The 18¢ dinner

The boys start Vacation Bible School tonight, and Lea is coordinating snacks (in addition to doing a fantastic job with decorations all week!). So I have dinnertime to myself tonight. I can have anything I want, and I’m having a thoroughly ridiculous craving. I might have ramen for dinner.

It’s been 14 years or so since I ate ramen. When I moved out of my father’s house, I was making a little more than $12,000 a year at a bookstore. To say that the grocery budget tended toward the simple is an understatement. I was a lot skinnier then.

Mind, I never pretend that I truly struggled. Thankfully I never had to ask for money, but if I had ever been in imminent danger of being hungry or cold, Dad would have helped me. Plus, I still found the money for cigarettes (yeah, yeah), though that wasn’t nearly as expensive as it is now.

Nevertheless, after rent and keeping the heat on, I’d often find myself with $10 or so to eat on for a week. It was a slam-dunk to populate three dinner slots with ramen, for a grand total of 54¢. (Store brand ramen was 6/$1). If I was feeling rich, I’d split a can of mushroom pieces and stems between them, pushing the cost of three dinners to $1.49.

My income went up substantially when I started selling cars, and I was able to move up the food chain (though I stayed skinny; hustling around a car lot 60 hours a week will do that). It took some time to click over in my head, though. Initially, instead of upgrading my meal selection, I upgraded the add-ins. Creature of habit, blah blah blah. I was scooping a can of cocktail shrimp into the pot of ramen one night when the absurdity of such an act occurred to me. Heh.

So, as my success increased, ramen fell off my radar. But I’m stopping by Publix to get dinner on the way back from dropping the boys off tonight. If I were standing there right now, it would be ramen. Nostalgia? Salt craving? Who knows? I’ll have to see if the feeling is there in an hour and a half.

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