IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND
We are in the kitchen of my house, just the two of us now that my dad and 4 sibs have finished their dinners and gone to watch television in the den. I am eight or nine or so-still young enough to be “forced” into obeying my parents, one way or another.
“Harvey!” “If you don’t finish your peas I’m going to set the “buzzer” on you, my mother threatened.
“Well, you might as well set it now cause I am not putting them in my mouth,” I declared.
And so she did. Set the buzzer. As she had so many times before. You would have thought by now that my mother would have noted that I was NEVER going to put any of her “canned” vegetables into my mouth. Besides the putrid smell of canned vegetables the real deal breaker was the texture. Mushy, smushy…yuk! That went for string beans, spinach, lima beans, (any beans really), as well as for peas. To tell you the truth, I don’t know if I even knew where vegetables came from until I was out of the house, on my own shopping and seeing fresh produce for the first time in my life. My mother was just about the worst cook I was ever to know. It may have had something to do with the martini’s she began imbibing at 4pm each day. Dinner was never the main event and it suffered a horrible neglect you could definitely count upon.
***
The buzzer was the timer on the stove. Of the five of us sibs there is no doubt that I held the record for buzzer settings and sittings. Again, you’d think after all my failures to finish my veggies in the allotted time, mom would have learned to skip the buzzer (since there was no way in hell I’d EVER eat em) and just send me to my room which is what happened when the stupid buzzer finally made it’s horrible “loser” sound.
“When will you ever learn Harvey” , my mom would enjoin.
“Apparently never mother. Or hadn’t you noticed..?”
Oh yes, I was a bit of a back talker, a rebel without a cause although I thought I had plenty of valid reasons for being so defiant of my mother’s authority. She was a pretty crazy lady. Slowly but surely as I grew older I grew also to despise her. Why was that? How about this for one good example?
One evening when dinner was over and I was once again awaiting my punishment; early to bed during the summer at least 2 hours before darkness arrived, mom ran out of patience with me. This time my refusal involved lima beans; soft, smushy, gushy pukey pale lima beans. They weren’t even green and still I hated em. My mother reentered the kitchen with my older brother the bully, Phil.
“Harvey” my mother started, I am going to prove to you once and for all that all this resistance to eating your vegetables is all in your mind.”
“I don’t think so mother”, I replied testily.
Philip, my older brother was enlisted to provide the muscle needed to force feed me. I watch as she piled mounds of lima beans onto a Kaiser roll.
“What are you doing”, I asked regarding this new approach to making me do something I didn’t wanna do.
“You’re not even going to taste them. Open your mouth,” she commanded!
“No way,” I replied.
“Philip-help me out here,” she said and Philip was more than happy to oblige her.
Philip pulled my arm up behind my back putting me in a hammer lock. He continued to apply more and more pressure while my mother held the threatening bean sandwich hovering at my mouth just waiting for an opening, literally. The pain got intolerable pretty quickly. I I acquiesced and grudgingly opened my mouth.
“There,” mother exclaimed! You see-i told you it was all in your mind”.
As soon as Philip released my arm I fled to the bathroom and puked my guts out. This gave my mother pause. I’m sure she had high expectations of what the outcome of her new strategy would be and it wasn’t me throwing up my entire dinner. I think the sound of my retching was a bit much for her too.
“Go to your room,” she yelled, pointing towards the second floor as she had so many times before.
` “Gladly,” I replied and the truth is I was always glad to get out of that kitchen and the whole scene that so often went down there.
I think what my mother never knew was that she helped encourage my reading skills. What was I going to do until dark but read a book. Books transported me out of and far away from my house, my mother and brother. Books took me away from my unhappiness. Not only did reading take me far away from my reality but it gave me the opportunity to envision myself differently. My favorite readings at the time were about animals; I got to become Lobo, the lone wolf. I could smell 200 times better than mere humans could. I could run faster and tirelessly. I could chase and catch a rabbit and put my powerful jaws around it and snap the life out of it with ease. Looking back, being an animal in my imagination was so much more preferable to being a powerless child in a house that rarely made sense to me. I heard the Call of the Wild, I reveled in the power and speed of the wolf. I devoured stories like I devoured prey in the books I read. I was wild. I was free.
***
