On Top of Spaghetti

On Top of Spaghetti – by Liam Sweeny.

Waste not, want not. Now this is a poignant story for me, what I am about to tell you, for last night was a suffrin’ night. My dear sweet mother made her famous “Old World” spaghetti sauce (we’re Irish, so maybe potatoes are involved, I don’t know) and it was my job to cook the spaghetti. My general plan of attack in such a thing is to put enough spaghetti in to fill the pot. And since she eats like a bird, I have to finish it off like, you guessed it, a pig. So I inevitably ate too much and, well, suffrin’.

So imagine my surprise when I find out that in the town of Old Bridge, New Jersey, someone (someones?) dumped 500 pounds of cooked pasta in the woods. We’re talking spaghetti and macaroni elbows, the ubiquitous taste of Italy for a damn platoon of heavy eaters.

No, they don’t know who did it, not yet, but that would make a hell of an explanation. Who in the bejeezus are you cooking for that you have 500 pounds left? The town has 66,000 people, which around here would be called a city, but that’s neither here nor there, and especially not at the bottom of a wooded gully lying around like a semolina berm.

I am a humble man, always willing to admit that my jokes may not indeed be the best, so I’ll toss you a few from the citizens of Old Bridge. From a New Jersey Reddit.

“We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary,” one person joked. “Lead suspect is a guy named Al Dente,” another commented.

I hope you all realize that, upon dumping all that pasta, there was, briefly, a “five-second rule” that nobody appeared to cash in on.

Jeez, that’s a lotta pasta. It would take me two whole days to polish that off.

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