As a kid, I had a very strict rule. I didn’t eat anything green. I was a finicky eater at best, but I just hated the awful taste in my mouth. And to make matters worse, my mother wasn’t a cook. She put everything on the table as best as she could, unfortunately, that meant canned, frozen, or pre-prepared packaged foods.
We ate oddly molded lunch meat, fish that only came in breaded stick form and two vegetables, green beans or spinach served from a can.
The green beans were French cut and limp with a taste somewhere between shoe sole and drowned pasta. The spinach was, to my chagrin, not Popeye’s strength food, but this congealed blob of green guck, with a hard boiled egg in it. Why she added a hard boiled egg, I had no idea, but I knew it was the spinach that turned the egg green. I often wondered if that’s where green eggs and ham in the book came from.
The nightly ritual of eating my vegetables was a tense standoff. I didn’t want to eat them. My parents tried to force me too.
So, my father made me to sit at the table until I finished them. But since the TV was in full view of the table, that wasn’t much of an incentive or punishment. I sat there for hours in a battle of wills.
One point I thought I’d get a little cleaver and strew the vegetables around my plate and not in a bunch, so it looked like I had eaten some, when I hadn’t.
Being less than successful, I upped the ante a bit. I loved mashed potatoes, but in a devious rouse, I’d leave a clump of mashed potatoes on my plate, feigning lack of hunger, and hide the green beans or spinach under my potatoes. That actually worked for a while. But one day, my mother caught me hiding green beans under my mashed potatoes and the jig was up.
So at the table I sat in a perpetual tug of war. And quite frankly, if my parents hadn’t given up… I’d probably still be sitting there.
(C) Copyright 2024 Suzanne Rudd Hamilton
SUZANNE RUDD HAMILTON 