Last week I responded to a command performance...I was required to go to lunch at my parents' house. I had been avoiding them over the last few weeks, for so many reasons, but I was going to need a few favors from them, so I had to put out. That requires eating my mother's food. It's how she tells people how she feels about them, and how she evaluates how they feel about her.
Every week I get a call..."Come get some vegetables." Mom sends Dad to the market for fresh veggies several times a week. He either over-buys or Mom has him buy food specifically for me. I am required to pick it up in a timely fashion or it becomes a sin of waste I somehow force them to commit. It also means I am rejecting her. If she's already cooked the food, I'm required to go eat it there at lunch. At least once a week. When I don't go...well, you get the picture. If I don't go for several weeks, it's interpreted as there's something evil/bad/wicked going on with me and I'm keeping things from her. Yes, even at 48 and a responsible mother of two, my character is suspect.
She made all my favorite veggies last week in a dish called briam. It's a blend of summer vegetables, roasted until they melt. I truly love it, as a stand alone dish or combined with lamb chops. But sometimes, Mom slides one veggie in there she knows I really don't like...okra.
Greeks don't bother to fry their veggies in batter like American southerners do. Greek children aren't given the opportunity to consider the notion that they can refuse to eat a vegetable, so why bother disguising it with cornmeal and deep-frying. Greek cooks do terrible things to okra. They put it in a stew, with other vegetables possessing odd textures when stewed, like eggplant and fennel tops. They are accompanied by potatoes, green beans, zucchini, and lots of whole garlic cloves. Tomatoes are added. It's all cooked down until the eggplant practically melts. I don't mind it, but in one's mouth, slimy eggplant is made worse with clumps of fennel tops, which once resembled lovely, feathery herbs but now feel like clumps of someone's hair in my mouth. And then there's the okra, which when stewed, feels like slimy mucous with bits of boogers. When boogery okra is present, the only thing that saves this dish is the potato. It provides the only real texture that is pleasant.
And so while I'm forced to eat this lunch...because I've been preconditioned to do so since I was a small child...Mom is telling me how Dad got caught on the ladder, while cleaning the gutters, with a bout of serious diarrhea as a result of some new vitamin regime he started that is, once again, cleaning his colon.
(I swear, those people have the cleanest colons on the planet! If you blow through my mother's nose, you'll hear a whistling sound coming out her ass!)
Mom's epic continued, while I was being served a second helping of the briam, and I had to hear about her hazmat cleanup, which included private details about my dad that I really didn't need to know. I felt the need to put my fork down to avoid the okra during the part about the cleanup, but she paused until I picked it up again. I went for a bit of potato instead. Then I had to see The Face, the one she wears when she's waiting for me to validate her martyrdom.
"Oh, wow! That's just awful! It's a good thing Dad didn't fall off the ladder trying to get down in time!" Classic mistake...I empathized with the precariousness of Dad's urgency, so I was chastised with further minutiae covering the extent of contamination in the bathroom...and another serving of okra.
(If I drink water while the tip of my tongue is touching the roof of my mouth, right behind the front teeth, the gag reflex diminishes.)
Yeah, I had to clean my plate too.
No comments:
Post a Comment