My Uncle Thomas was in Asheville the first week that I moved there to live with Valeria in 2011. It was good to see him, I hadn’t seen him in a very long time, and he cooked dinner for us every night that he stayed with us. It was amazing food too, southern staples that Valeria has grown to love and feel guilty for gorging herself on, like his bacon and ranch macaroni and cheese, ham hocks and collard greens, and the most mouth watering, buttery and sweet cornbread you will ever put in your mouth. Valeria doesn’t like macaroni, we had an entire conversation once about how she hated food that relied solely on the glory of cheese to make it good, but she doesn’t consider my uncle’s macaroni to be a conventional American macaroni dish.
“It’s definitely French,” she explained, her knowledge of cooking honed by years spent with her father in the kitchen. “He puts crust on top and his cheese sauce is a bechamel with nutmeg, that’s French, and Martha Stewart.” I love when my wife pronounces words with R’s because you can tell that she is resisting the urge to roll them and she always over accentuates. And she is spot on about my uncle’s macaroni.
I truly enjoy talking about food and when I realized that Valeria loved food as much as I do, I knew that we were meant to be together. My relationship with Valeria is unlike any other that I’ve had because even though we don’t agree on everything, we have an opinion about all of the same things, which means that we have similar interests. She loves my uncle Thomas just as much as I do so the week with him in the house with us was a great time.
Our roles reversed that week; instead of me asking my uncle a thousand questions about the places he’d been and the people he’d met, he asked Valeria and I about our lives and our aspirations. Valeria and I had only been together for four months then, and maybe things were moving fast, but when something feels right you have to be brave enough to go after it — and as much as I look up to my uncle as a role model, there were aspects of his life that I was determined would be different in mine, namely the fact that he lives alone into his forties. If not for the week with my uncle at our place in Asheville, maybe Valeria and I would have had sex for days and skipped all of the meaning conversation, but with my uncle there we spent a lot of time getting to know one another better. Its funny that it was also the week that I gave Valeria the nickname Superman Lover. Not Superwoman, because it’s too many syllables, Valeria is my Superman.
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