RV and almost knocked his teeth out. He does that a lot. We had a rainstorm. It does that a lot here too. And he dropped his clothes in the prison shower. So when he sat down for his soup, he was real excited about it. Real excited. He took a big bite. And that’s when all coconuts broke loose.
As he bit down, he bit down on something hard. Real hard. He jumped up almost knocking his soup over and exclaimed that he had bit a rock. Now. Girl Person knows he is over dramatic. She also knew that she did not put a rock in his soup intentionally. That day. So she was confused and now she lost her appetite. She put down her soup and told Boy Person to calm down. She wished she could drop a coconut on his head to knock him out, because he had went coconuts.
When he finally calmed down, it was to be realized that in fact, he had shattered his tooth like a matzo cracker in this RV on a Saturday night. His tooth was just not gonna be ok. And now, besides the pain, they had to find out what had caused it. Was it salt? No. Was it the seeds from the squash? No. Was it the cashew milk? No. They were in limbo. What was it?
Finally, as Girl Person ran down every single ingredients, she hit the nail on the coconut! Coconut milk…coconut milk. A piece of coconut bark had found its way into the soup. And into Boy Person’s tooth. And now. That was that. His tooth was hurting.
Some days, you wish you could start over. Some days, everything seems to go wrong. But as Boy Person sat down and they tried to find a dentist, they started to chuckle. Just a little bit. Because what were the chances that a bowl of butternut squash would cause such a night? You never truly know what can happen in each day. But my suggestion would have been to order a pizza. You can go coconuts about everything that can go wrong, or you can appreciate what went right. The bread was good. And maybe rock soul should be a thing…
-Deputy Digby Pancake
