Willing suspension of disbelief remains a necessity when it comes to reading Fiction: sure, there are a million different ways to save the world, stop the bad guy, unite the lovers…. No doubt many of you have been known to shout at your reading material or television set—“Just shoot him, now!” “Don’t assume that!” “Don’t leave this way!” “Don’t handcuff him to the chair, then leave!” “He’ll just escape, again!” You get the idea.

But for this piece, suspension of disbelief is unnecessary. For this, you just need to think back to a time when you were clueless.

To set the background straight, I was a late-life baby. My parents already had an 18 year old, a 14 year old and a 13 year old when I was born. Oh, the hormones raged, the school skipped, the cars “borrowed,” but at least it was almost over…then, along came me.

At that point, I think it’s a little easier to assume the teaching role is over. When I turned 16, I don’t recall any conversation about oil changes, for example. But, boy, was I supposed to know that one. At 18, I should’ve learned how to cook and clean. Oops! As I’ve said before, I was a princess. Here I come, real world! I’ll figure you out as I go along.

What I mean is, some of the simplest tasks that you already know, you take for granted. Driving a car. I remember asking my dad how to line the truck up so that it rode in the middle of the lane.

He paused for a second and said, “What are you lining it up with right now?”

I said, “That piece of paper,” as I nodded at a stray piece of mail on the dash.

He repositioned his face into an annoyed expression and moved the paper.

“Now, look at the line down the center of the hood, and line that up with the white line along the shoulder.”

I was 13 or 14 at the time. The next year, he taught me how to drive a standard….

Look of annoyance, or not, I wish Mom would’ve been in my kitchen around the time I turned 20.

I’ve said it before, but we really were a meat and potatoes kind of family. Well, I decided to make rice.

I lived in Chickasaw at the time. Unlike the lovely open floor plan I enjoy now, and the one I’d become accustomed to in my previous, more studio-style apartment, this 1,200 square-foot house positioned the living room at the front and the kitchen at the back.

I had reached my sophomore year in my B.A. degree at the University of South Alabama and spent most days on the couch, reading, or at the desk, writing. My laptop’s keys were worn so that the letters on each tile need almost be memorized as I’d read a book, write an essay, read a book, write an essay, and so on.

On this particular day, I’d stumbled upon the incredibly cheap dish—chicken and rice. I had boiled chicken leg quarters, yes, they cost sixty-something cents a pound. I had acclimated myself to an easy chicken and dumpling recipe (that used biscuit dough for delicious, puffy dumplings) at that point, so I boiled and picked the chicken, added the cream of chicken soup and went through the motions of a poor, college student in the kitchen with some ease.

Then, I came to the rice. I held up the three-pound bag of Fred’s dollar store, white rice and searched the back for directions.

One cup of rice, two cups of water. That’s simple enough. Boil the water with a teaspoon of salt. Check. Stir in the rice, reduce heat to low, cover and simmer for 25 minutes. Alright, 25 minutes on the timer, and back to the couch to dig into Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

The minutes flew by as I fell deeper and deeper into the Congo. “The horror” trickled from flipping pages into the paintbrush of my imagination until a beeping from the kitchen pulled me back into my brightly-lit, beige-carpeted living room. I shook my head as I placed the book on the coffee table and pushed against the tan and black fibers of the couch to stand up, stretch, and mosey into the kitchen.

As I peered into the glass lid, I smiled with satisfaction as the hard grains had puffed up into a yummy, white sustenance.

I opened the lid, lifted my cheap, plastic serving spoon, and attempted to stir. ATTEMPTED to stir. The rice had burnt so that it affixed itself to the bottom of the pot. Black chunks began to acquaint themselves into my wholesome, white mixture.

No one told me that I should stir occasionally during my 25 minute simmer. The bag said nothing about removing the lid, stirring to loosen the grains from forming a Gorilla Glue consistency. Overkill? I think not.

Apparently, I was the only person in the world not born with this knowledge. No straight from the womb, rice aficionado, here.

Perhaps Fred’s was too cheap to add that extra two-word sentence. “Stir occasionally, ‘understood YOU.’” The bag writers must have charged by the letter.