The Right Kind of Pickle

People argue about the strangest things.

For the last few months, my husband, daughter, and I have been living with my in-laws as we renovate and sell our home of 15 years and move to a new state – New Jersey, the state my in-laws live in – to buy a new home.

The arrangement has been mostly peaceful and only occasionally hitting upon moments of friction when loud exclamations radiate throughout the entire house alerting everyone to trouble at hand.

People need other people.

Although we hear about the lone survivalist “living for years on their own,” humans are for the most part designed to live around other humans. We have evolved, with knowledge buried deep at a DNA-level, that to not be a part of a tribe puts us at risk. We were never the animals with the sharpest teeth or the longest claws. We didn’t dominate with our size or outrun our predators with great speed. Instead, we learned to coordinate and collaborate.

United we stand, divided we become a panther snack.

And so we are drawn to each other. Even introverted humans tend to find ways to come together. We may not want to actually have to answer the phone, but we still find book clubs, Discord groups, and engage in lengthy exchanges about replacements with our Instacart shoppers so that we feel we have made some kind of human connection that could potentially save us from peril.

One is reminded of the story in the news a while back of the man who ordered from the same Domino’s pizza every day for years until one day he didn’t. The employees at the franchise became so concerned that they called the local police and ended up saving the man’s life. He had suffered from some kind of severe health issue and was immobilized without food or water for three days on the floor of his house. His regular connection with others – through a pizza being delivered at a regular pattern every day – was recognized by other humans who came to his aid when the pattern was broken.

We are creatures of habit…and community.

I say all of this to bring us back to the arguing.

If we are designed to survive by working with one another, then why are we so bad at getting along sometimes?

I was reading about the coup in Myanmar/Burma last night and thinking about the power struggles we humans get into regularly. The Earth’s face is pockmarked with the blemishes of wars between humans in the past and open wounds from the fighting of the present.

Just last month, a large riotous group of Americans attacked other Americans, breaking into the U.S. Capitol building. It turns out being united is complicated.

The Pickle War

And so we shouldn’t be surprised that a war broke out in my in-laws’ house, the house my family is presently staying in, over air-frying pickles.

[*It should be noted that there was already an undercurrent of hostility hanging in the air when the following exchange went down. It should also be noted, in the interest of not being banned from the house, that my in-laws are gracious, fun, and loving people who also happen to argue in loud, New Jersey accents.]

“Do you need to dip them in milk first?” my father-in-law, Brian Sr., asked.

“Why would you dip pickles in MILK?!?” my mother-in-law responded loudly, sounding pained.

“To make a BATTER!” he yelled louder. “You use milk sometimes to make a BATTER! I’m not stupid, y’know? GEEZ!!”

“The pickles are already WET, BRIAN!” she hissed. “They are already WET! Why would you need MILK?!”

This time her incredulous, deafening words were punctuated by purposeful slams of multiple kitchen cabinets.

“I don’t KNOW, JEANNE!” My father-in-law shouted back. “Why don’t you check the recipe book?!”

My father-in-law then began muttering things, under his breath, but loud enough for everyone to hear. If their argument was a song, the bass line became a string of syncopated lines like, “She always blames me for stuff…” and “Man, you see how she is?”

“I don’t HAVE a recipe book for FRIED PICKLES, BRIAN!”

At this point, my father-in-law wandered into the kitchen to help assemble the fried pickles and began criticizing, well, everything.

[grumble, grumble, grumble] “Well, is this even the right kind of BREADING? Is this the stuff we bought for the air fryer? Is this the…”

“I DON’T KNOW, BRIAN!”

Then…a quick return to the batter question.

“Do we need to put something on the pickles, first?”

Anguished cries rang out from my mother-in-law.

“Did you even GET the RIGHT KIND OF PICKLES?!” she roared back.

At this point, my husband who was reading articles over on his iPad spoke up.

“Hang on, hang on! I’m the one that got the pickles out, so if there is something wrong with them, then it’s my fault. I didn’t know there was a right kind of pickle!“

There was a slight pause in the yelling, but not in the kitchen activity. Then an explosion!

“DON’T LEAVE THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR OPEN, JEANNE!”

…

…

…And really, that is why we all need help sometimes with facilitating complicated matters.

Because no matter how kind, intelligent, or important to one’s personal survival another human – or group of humans – happens to be, we can all easily find ourselves wishing death on each other over the right kind of pickle.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this story, it is this.

Take the time to learn how to better communicate with others during times of high stress and anxiety. If at the end of the day, you are able to eat together at the same table without suffering any casualties, you will know that you’ve succeeded. And you don’t need milk to batter pickles fried in an air fryer.

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Recipe for Breaded Pickles in an Air Fryer

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