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Retirement Talk for Boomers, Seniors, and Retirees

Frog Spit

Jackie Spinks

                                                          Chapter Ten

“Eat you oatmeal,” Mama ordered.

“I can’t.  I hate it.”  Our never -ending battle.

“It’s good for you. Now eat it!”

“No.”

“Look at your Daddy.  See how much he likes his mush.  Yum!  Yum!”

            “He like it.  I don’t.”

            “Don’t you want to grow up to be big and strong like Daddy?”

            “No I’m a girl.  I don’t have to be big and strong.”

            “Everybody wants to be big and strong.”

            I was silent.  If I had to pay the price of being big and strong by eating mush, I guess I’d have to remain little and weak.

            It’s good.  See Mama love it,” and Mama took a bite.

            I frowned.  I knew a flimflam when I saw one.  She didn’t seem to enjoy it all that much.  I was five and had spent five years checking out her facial moods and I could tell.

            “You eat it then,” I mumbled under my breath.

            “I heard that, now don’t get smart with me, young lady.  Eat you mush!”

            “I don’t want it.  I can’t eat it.”

            “You have to have some breakfast.  Just one teensy bite,” Mama held the spoon to my reluctant, clenched teeth.  “If you take a bite, you can have some toast.”

            I opened my mouth a smidgen and Mama got a spoonful of oatmeal in and I swallowed.  “Another bite.”

            Where was that toast?  I took another bite, swallowed and vomited it all up along with everything else in my stomach, and the vomit went all over Mama.  Mama said something in Swedish and I repeated it back.

            “Speak English,” She yelled at me.  “And you’re going to sit there until you eat your mush.  Even the term, “Mush revolted me.”  I had visions of sitting there until I was an old woman.

            “I don’t care,” I lounged back, reconciled to spending my life in that high chair.

            I sat mute for a long time.  At one time I’d become terribly sick after eating mush, and whether it was the mush that did it, some virus or some other unknown cause, I’ve hated mush with the same intensity a religious pro-lifer hates a pro-choicer, or a Tea Partier hates taxes, ever since.  And nothing but an intravenous injection would get it in me.

            “Okay, “Mama said, “Than you can eat it cold for lunch.  How’d you like that?”

Oh, dear, it looked like I was going to have to choose starvation. 

            “Can you imagine all the little starving kids in India who’d love your mush?” Mama said.  “That’s what’s the matter with you kids, nowadays.  You’re too darned spoiled.  A bunch of spoiled brats who think they have the world coming to them. 

            I thought of offering to switch places with one of those starving kids in India, but figured that would set Mama off in a Swedish swear word tizzy, again

            “Isn’t that right, Daddy?”  She turned to Daddy for confirmation.

            “Well, I’ve got to be off.  Late for work.’
            “That’s right!  Run!” And to me, “Oh, get out of my sight!  Go outside and play.”

            Reprieved for another day, I climbed down from the high chair I had to sit in, where I ate Later my brother would be big enough to take over and I’d matriculate to a wooden upended orange crate, with the dictionary on it to give me height,  and gobble down whatever was put before me, except mush, while my brother pounded the high chair with his spoon.

            It was a daily battle—that battle of the oatmeal mush.

            Defeated, Mama would be mad.  “You are the most stubborn kid that ever lived.  I don’t know what I ever did to deserve such an ornery kid?”

            “Not that I wasn’t hungry.  I was always hungry.  I’d eat anything that didn’t move, with that one exception, which we had a battle over every morning because (1) Daddy came from Scotland and he said that was about all they ate over there, and hence, he looked forward to eating his mush every morning and (2) it was cheap (most important reason)  and (3) Mama couldn’t understand my aversion to it although she knew I’d gotten sick after eating it.  She was determined to find some way to break me down, especially after the doctor said I was malnourished. 

            “It’s good.  See, it has brown sugar, raisins and cream on it.  It won’t make you sick now,” Mama said.

            “Yes, it will.  I don’t want it.”

            “If you’d take a bite, you’d see, you’d like it.”
            I hesitantly took a bite and threw up again.

            At that, Mama became furious, believing I did it on purpose.  And so this went on every morning.

            Late, with the exception of Daddy, who was part Irish, which probably explained the laughter in him, I’ read Scots were a dour bunch and decided it had to be that constant diet of oatmeal mush that made him so cheerful.  So I wanted to like it.

            It wasn’t the oatmeal I hated, as I’d eat oatmeal cookies, oatmeal apple crisp, oatmeal bread, anything with oatmeal in it, other than oatmeal mush.  I just couldn’t take that gray glue?

            Food loomed large in my thoughts during the Depression, as it did for everyone, else, with that one exception.  I’d even eat grass.  Many summer afternoons were spent lying on the lawn pulling out the grass and eating the tender roots, until someone told me they were poison.  Brother and I were always hungry, but there was seldom anything much to eat.

            “Mama, can Brother and me have a cookie?” And I knew the answer would be “No.”

            And as Granny Brita made excuse as to why Selma couldn’t have bread, many years ago in Sweden, Mama gave the same excuse, “Not between meals.  Do you want to spoil your appetite?”

            “It won’t spoil our appetites.”

            Mama knew we’d eat like pigs at dinnertime, no matter what was served.  We’d have liked even a piece of bread, but that was meant for lunch the next day, because if Mama had any extra bread, she’d give us a slice between meals.  Mama had to pretend even to Brother and me, we weren’t as poor as we were.

            The next day we’d have lunch of what Mama called, “Milk toast.”

            This was bread crusts soaked in milk.  Ours was stale crusts, mold cut off  (no preservative in bread yet) and with the mold cut off, soaked in milk thinned with water.

            We ate it and liked it.  If we had a fire going in the stove (Mama was washing and boiling the clothes on the stove) remember her fear of germs, so everything was washed and boiled to kill germs, she’d lay the bread on top of the stove and toast it and heat the milk/ water. 

            Food took up about a quarter to a half our lives: harvesting it, I went into the field from about the age six with Mama to help pick strawberries, buying it, canning it, chopping, kneading, and stirring it.  And if not actively employed in food, we’d be reading recipes, talking about the price of this or that, deciding which of the relatives was and wasn’t a good cook, commenting on the price of dinner out and how much more it cost to eat out, than at home, and how Daddy’s favorite dinner was a package of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and how Adina had this wonderful job as cook at the Olympia Hotel in Seattle.  And how you can’t get much cheaper than Kraft Macaroni for a meal.

            Anybody, in the extended family, that brought up the subject of food, no matter how heated the previous conversation had been could quiet everyone down and bring smiles of anticipation by two words, “Let’s eat.”

            I remember on one occasion, it didn’t work.  Aunt Signe mentioned how she couldn’t stand pork and tried to turn us kids against it by reminding us of the cute little piglets, and furthermore  she thought the Jews had it right.

            And some wisenheimer said, “You mean maybe the Jews were right about Jesus and Jesus was just some rabbi bloke BSing us about being the Son of God?”

            This mad everyone, especially Agnes, the most religious one in the family gasp and shudder for the soul of the blasphemer.  Tears flooded Agnes’s eyes-- to think she would never meet her dear relatives in Heaven.  And then Adina, to be snarky answered, “Yeah.” And food forgotten-- they were off on another round of arguments.

            But when it got too heated someone calmed it down, by shouting, “Hey, let’s eat,” and someone else said, “I’m starving,” and they were back to food.

            Except when the carnival came to town and we’d get to see the “fat lady in the circus,” (she wasn’t all that fat, might be classified as overweight now—not obese) sitting outside the tents, I never saw a fat person, although Grandma D. told me there were lots of ladies up on the hill, who were fat.  So, I was twenty-two years old before I saw an obese person other than the one at the carnival. Then I couldn’t stop staring in admiration.  How lucky she was to get all she wanted to eat.  Except I was told she didn’t get fat from eating food, but from a glandular condition.  Her thyroid had gone on the fritz and bingo, the next year she was huge.

            A high point, in our lives, was getting a penny for candy, running to the store and going through that long agonizing debate of whether to buy chocolate, which we loved or the taffy, which lasted longer.

            I, invariably, chose the taffy and sat on my front porch, making it last for an hour while I deliciously chewed and watched the world go by.

            Yeah, I’ll eat anything.  Except oatmeal mush.  If an interrogator wanted me to spill the classified beans, they could torture me (doctors and dentists have exclaimed over my endurance to pain) and they’d get nary a word.  But if they’d made me eat oatmeal mush I’d sing like a canary.