Why a 2 for 1 pasta night means the world to me

I say that liberally. It doesn’t mean the world, but for this past Tuesday evening, it took up quite a large portion of it (and this isn’t just because I had a large portion of pasta…). 

When I was little, a Restaurant in my hometown would do 2 for 1 pasta nights on Tuesdays. Almost religiously my mum would take my brother and I there every Tuesday. It was a cheap feed, the service was simple but friendly and I could order the Napolitana without having a 6 year old version of a panic attack, wondering if my food would be palatable (it so was).

We’d go against mum’s wishes and wear white shirts whilst slurping up red tomato sauce (the Napisan supply got a workout that year), and I’d stick my head under the table in protest when mum’s order of Spaghetti Marinara arrived, baby octopus and all. 

Twenty years have past, and I have not been to that restaurant in 8 years, but we know that Phil will still be there greeting his guests, sashaying casually through the tables and talking about his father’s recipe, and giving us a plate that runneth over with carbs and for mum, carbonara. 

Perhaps why it means the world for me is that right now it is something mum and I could do for ourselves that didn’t cost our world. Mum is fighting for her life with metastatic cancer and we face chemotherapy again this friday, the day before I venture into my 27th year of life. The cancer not only eats away at my mother’s body - it eats away at peace, at joy, at balance, at money, at safety. It eats away at what it can of our lives here on earth. So for a cheeky $25 the lot, 2 for 1 pasta became a gift from God. A familiar place, a no-stress menu and a kind word from Phil - we were blessed. God was restoring a sense of normality to us. He was simply saying “I’ve got the final say in your life and in today.”

And the blessings keep flowing because we had leftovers for lunch yesterday. God is good.