The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

On the loading dock of my work, a truck driver named Tater takes a seat in the shade and fans his sweat soaked crotch with a celebrity gossip magazine. Under the broiling summer sun, the tubby trucker is quickly roasted like a luau pig; his fleshy face turns heart-attack red and his sleeveless t-shirt stinks to high heaven. As I unload pallets of topsoil off his truck with a forklift, we chit-chat and have a rather high-brow discussion about how awesome barbeque

We are children, and then we work. If we’re fortunate, at any rate, we’re allowed to experience our childhood as children, and able, when the time comes to make our way in the world, to find work. Meaningful work, if we’re truly fortunate.

The truth, though, is that the introductory icebreaker for youngsters—“How old are you?”—is too quickly replaced by “What do you do?”

I’ve been thinking about spaghetti sauce a lot lately. I grew up in a very busy household with parents who didn’t have a lot of time to cook, so the sauce on our noodles was always of the canned variety. Not knowing the different between canned and fresh, we kids slurped it right up—the soggy vegetables, the sugared tomato sauce. It wasn’t until I went to college and started cooking for myself that I discovered how good fresh, homemade spaghetti sauce can be.