Column: An ode to spaghetti

Spaghetti is merely the shape of pasta. But growing up, spaghetti to me was an event.

Paired with garlic bread and simple arguments over who got a hold of the controller and remote. The red sauce and noodle twirled up on my fork, completely missing my mouth with an utter lack of grace yet full-hearted happiness.

But as the years went on I went from calling spaghetti to pasta specifying the sauce with pesto, alfredo, or carbonara. Choosing the pasta with the choices of tortellini, Linguini or Penne. Perhaps this is what Aladdin was referring to when talking about a whole new world.

Beyond that there are noodles, fitting in a similar category. Peanut noodles, jade noodles, soba noodles, that I eat with a napkin placed carefully on my lap. Now we have cold kinds of pasta for hot summer days and warm kinds of pasta for comfort and family gatherings.

But as we get older we refer to garlic bread and pasta as carbs and eat dinner in our rooms relying on our new friends, whether they know it or not, to order the fast food that we were too busy to get.

Now spaghetti is nothing but a distant memory and as beautiful as all of these fancy kinds of pasta get, I sometimes long for Spaghetti.