Bassic-ly me

In 1991 I was just shy of 14 when I first started playing bass at Birchwood Junior High. I loved it so much that I sold my Nintendo and begged my parents to return the video game they had gotten me for Christmas so I could subsidize my first electric bass purchase. It was a cheap used bass, but I loved it. We didn't have a lot of money, and I couldn't afford an amplifier so my dad rewired one of those old grey "boomboxes" so I could plug my bass in and hear myself. The next fall I was at Colonel Gray in the concert band and intermediate jazz band and my life was full of music--amazing! Music was pretty much all I did. For Christmas that year, I knew my friend was getting a brand new electric bass, and though I was happy for him, I was pretty jealous. I didn't have the money for a new bass and my parents did their best but didn't have a lot of extra money lying around. Christmas morning I woke up really early, I couldn't sleep so I went downstairs an

While growing up, it seemed that at some point every December my house would be filled with the most amazing smell - my mom making her Acadian Meat Pie (Pâté). It was so good - heated up, cold, plain, with molasses, with ketchup, whatever... it was so so good.  She was so good at it that for a long time that's what she would give her sisters for Christmas each year - and it's all they wanted from her. I can remember many Christmases helping her with the preparation: cutting the meats, dicing the onions, etc, and then over the next few weeks sneaking into the fridge with a knife..sawing off another piece and drifting off to savory heaven.  Delicious. Fast forward to 2011 and my mom dies of cancer - the first Christmas afterwards was of course pretty difficult.  Seems selfish, seems petty but I sure did miss that meat pie...and um...yeah her too of course. :) Survived that first Christmas and then heading towards Christmas of 2012 I thought I would try to make her meat pie.  Went