Family, Yamily

I don't like yams. Never did. To my way of thinking, if you have to cover something with marshmallows to get people to ooh and aah over them once a year, something other than the pork isn't kosher. But come Thanksgiving, you gotta drag out those orange mutants, daub brown sugar on them and choke 'em down.

My dad could cook them just right -- boil them till the skin sorta slid off, then dress 'em up with brown sugar uand Kraft mini-mallows and slap them on the table. Thanksgiving of 1994, he gave me his yam secrets over the phone from Kentucky.

"Can't cook yams? What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked, before 10 minutes of tater talk. I boiled those babies and served them to my mother-in-law, a yam-snarfer from way back. That night, my dad called me in Arizona and said, "We do, too," when I said, "I love you." He asked about the yams. I told him I still hated those suckers.

A week before Christmas that year, he passed away. God, my daddy would never have died just before a holiday if he could have helped it. What the hell do I do when the brown sugar burns? Why the hell did I cry as I searched three stores for mini-marshmallows? Was my father a star in the sky above the interstate in Phoenix that night, shining on my Tercel and howling over my kitchen incompetence? Daddy, yams, racks full of big, jet-puffed pillows -- so many questions. Never, it turned out, enough time to ask all of them.