Food! Glorious Food!

     Gen and I were talking last night about dinner, and whether or not her kids were going to eat or not. It seems like all of her kids have different quirks when it comes to food, but none of them are normal eaters. Neither is my own son. She is actually worried that her oldest might be malnourished in some way. Like berri-berri or scurvy. But after what we were put through in the Gulag, I mean our childhood, she just can’t bring herself to force him to eat certain foods just because she knows they are good for him. After all, our mother was convinced the foods she forced us to eat were good for us. Wasn’t she just trying to be a good mother?

     Let’s take a trip back in the time machine. I will pick a year. Lets call it 1977. Some guy has come into our house and is sitting at the round wooden table in our kitchen. This is nothing unusual. Our house had a revolving cast of characters coming in and out of it. Some we knew quite well, others were, well, strangers. I was eight years old and knew how to lie and cheat and steal, and I was learning how to roll a mean joint, but I had never been told a thing about stranger danger. (Not to ruin the ending of this story for anyone, but there is no funny business or hanky-panky in this one. Just forced feedings. I swear. So relax) This guy is at the kitchen table, and my mom is serving him coffee, and he is telling us how his car has a flat tire, and he didn’t have a spare to fix it, and could he borrow a phone to call a tow truck. Pretty normal stuff, right?

    We did live right in the center of a large city,  things like this happened from time to time. Our family knew all about tire problems. Our car was constantly having a major tire problem in our neighborhood. We would go out in the morning and all the tires would be missing, the car up on metal milk crates. Just a little local flavor.

     Flat tire guy is telling my mom stories, and she is telling a few herself. I don’t remember much of that. You know, boring adult talk, blah blah blah… Then he starts talking about this group he is involved with that practices fighting in armor with swords and spears and bows and arrows. That got my attention. Sounded pretty cool to an eight-year-old boy who had owned a few wooden swords in his day. He talked about this group he belonged to that dressed up like medieval knights and trained to fight like them. I was thrilled. Why hadn’t I ever thought of that? Tire guy finally got a tow truck to show up after a few calls and a few cups of coffee. He took off into the night, another stranger just passing through. But my sweet mother, bless her heart, had gotten his phone number, and an invite for me and Jenny to go and watch his group of crazed barbarians perform their ancient rituals of sweat and steel. Score one for the home team!

     To say that I was excited about this prospect is a complete understatement. I was in a frenzy. How in the world could there possibly be anything as cool as this group in the whole wide world. How could I be lucky enough to meet someone that belonged to a group like this, and was actually going to take me to witness it myself. Fuck Disney or the Grand Canyon. I was going to my first SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) weapons practice at eight years old! Finally, the appointed day arrived. I was on the edge of my seat. Ramped up all day long. Ready to roll. Practically peeing in my pants in anticipation. Then, tragedy struck. I know your thinking, oh, no. That poor little eight-year-old Frank. He was so excited. What could possibly happen to ruin this for him? That’s right, folks, the worst thing that could happen, inevitably occurred. The one thing standing between me and a few hours of blissful childhood heaven. It was….. dinner time!!! AAAGGGHHHH!!!!! (Does this seem a bit over the top to some of you? It might. To my sisters and to me? We understand in the way that survivors understand. These little slices of hell are seared forever into our brains. We cannot forget. What? You were never terrified to sit down and eat dinner in your family? Lucky you.)

     In all fairness to my mom, she tried to cook healthy and tasty meals for our family. She quite often failed miserably on the taste side of things, but she did make the effort. Unfortunately for me, that night happened to be mystery soup night. I can’t tell you what it started out as. Or what all the other healthy ingredients were. I can only tell you what was on the bottom of my bowl when I had finished. A dreaded group of Lima Beans was staring back up at me uneaten. There are certain foods we all have that we can’t stand. Sometimes it is the taste, sometimes the way it looks, or the texture, or just the idea of the food itself can make you sick. I have always hated beans myself.

     When I was a kid, I hated them all. Like anything else in our lives, there were some I hated more than others. Black beans and navy beans were not nearly as bad as kidney beans, for example. Garbonzo beans were the worst. Just looking at them would remind me of the awful feeling of them in my mouth, and I would start to retch. To this day it completely squicks me out to even think about them. For me it was the texture of the beans that I couldn’t stand. Something about the dry, grainy feel of the beans in my mouth completely revolted me at that age. Our taste buds mellow and change over time, but at eight years old beans were the great Satan to me.

     The flat tire medieval sword guy shows up just as we are finishing dinner. He was ready to take us off to his super duper cool weapons practice session. I jump from the table to go, but a disapproving look from my mother freezes me in my tracks. She is looking down over my shoulder into the mostly empty bowl of whatever soup and frowning. “You need to finish all of your dinner before you go” she says, the permafrost drooping frown returning to her face, hardening there. Now let me clue you in on a little secret here, fearless readers. My mom knew that I detested Lima Beans. I was eight years old, and was never a picky eater. It wasn’t like I never ate my greens. I ate just about everything you put in front of me. My Uncle Joe used to call me the human garbage can, and for good reason. I actually ate food out of trash cans at that age. It wasn’t like I hadn’t choked down the rest of the slop she served up that night. I was trapped. There was no mercy in those pitiless eyes. She sat me back down in front of the Lima Beans. I will never forget staring into that bowl with that pre-vomit watery feeling creeping up in my mouth, tears beginning to well up in my eyes, and tire guy standing there looking at his watch wondering just what the holdup was.

    I know some of you are thinking come on Frank, it was only seven or eight Lima Beans, for Christ’s sake. How bad could it be? Believe me when I tell you, I would have rather eaten eight goat turds than choke down those Lima Beans. I had no idea what goat turds tasted like, but those beans? I had eaten those before. Ugghhh. Time was running out. Flat tire guy had people to beat up with blunt weapons, and that wasn’t going to wait forever. I finally dug into the beans, my mother literally standing over me like some grim jailer, making sure I choked down every last one. Nothing was ever free in my relationship with my mother. She always made me pay the hardest price for anything good in my life.

     Finally, having satisfied whatever sicko fantasy of good parenting had been wafting through her head that day, I was free to go with flat tire guy and Jenny to watch the weapons class. The funny thing about so many parts of my childhood, I cannot for the life of me remember one thing about the practice we went to. Bowl of nasty lima beans: permanently burned into my cortex. Awesome medieval sword practice with a bunch of high powered super geeks: no memory whatsoever. The good things constantly faded out of my memory. Is there somewhere I can get a refund for this shit? Seriously.

     Did I mention that my mom sent eight year old me and seven year old Jenny of with flat tire guy by ourselves? For all of you parents out there, I ask you, would you send your young precious children off for hours with some guy you met once? Remember, we didn’t meet this guy at church or a school function. He wasn’t even a good friend of a good friend of our family. Nope. He was just random guy. Doesn’t sound bad enough? I was not allowed to go back to super cool medieval weapons practice. I was told that I kept trying to get out onto the fighting field myself. Go figure. My sister had behaved admirably, and was allowed to go back again by herself with tire guy a few times. As I said at the beginning of this montage, flat tire guy was completely cool. He didn’t try anything out of the ordinary. But handing your seven year old daughter over to a complete stranger over and over again. Really mom?

This entry was posted on 2. March 2009 at 16:44 and is filed under Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.