How about the tale of the trip back from my cousin’s wedding? I must preface this with the fact that this wedding was in the middle of the days when my grandmother died last year, but the semi-dysfunctional side of our family decided to still have the funeral two days after the wedding 6 hours away in Maine.
The ride up was relatively uneventful – except that Dad, who wouldn’t let anyone else drive the rental car he insisted on getting, proceeded to drive with his reading glasses on so that he could watch his GPS handheld while he drove with one hand. The ride back is a better story because of two things: 1. my brother and I were probably still drunk from the wedding reception the night before when we got into the backseat and 2. because of the McDonalds fruit and nut salad.
I woke up at 5:30am in the morning to the simultaneous sound of my father banging on the wall and calling us on the room phone. I whined “WHY?” painfully into my pillow until my brother said “Hey…where’s your purse?” for which my response was to sit straight up and say “SHIT! Where IS my purse?”. It was right there next to the bed, but turns out my brother was looking for Advil first thing first. We slowly packed up our now sticky, wrinkled clothing and crawled into the vehicle as Dad forcefully took the wheel saying, “No stops until the next McDonalds.”
Now, in the depths of Maine, the next McDonalds is an hour away. That was fine with me because I wasn’t feeling too hungry. This lack of hunger was a direct result of my state of STILL BEING DRUNK and Dad lurching the car back and forth. His driving was degrading as he tried to read the GPS without his reading glasses on because we had ranked on him so much for it on the ride up.
At the first McDonalds, we all headed to the bathroom, but then a parental argument ensued about eat in versus take out. Mom wanted to eat in and enjoy our high cholesterol breakfast as a family. Dad didn’t understand why we got out of the car in the first place. So we ordered. I ordered a large OJ, because I’d started to sober a bit and worried about dehydration. A large OJ at McDonalds is apparently equivalent to a super size Coke, which is roughly equivalent to a small oil tanker. NO ONE can drink that much citric acid. Of course, they filled my drink order last and it kicked the last of the OJ in the machine, so we waited. Dad hates waiting.
Standing there waiting for my vat of O.J. in an empty Maine McDonalds, we all stared at the magnified poster for the restaurant’s newest healthy sensation because it was all that was in front of us. This is where the long debate began….
How DO they make that fruit and nut salad?
We sat (I stared at my egg & cheese biscuit with distrust because by then I was sober and knew this is a bad idea) and the debate continued.
How do the apples not turn brown?
[ME to myself: Why did I order "egg" when I know it will look like this?]
Do they cut them ahead of time and use lemon?
[Eww, OJ acid reflux.]
Do they have a massive machine that cores and slices the apples fresh every time?
Maybe they freeze them with dry ice…
Who the heck would pay almost $3 for cut up apples?
[ME: The same person who can drink this much orange juice.]
This went on for 30 minutes before I realized what was happening. Everyone but me had somehow finished eating, started playing with sugar packets and deeply contemplating the apple salad.
When we got back in the car (me with still half of a cold egg & cheese biscuit that I couldn’t bear to eat, but stupidly thought might look good later), the debate CONTINUED further.
Do you think they only use two kinds of apples?
Do you really think it’s lemon or some sort of preservative?
After another hour or so of seriously, uninterrupted debate, every mention of the words “fruit salad” began to cause my brother and I to giggle like four year olds when anyone says “poop.” My mother, turning in the front seat to give us the scornful eye, responded with the typical:
Everytime you two get together, you regress. I don’t see what is so funny.
And while the topic may have strayed for a while on that long ride, it always came back to the damn fruit salad. And it got funnier to us because my usually intelligent parents didn’t even realize that we had been debating fruit salad for HOURS, as if it was as consequential as religion or politics.
But you know what’s the funniest part of this story? Try retelling this story sometime.
I guarantee it will end with a debate about that fruit salad.
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