Answers for Siouxz: Liar, Liar

I'm feeling a little overwhelmed by all the questions from last week's post, but in an effort to be a good little blogger, I'm just going to plow through and start answering them.  Starting with the first comment.  Ready?  Set?  Here we go!

Siouxz asked:

I would like to know some of your favorite staple recipes. Something you go to often because you make it well, it's fairly easy and your kiddos like it. - I tried the pork chop, onion and apple recipe you blogged about not too long ago and we love it!
And I'm very curious to know the biggest lie you ever told your parents!

Okay, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to answer the last question first, and then Siouxz, I'll be posting my favorite staple recipes over the next several days.  So just stay tuned, alright?

Now, I'm going to tell you a secret. 

I wasn't the most straight-laced teenager.  I had a very goody-goody appearance, I'll admit, but I tried really hard to be rebellious.

Overall, I wasn't bad, but I definitely pushed the limits, and Mom and Dad?  If you're reading (sigh), please strike what you're about to hear from the record, okay?  If you ask me about this in person, I'll promptly turn twelve shades of red and deny every word of what I'm about to write.  Deny, deny, deny.

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Remember my first car?  The super-fast, super-powerful Mustang 5.0?

It sped home at 85 miles-per-hour very nicely one humid summer night when I was almost 17.  I was a few dozen minutes past my curfew, and nervous.  Though I'd promised my parents I was at a friend's house just across town, I had actually been at a party just across a few highways.  This party included all the basics: loud music, sneaky teenagers, bottled Zima, and the guy I was dating.  The boundaries of our relationship were quite undefined, and looking back, I'm very content to say that he wasn't ever a 'boyfriend'.  Just a short-lived blip on the radar of people I involved myself with. 

But back to the party -- it was mostly unmemorable.  I stayed for as long as I thought I could get away with, and finally left when I became frustrated that people were just sitting around drinking.  Boring.  Especially since I hadn't had anything to drink, myself.  I got in my red Mustang, put my foot on the gas pedal, and headed for home.  One highway went by quickly enough.  The second highway, though, became a bit trickier.  I wasn't exactly sure of my whereabouts, so I was already on edge.  (Good reason to take your foot off the gas pedal, huh?  But, nope: color me adolescent.)

When the pale, young deer leaped across the road in front of me, every muscle in my body tensed for impact.  I squeezed my eyes shut so tightly that I never saw the deer fly off the hood of my car.  Somehow, I gathered my wits about me long enough to pull over to the highway's shoulder and peer into my rear view mirror.  The road was deserted and dark.  I couldn't see if there was anything huddled on the ground back there, but since I'd been going so fast, I was sure it would have been too far back anyway.  I was shaking so violently that driving the rest of the way home was certainly not the smartest thing to do, but -- I was already past curfew, already in the middle of a lie about my night's events. 

I didn't get out of the car to see the damage: I just wanted to go home.

Once before, I'd been in a car that had hit a deer, and it had left me shaken.  This time, that shaken part of me morphed into a terrified part.  (For years afterward, I had nightmares about deer -- such innocent creatures!  Ha.  Devious beasts.  Frightening martyrs.  Bah!)  I sobbed for the rest of my drive, crawling along at a snail's pace until I reached my driveway.

My brother was awake when I came home -- my parents, too.  I couldn't have stopped bawling if I'd tried.  Everyone knew something was wrong, least of which was how I came to be so late on my curfew.  I blubbered something about hitting a deer on a street very close to my house, and ended up being comforted by my dad amid my tearful babbling.  (Oh, the shame.)  My poor brother even hopped in his truck to go see if the deer was still there, poking around in ditches and coming up empty.  (On the plus side, I started half-believing that the deer didn't actually die, but merely wandered off, dazed and grumpy.)

The front quarter panel of my awesome, too-tough car was beyond repair: fur was embedded in the shiny red paint; metal was peeled away from metal; the headlight was shattered and dangling. 

Also beyond repair was my no-good, lying soul.  I want to promise that I cleaned up my party-sneaking act after that, and I did for a time -- I was too nervous to be so brash again.  But it took a few more years before I grew up enough to understand that being a goody-goody wasn't entirely bad.

So here I am, Siouxz.  A whole-hearted good-girl.  At last.

(Except, not quite good enough to NOT deny this to my parents.  I'm just...ah...really creative, Mom.  I totally made this up to make my teen-years seem more exciting.  Yeah.  That's it...)