I've had a nearly lifelong disdain for Crisco, and I can pinpoint for you the exact moment it started. Like most weird little kids, I had my own weird little obsessions. Chief among them, for a few years at least, was butter. I couldn't get enough of the stuff; I'd sneak bites of it when my mom was cooking, I'd eat butter flavored Crisco by the spoonful. It was a problem. A problem that became a full blown domestic and intestinal disaster when I was a little less than two-years-old.
My dad has always been a bit of a handyman, (this will be relevant, just wait) and back when Mike and I shared a room he decided to craft us a set of bunkbeds. Brother and I would spend hours in the garage fetching tools for him and trying to decipher the magics of carpentry. I had a pretty intense case of toddler narcolepsy back then, and I tended to run around like a maniac for a few hours and then BAM pass out wherever I'd wandered to. So it was no wonder that Dad assumed I was unconscious on the dog bed when the garage became eerily quiet. It was, after all, one of my favorite slumber stations.
But I wasn't asleep. I was plotting. And stacking. And climbing. Mom had just been to the grocery store a few days earlier and had bought a brand new tub of butter-flavored Crisco in preparation for a baking frenzy. She'd intentionally put it on a high shelf in the pantry because she knew me for the butter fiend I was. Unfortunately for her (and me, and Dad, and the carpet) I knew right. where. it was. And damned if I hadn't inherited enough engineering genes to figure out how to get to it. Oh, and get to it I did. Using a cunning technique of stacking cereal boxes and jars of peanut butter I managed to ascend the 6 or so feet between myself and the Holy Grail. A completely untainted tub of Crisco, and it was all mine.
The exact thought processes leading up to "The Crisco Incident," as Walker family history will forever know it, still remain a bit fuzzy in my memory, but goddamn did I exploit those precious few unsupervised minutes for all they were worth. By the time Dad realized I wasn't peacefully asleep in the garage and Mike had admitted he was too interested in a socket wrench to keep an eye on me, the damage was done. When they found me I had not only covered my entire self in Crisco, but I'd also managed to pack an impressive amount into my diaper and grind even more into every bit of carpet my tiny arms could reach. After some serious calculations, estimations, and tracking my intestinal misery for the next few days, it was determined that I'd also eaten between 1 and 1 1/2 cups of the stuff.
It took less than 10 minutes, but I swear to you the implications of those 10 minutes still haunt me.
