This is something I wrote on 6 May 1980 while living in West Hollywood. It is part of a collection called "Letters from Uncle Bear" in which I wrote miscellaneous items for my nieces, nephews, and godchildren, in hopes that some day they would have an idea who I was.
Image courtesy of Goodness DirectFor everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven.
--Ecclesiastes 3.1
When I was in elementary school I dreaded a certain day of the week (Thursday?). We were permitted to skip one item each day at lunch. If there was one particular taste treat that caused your gorge to rise, you could avoid it altogether. If there were two such dishes served on the same day, you had to consume one of them. The lunch monitors who enforced this undoubtedly occupy their own special circle of the Inferno.
The choice between two noxious dishes might approach a crisis level as you teetered between Scylla and Charybdis, sparing yourself canned spinach only to face an okra soufflé. [OK, I made that last one up.] My cross to bear in those tender days was was the weekly decision between prunes and cottage cheese.
Some of you may ask, "What is wrong with that?" but I trust you would know better than to pose such a question to a seven-year-old boy. I hated them, that's all. Sure, I drank prune juice every day for years, but prunes themselves--yeccch! And it was almost two decades later that I overcame the urge to vomit whenever cottage cheese approached my lips or dwelt in my imagination.
I thought of all this today as I lunched, by my free choice and preference, on cottage cheese and pineapple, accompanied by dried apricots and prunes. I am gradually learning not to say "never."
A time to cast away stones,
and a time to gather stones together.
--Ecclesiastes 3.5a
Such the original essay. To add further context, the prune juice was to wash down cod liver oil. Because I was a very large boy with rapidly growing bones, my pediatrician (Dr. Nathalie Wolfe of blessed memory) insisted that I get this supplement for Vitamin D. I have adjusted fine to prunes but am still very leery of fish. A friend who also had cod liver oil each morning grew up to love fish, and the "fishier" the better. Life is interesting, no?
1 comment:
A great story. As a child, I loved cottage cheese, until the Field Trip to the Dairy. Now, there are not many cows on Okinawa, and the milk we drank was called "reconstituted," which meant it was powdered milk with water and soy protein added at the so-called dairy (I guess it was really a milk factory). However, we third graders toured the plant and eveything was fine until we entered an area where the cottage cheese was manufactured. There were huge tubs of cottage cheese, and, for some reason, the sight of these huge tubs of cottage cheese made me ill, and to this day I can't eat cottage cheese, with or without pineapple pieces.
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