Thomas Koskovich reflects on how a simple baked potato became a profound reminder of gratitude and mindfulness in prison, revealing the beauty in life’s smallest moments.
I sat down one night to eat a plain baked potato with just a little bit of salt on it. This turned out to be a moment that changed my life. It shifted my mental state irrevocably and gave me a life-altering revelation! Okay, so maybe I’m being a little dramatic and hyperbolic, but I did enjoy that potato so thoroughly that it made me think about those little things in life that become much more meaningful when you are incarcerated, with two life sentences and no real prospect of ever going home. In that moment, I felt true gratitude.
Why Prison Food Tests Gratitude
It’s no secret. Everyone knows that prison food sucks! Most often, it’s something that is precooked and packaged somewhere else, then reheated when it gets here and is served to us. Or it will be some over-processed, off-brand cold cuts that I’ve never heard of before, like turkey ham or spiced turkey slices or chicken bologna. And let’s not forget the instant stuff: grits, farina, potato flakes, and something called “egg product”—a liquid that comes in a milk carton and cooks up into a chewy egg block that always turns green for some strange reason. Once in a while, some silver-tongued, incarcerated individual will convince the civilian supervisors to try something creative like putting pieces of pineapple in the “chicken-a-la-king,” where it absolutely, undeniably does not belong! Even so, I try to remind myself of gratitude for whatever I have.
The Rare Gift of a Perfect Potato
So how does the humble baked potato become such a treat? The potato is such simple and plain fare, a staple in most cultures, that you would think it would be the easiest thing in the world to prepare. But here, they usually have to cook way too many potatoes in not nearly enough time. And they’re using convection (air-heated) ovens, so the potatoes almost always come out undercooked. And if you have ever bitten into a raw potato, you can empathize with the utter despair of expecting some tasty morsel, but ending up with a mouthful of something that is at the same time somehow wet and chalky. It has a texture that’s crisp like an apple but also rubbery like an unripened eggplant. So when you finally get a potato that’s baked all the way through, it’s like manna! A small moment of gratitude in a world of scarcity.
Creating Comfort, Cultivating Gratitude
I got that potato with my lunch and, as is my normal, I stuck my plastic fork into it to see how much I’d be able to eat before I hit that raw, starchy core that I would have to toss out. But my fork sank all the way through! I immediately wrapped it in a napkin and put it in my plastic Tupperware-like bowl to bring back to my cell.
Since we have no way to cook anything in the cell (no microwaves, no hot pots, no immersion coil stingers), we have to get creative. That evening, I unwrapped my potato and put it into a lidded bowl by itself. I put that bowl on top of a larger lidded bowl that I had filled with hot water from a hot water dispenser on the wing. I wrapped a thermal shirt around them and then wrapped that with an old sweatshirt. I placed this on the back corner of my bunk and laid my blanket on top of it. I let it sit like that for about an hour.
Around 8:00 p.m. (the perfect time for an evening snack!) I unwrapped that bundled mass and opened the bowl that had my potato in it. A tiny bit of steam wafted up out of the bowl (most likely because it was a chilly, early January night, but I like to believe that it was because my potato was perfectly cooked). The potato was so well done that it broke into chunks when I tried to cut it into thick slices with a plastic butter knife. I had no butter or sour cream, but I sprinkled a little bit of salt over the top of it for flavor.
As I savored each bite, I thought of how significant such a small luxury could become under the right circumstances. Everything else had melted away; the noise, the time, the stress had all disappeared. The cacophony of raucous voices outside my cell could not breach the doorway. I was no longer in prison; I was only in the moment. It was all so perfectly Zen. That was pure gratitude.
A Lesson in Gratitude and Presence
I began to see that life is truly about the little moments. When you’re young, every time you step outside of your home is a potential adventure filled with endless possibilities. Now it has become drudgery. We have to go to work, we have to go to the supermarket, we have to go somewhere, we have to do something. Everything has to have a goal, an endpoint. It’s no longer about the journey or the exploration. What happened to those days when everything was like an open-world RPG game where the goal was to just explore, try something new, do something differently? You could follow an ant down the sidewalk just to see where it came from or where it’s going. Now we just step on the ant and keep on moving—and we probably don’t even realize we stepped on the ant!
I guess what I’m trying to say is, whether you’re a person trying to survive in prison or someone trying to make it in the free world, you shouldn’t neglect the small things. Pay attention to the world around you, enjoy the moments. Don’t let life just pass you by. There may come a time when you are unable to enjoy those little things. So take advantage of the time you have and don’t take it for granted. You may find yourself in a position where the highlight of your life is a well-cooked potato with just a little bit of salt on it—and in that moment, you’ll know true gratitude.
Enjoy this story? Check out The Evolution of a Criminal Life
