In “Panacea,” Allison describes the importance of gravy to her. She starts off her writing by using the five senses to show what gravy is like. Then, she uses a flashback to show how her mother made gravy and how it was the most important thing to be served at dinner. Allison says, “It is anticipation, the last thing prepared before the meal comes to the table, the bowl in Mama’s hand closing the day out peacefully, no matter what came before” (1). After that, she moved to present tense to describe how her son, Wolf, doesn’t like gravy. She said that he didn’t like it because he is the son of “the author of a best-selling novel” so he never got told what he had to eat because he was never poor (2). She was not going to settle for her
