5
The Lawrence Daily Journal-World makes note of my birth. While the newspaper archive service to which I subscribe doesn’t have the Lawrence paper, Google does, but its archive of the paper is difficult to access and the search function is useless, which necessitates a tedious hand search. A city with a university in which 8864 people are enrolled in 1957 (source University of Kansas, Office of Institutional Research and Planning, Table 4-164 Net Registration Head Count Enrollment, Fall 1910-2014), the Lawrence newspaper hasn’t the character of an old small town newspaper but on the second page of every edition are listed funerals, as well as births, deaths, admissions and dismissals from the Lawrence Memorial Hospital. My mother is shown as having been dismissed on the twenty-seventh of June, the fourth or fifth day after I was born depending on whether or not one counts the day of my birth (I do know I was born early morning), and I would wonder if she was instead released on the twenty-sixth but this was an evening newspaper, its name revealing it was once two papers that were combined (the Library of Congress shows they were combined in 1911) and as it was the news of the day then there may have been time to get in the daily stats from the hospital before the paper went to print. If that’s not the case then the real date of the hospital reports needs to be adjusted to the day before.
Three other births were reported alongside mine—all girls identified by their father’s full name, the Mrs. an appendage with no given name, wife and mother distinguishm
ent enough: Bruggeman, Wing, and Walker. “Mrs. Bruggeman and baby girl” and “Mrs. Wing and baby girl” went home the day after my mother was dismissed, and “Mrs. Walker and baby girl” went home the day following the dismissal of the other two. One might picture each woman in a wheelchair rolled to the hospital’s front door, in their arms the bundle of their brand new human still swaddled in a hospital blanket, and the gift or gifts of flowers received may have gone home with them if still viable, ported behind, the customary acknowledgment of the significant events of a life with fragrant blooms of the earth that are temporary, the beauty of them enjoyed for the few days between their cutting and wilting, which is perhaps a part of what makes them precious, that they don’t add to one’s material wealth and quickly become only memories. Taking for granted the other three births were into relatively normal situations, the mothers might have felt excitement and joy and thankful their situations were the desired outcomes in which mother and infant went home together. My mother would also have been wheeled in a wheelchair to the hospital’s entrance, but she went home with empty arms and said that rather than saddened or depressed by this she was relieved. She was glad to have me remain in the hospital as she enjoyed having that extra time to rest, and said she believed every woman ought to have a period of time to just take care of themselves after giving birth and not worry about the baby. This period of rest and relaxation at home sans infant lasted a little over a week for I’m shown as being dismissed on the fifth of July. I was in the hospital thirteen days.
The headline news story in the Lawrence Daily Journal-World on the day my birth was recorded was “Scientists Tell Ike H-Bomb Fallout Small. Experts Claim Weapon Now Nearly Clean.” The story was that obviously pleased University of California physicists were able to report to President Eisenhower that radioactive fallout had “been reduced by nine-tenths from that of earliest H-bombs” so they were ninety-five percent free of scary residuals that were busy transforming the ordinary into monsters in horror sci-fi films. As for concerns over the harm of radioactive dust and particles from testing that had occurred to date, the three scientists were “emphatic” that all H-bomb tests were harmless and that weapons testing could continue, which would have to do with the then proposed testing moratorium due health concerns over radioactive fallout, which would result in the first testing ban, informal, that would last from November 1958 to September 1961. There are always two stories and science now states that “no measurable success was ever achieved” in the efforts made between 1952 and 1992 to produce a pure, clean, fusion weapon. Next to the article on the “clean” H-bomb having been already produced was one titled “Brightest Bomb Yet Fired at Test Site.” This was Priscilla, exploded in Nevada over Frenchman Flat, one of twenty-nine tests codenamed Operation Plumbbob that took place between May twenty-eighth and October seventh of 1957. The strength of Priscilla was equal to 37,000 tons of TNT. In entertainment news, crooner Bing Crosby was upset by musical trash taking over the radio and TV. In local news, a soft drink machine had been broken into at 745 New Hampshire Street and change taken by the burglar who had entered the establishment by breaking a skylight. The Summer Institute on Asia at KU was showing the 1955 Japanese film, The Phantom Horse, which had been entered at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. Geneva Shaw’s letter to the editor was on how she was privileged to be able to go to the public pool for a swim but, with the exception of the university campus, hypocritical Lawrence was as Jim Crow racist as South Carolina, black individuals not allowed into the public swimming pool, into restaurants, and the nice areas of town. The film, Island in the Sun, about interracial relationships on a fictitious Caribbean island, featuring James Mason, Harry Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, and Joan Collins was playing at two theaters. Calypso cotton dresses, a trend from Trinidad which had the “country goin’ mad”, were on sale for $2.98 at Penny’s. The ad was illustrated with three white models attired in the full-skirted, sleeveless dresses.
If my parents ever mentioned this, I don’t recollect it, but KU went to great lengths to attract Wilt Chamberlain, the legendary basketball player, who attended the school from 1956 to 1958, playing for the Jayhawks. As Geneva Shaw’s letter attests, racism was a problem in Lawrence, which Chamberlain was disappointed to discover and when he left his hope was that he had been an agent of change.
While in college, my mother went to a movie with a white male friend, and his black friend, and was cautioned beforehand that they would have to sit in the balcony, the black section of the theater. I wish I’d thought to ask what movie this was.
Island in the Sun, because of its content, had difficulty being booked into theaters in the South. It was banned in Memphis, Tennessee, and a temporary restraining order was issued in Atlanta, Georgia, where it would only be shown at the drive-in. A 21 October 1957 report in The Atlanta Constitution is on the Twin Starlight Drive-In Theater, where the movie was shown, being picketed by 500 people, ten police cars keeping watch over what was described as an orderly protest. Most of the individuals questioned admitted to not having seen the film. On October twenty-first Dekalb Superior Court Judge Frank Guess “granted an injunction…ordering the manager of the theater to show cause why the film should not be ‘permanently’ enjoined from showing”. On November eighth the hearing was put off until November twenty-first. It was stated the temporary injunction could be absolved “on agreement of the Twin Starlight Drive-inTheater not to show the film”. This is likely what transpired as there follows no news on a November twenty-first hearing and the film is not again advertised.
If it’s curious that Island in the Sun was playing at two theaters in Lawrence, one of the movie houses was an establishment that showed sexual exploitation films.
I skim watch Island in the Sun, in which Joan Fontaine, who is said to “always pick the wrong man”, looks with fierce longing upon Harry Belafonte but they never kiss. Joan Collins, daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, sibling to James Mason, falls in love with Stephen Boyd, heir to an English title and a place in the House of Lords, but plans to break their engagement when she learns her father’s mother, who died in childbirth, was Jamaican with African ancestry. She and Stephen do kiss onscreen, then when she learns she’s pregnant her mother reveals she’s instead the child of an adulterous affair with a white man, which Joan now decides leaves her and Stephen free to marry despite the fact they won’t make public her real ancestry and the reason Joan wouldn’t marry Stephen in the first place was because of her uncertainty of whether it would be acceptable for him to have a mixed-race wife though Stephen had no problem with her being mixed-race. John Justin, an aspiring novelist who is white, marries Dorothy Dandridge, a black woman who is mixed race, and without ever an onscreen kiss they fly away to England to start a new life, but Harry Belafonte puts the kibosh on a relationship with Joan Fontaine, for he has work to do on the island as a union leader and his people would never understand their being together.
Island in the Sun has the distinction of being touted as the first film in which an interracial kiss occurs. As far as I can tell, Island in the Sun is a film in which the first interracial kiss purportedly occurs on screen but also doesn’t take place. Both actors are white, and Joan’s character turns out to be white rather than biracial.
On June twenty-seventh, the day my mother went home from the hospital with empty arms, happy for the rest, the headline news was “Audrey Smashes into Texas and Louisiana”, a hurricane that would prove to be one of the deadliest in U.S. history, killing at least 416 people. An image at the bottom of the page shows a white man, Joseph Schwartz, eighteen, member of the notorious street gang The Cornell Square Rebels, of the Back of the Yards neighborhood of southwest Chicago, weeping after having been sentenced to fifty years in prison for slaying, with a #397 ball peen hammer, seventeen-year-old Alvin Palmer, a black youth. Palmer, sixteen when killed, had been selected at random by the then seventeen-year-old Schwartz who had gone riding with a few gang members with the intention of finding and assaulting a black individual in a white neighborhood. The initial plan, one of the gang members asserted, was to only prank the individual they targeted by stealing his shoes, but Schwartz had instead felled Palmer with a single tragic blow to his head, and he had died the following day. Many of the gang’s members were Polish-Americans, the children of immigrants. Upton Sinclair had memorialized the Back of the Yards area, the slaughterhouses of the Union Stock Yards, the impoverishment of its lower-class workers, often immigrants, in his 1906 novel, The Jungle.
On July fifth, the day I was released from the hospital, the front page news headline was “Atom Blast Called Most Spectacular”. Which it was. Footage of the Hood blast shows a demon mushroom sun consuming all the light in the sky. The strength of the Hood explosion was that of 75,000 tons of TNT. In local news, Lawrence had enjoyed a Fourth of July fireworks display of forty-five minutes over Mt. Oread, an extravaganza of fountain-like lights that was preceded by a concert. In Tonganoxie, a town located between Lawrence and Kansas City, an old two-story native stone building had collapsed killing three persons, and the wreckage was being nightly ravaged by out-of-town looters. Two of the three births that had been reported alongside mine were to couples from Tonganoxie.
Fifty-seven years later, in 2014, it was reported that recently released declassified documents revealed Operation Plumbbob had been responsible for the loading of 58,300 kilocuries of radioiodine (I-131) into the atmosphere over four months, and comprised thirty-two percent of civilian exposure due to continental nuclear tests. A Downwinders map of fallout exposure shows the highest concentrations occurred in western portions of Utah, and the midstate area of Idaho moving into Montana. The Midwestern states of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Missouri were profoundly affected, though not as much as Idaho. The event was international but the map doesn’t show Canada, though the area above Montana and North Dakota would have impacted in the same manner as the Midwest.
A plumb bob is a pointed weight, much like a ballpoint pen tip, hung at the end of a line. By means of the instrument, gravity does the work of drawing a vertical reference line. What is “plumb” stands upright. I’ve yet to locate any publication that divulges how the operation came by its name.
My father, with his degrees in biophysics, spent my childhood performing radiation experiments on miniature livestock. I never asked him, “How did you get into this line of work?” Like the marriage of my parents, and my mother’s concert pianist aspiration, when I was young it all seemed a priori destined by fate. He never mentioned any compelling childhood desire to go into the sciences or medicine. In the Lawrence Daily Journal-World, 6 August 1956, a large ad taken out by a firm of investment bankers shows an illustration of what appears to be a city skyline within the three spirals of a standard illustration of an atomic nucleus structure and reads, “Invest in atomic science through a mutual fund. Atomic Development Mutual Fund, Inc. is designed to provide a managed investment in a variety of companies participating in activities resulting from atomic sciences. Get the facts and free prospectus.” Fields associated with the atomic sciences would have presented themselves as a sure bet for gainful future employment.
The Lawrence Daily Journal-World is, in a way, as close as I will ever get to knowing my Lawrence, Kansas, edition parents. Everyone, back then, daily purchased the newspaper for more in-depth domestic and world coverage than could be communicated in thirty minutes of the nightly news consumed only by those able to nightly settle themselves before a television during the designated programming schedule. My father would read the paper for news, just as it was later his habit to each evening cover his face with the paper then switch to silent consumption of vapid sitcoms that were good at not compelling discussion. My mother never read the newspaper for its stories or comics, eschewing all forms of news, eventually trying to ban me from watching television news when I was a teen as she didn't want to hear the nightly news from the table in the kitchen where she drank. But as a newlywed she would have likely dipped into the Lawrence Daily Journal-World to peruse ads for clothing and the grocery specials. They perhaps had the newspaper delivered. Every time my father saw the newspaper delivery boy, or man, unlikely to be a female as it was then a job typically held by male youth, he perhaps thought of when he had delivered newspapers. He mentioned this once, when I was a teen, a subject covered by two sentences, a surprising degree of bitterness coloring his voice, convinced that carrying the heavy bag of papers had forever harmed his back and seeming to blame the parents of whom he rarely spoke but with whom I later would realize he was in frequent contact even during the times he supposedly was not, when my mother insisted on no communication with them, just as she would often break with her own parents.
The population of Lawrence grew from 23,351 in 1950 to 32,858 in 1960, and for a city of that size the newspaper seems to have fewer ads for grocery stores than one would expect, perhaps because nearly a third of the population was students, and students in dorms, boarding houses, or still living in the homes of their parents don’t purchase groceries, furniture or appliances. If one doesn’t know the “who” of a person, at least it’s known they are subject to the physiological demands that rule us all. Several days after their marriage, my mother may have glanced through the paper for grocery specials and perhaps her eye was caught by a Safeway ad for the Greatest Values on Earth, a Summer Circus of Savings ad, the rare one that is illustrated to be an eye-catcher for not only adults but children who are only interested in the comics but who will associate the circus with the grocery store and plead to be taken shopping at the magical Safeway. It occupies a full page, considerable real estate for the few specials hawked by a smiling, long and skinny circus ringmaster with long, skinny mustache curled at the ends, a brass band riding atop a wagon, a clown with a smiling donkey, a joyful lion displaying four sharp but non-threatening canines, smiling tiger, smiling elephant in a ballet tutu, and smiling giraffe. Kleenex tissues, four boxes for a dollar. Philadelphia cream cheese for thirty-five cents. Hamburger at thirty-nine cents a pound. Ten cans of standard cut green beans for a dollar. A two-pound package of fig bars for forty-nine cents (when she once made the rare purchase of Fig Newtons, my mother mentioned enjoying fig bars while they lived in Lawrence). Two quart jars of Western Pride dill pickles for forty-nine cents. But she isn’t one to be attracted to Crushed Royalty pineapple, or Large Size Thick Golden Meated cantaloupes, Curtsy Angel Food cakes and “TV popcorn”. We didn’t have canned pineapple, and I never tasted a fresh, prickly pineapple with palm-like frond top or an Angel Food cake until I was out of the house, and popcorn was too much trouble for them to ever fix. The full page 10 August 1956 ad for the Cole’s Rusty IGA (Independent Grocers Alliance, founded in 1926) on Louisiana Street is a closer fit with two pounds of cottage cheese for thirty-nine cents (she ate calorie-conscious cottage cheese for lunch every day), one pound of crisp carrots for ten cents, three cans of Chicken of the Sea tuna for seventy-nine cents (they always ate Chicken of the Sea, which I liked because of the golden-haired mermaid on the can), a large box of Tide for twenty-five cents (to which I’m allergic but they always used Tide), three pounds of ground beef for a dollar, an eleven ounce jar of hot dog relish for thirty-one cents, five six-ounce cans of Snow Crop orange juice for nine-five cents (but they only ever purchased Minute Maid frozen concentrate, a type of food processing developed in the 1940s for delivering vitamin C to soldiers). There’s a deal on Colgate toothpaste but my father refused to have anything other than Crest in the household, a habit that may have already been established as Crest with Floristan was rolled out nationally in 1956, then “the only toothpaste recognized effective against cavities by the American Dental Association”, and was by 1962 the leading toothpaste in the nation perhaps due in part to an advertising campaign featuring smiling children painted by Norman Rockwell. However, the Cole’s Rusty IGA store, way down at Twenty-Ninth Street, next the Haskell Indian Nations University where some of my father’s extended family would attend, seems distant their apartment in comparison to the Reeves at Ninth and Mississippi, which also has three pounds of ground beef for a dollar, a quart of Miracle Whip for fifty-five cents (Miracle Whip was always used rather than mayonnaise which I wouldn’t taste until I was out of the household), four rolls of Charmin tissue for thirty-three cents, and a large size Welch’s grape juice for thirty-nine cents. My mother loved Welch’s grape juice in the bottle and they would frequently buy it but it was for her exclusively. I loved it but “pure Concord” Welch’s in the bottle was considered too costly for children’s consumption.
As I go through the grocery store ads I realize I’m looking for any early married hints at the formation of their habitual go-to foods and meals, which were limited, and I’m surprised at the variety of fresh and canned fruits and vegetables, offered in even the 1950s store ads, which never found their way into our home. When they cooked the vegetable offerings were always frozen peas (I do like frozen peas) and mashed potatoes made out of dried flakes. We never had regular potatoes. Sometimes we had canned green beans. Always with macaroni and cheese we had canned spinach which I loved for the apple cider vinegar that was poured over it. Rarely canned corn. Corn on the cob was something we did have but it was a once-a-year treat in the summer, dressed with salt and pepper and margarine, we never had butter in the house which was perhaps a holdover from the dairy rationing they experienced as World War II children. As with corn on the cob, the sweetness of watermelon was a once-a-year event that I would spend the next 364 days anticipating like it was Christmas in summer. The meat offering with the green peas and dried mashed potatoes was typically thin pork chops, occasionally an electric skillet fried chicken for which my mother did have a knack though it was nothing like what one thinks of as fried chicken, not even my mother thought it was successful fried chicken, but I liked it. On Sunday we would have either a canned ham or a beef roast. If it was a canned ham my mother would stud it with whole cloves. If a beef roast, it was prepared and served by my father, it seeming to be a traditional hard fact that if it was a chunk of beef it was handled by the head male of the household. And it was only ever a beef roast as we never once had a pork roast. Tuna fish casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and crushed saltine crackers on top was frequent. Tuna fish salad made with relish in the summer. A can of pork and beans with hot dogs. Chef Boyardee spaghetti in a box until I was a teenager and my mother started putting spaghetti in a bowl with canned tomatoes and mushroom soup and baking it as a casserole. For fruit we never had anything but bags of the cheapest mealy, bruised, tasteless apples that only my father would eat and sometimes a bag of oranges. We didn’t ever have fresh or canned peaches, apricots, pears, plums, or pineapple, only rarely green grapes (but those were often reserved only for my mother), and even more rarely strawberries and bing cherries. We never once had blueberries, raspberries or blackberries. We certainly would never have had avocado, papaya, figs, kiwi, mango, or kumquats. We sometimes had bananas. We never had limes and if my mother needed lemon it came out of a bottle of ReaLemon, just as we infrequently had frozen orange juice and instead had powdered Tang drink. My mother liked canned Mandarin oranges so we would have those on the shelf but they were reserved only for her. Maybe once a year we had the treat of frozen pink lemonade. Rather than fruit we would occasionally have jello, which was rare enough to be celebrated for its breaking the monotony. They did buy pink grapefruit, a calorie-conscious food my mother would sprinkle with a little sugar and dip into with her serrated grapefruit spoon with its bamboo handle, one half for my father and one half for her, and sometimes I’d get a half if my father was having instant Carnation chocolate-flavored powdered breakfast drink, which was often his breakfast of choice. We weren’t allowed to drink his instant breakfast but were permitted Nestle’s Nesquik dried chocolate milk powder and drank it once a day at most so it wouldn’t disappear too quickly and thus be banned from the household. Breakfast for the children was always Cheerios and Wheaties, and maybe once every couple of months we would have the treat of a box of Cocoa Krispies which between the four of us would be devoured in one sitting. My father often ate the Wheaties and I’d the impression they were a hold-over from his childhood. My mother didn’t like Wheaties or Cheerios so she had Kellogg’s Concentrate or Grape Nuts, both of which I liked but were considered special so again they were reserved only for her consumption and kept on a shelf above the Wheaties and Cheerios so to reinforce how they were reserved for her. My mother also liked to have Thomas English muffins for breakfast, a calorie-conscious nibble nibble little mouse half of one for her and a half for my father. When I was a young teen Ruffles with ridges potato chips were introduced to the household as our Saturday evening dinner with a dip made of green olives mixed with Philadelphia cream cheese and milk. This was our special, communal once-a-week descent into veritable food hedonism, sometimes spiked with a blender of chocolate milkshake split between four children and two adults. Once in a blue moon, Saturday dinner would instead be a root beer float made with vanilla ice milk. My mother usually only ever had the treat of ice milk, which had fewer calories than ice cream and was why we never ever had ice cream. As we weren’t allowed to eat the ice milk, only my mother, it would sit in the freezer until it had freezer burn. We never had candy except at Halloween. There was always a Mounds bar in the refrigerator but it was reserved for my mother, eaten in her calorie-conscious way of having one half of it one day and the other half saved for another, and we were so well trained that no one ever touched that candy bar or any of the other foods reserved for our parents. We children never had sodas. Coca-colas were in the house, but these were also reserved only for my mother, which she would place in the freezer to get ice cold then would sometimes forget them and they would explode, glass and frozen cola slush over her carton of ice milk and the big bag of frozen peas. We children ate dill pickles as our treats. For a snack or side dish my mother would often make calorie-conscious fresh cucumber slices in vinegar, which seemed like a big fancy deal as the cucumbers had to be peeled. For snack treats we had Saltines and peanut butter on Saltines. Ritz crackers were a cut above our grade as children so though we loved them they were never purchased, Honey Graham crackers were also rare and seemed like dessert, again often reserved for my mother’s consumption, she’d put Philly cream cheese on them, so the Philly cream cheese and graham crackers were hers. As far as a standard menu that ran weekly for years, at least the months when my mother wasn't in the hospital, which she began to regularly enter when I was seven, for breakfast it was Cheerios and Wheaties, for sandwiches we had bologna or sliced processed cheese, and peanut butter and jelly. We always had a block of sharp cheddar cheese but this was again largely reserved for my mother to snack on, though it made its way eventually into our sandwich meals. The standard evening menu that ran weekly for years was tuna fish casserole one night, Chef Boyaredee spaghetti on Wednesday nights, macaroni and cheese with canned spinach often had on Thursdays, and the pork chop somewhere in there, or egg noodles with cream of mushroom soup mixed with hamburger, or meatloaf with peas and dried flakes mashed potatoes. When my father was cooking he liked to fry Spam and occasionally we had TV dinners which seemed a great and novel treat even if they tasted like cardboard. Before the Saturday night potato chips and olive dip dinner was introduced, Saturday was the night for pork and beans and hot dogs. And on Sunday the peas, fake mashed potatoes and canned ham or roast. The monotony at our family table was actually preferred for otherwise the introduction of a new food was something we children found unpleasant. Such as when liver was introduced, and broccoli another time, both when I was not yet ten years of age, and as we children wouldn’t eat either we were forced to stay at the table for several hours, an ordeal of infuriated yelling chastisement, tears on our parts, gagging or vomiting when we struggled to eat the liver or broccoli, and beatings with our father’s leather belt, the point being we must do as we are told even if it makes us physically ill, and beaten again at the end of the night when we were finally allowed to leave the table and sent to bed exhausted by a trial that had nothing to do with respecting waste not want not, our parents hadn’t been left hungry and traumatized by the depression as in some families we didn’t hear stories of deprivation their parents were employed and we were never told we should be thankful as children in China were starving to death.
Mid-twentieth century America ran on pre-prepared foods so in this respect our household wasn’t unusual in its reliance on what was canned and frozen. The selling of canned as a modern convenience largely meant you didn’t have to do the canning yourself, and no one in the city had gardens that supplied produce for home preservation anyway. While Tang was on board the 1962 Mercury fight and the Gemini missions and provided Space Age thrills in a glass, the aesthetic is ultimately survivalist. Take something pleasing and transform it so you have food that will last the long ocean voyage from the Old World to the Americas, from Earth to Mars. Farming forebears had canned and dried the produce of summer for sustenance the remainder of the year, so the idea that everything must be garden fresh the year round would have been more novel than preserved foods. The Baby Boomers consumed what the Silent Generation and the Greatest Generation put on the table.
Our family was, however, extreme in food not being a source of pleasure, and while this wasn’t only in the respect of the children, it was especially in respect of them, which is a give-away that the parental attitude was children were not full-fledged human beings as they were dependents, and to be dependent was to expect to have only one’s basic needs met.
When I was an older teenager and others expressed astonishment with my revelations that I’d not had such-and-such foods, I became aware that this degree of monotony in dining and exclusion from restaurants was not the norm, which became a source of embarrassment and another thing to hide, just as everything about our family was best hidden, it was a deeply inculcated necessity to protect my parents from the eyes of the outside world which meant never disclosing to others any aspect of our home life. The ignorance of my parents in respect of food as something in which one might take pleasure wasn’t criminal, nor is not being a good cook a criminal offense, nor was not taking us out to eat, every family is different in its relationship to food, but I believe there was negligence with an intentional deprivation of pleasure, and negligence in that the parental disinterest was in part from the bulk of their calories coming from the primary food group that was alcohol, which meant that for us children anything that wasn’t Wheaties or Cheerios or peanut butter on white bread or mealy bruised apples was considered a food luxury. My parents experienced less food monotony as they went out to eat, but without us. Before I was ten, once in a while we would have dinner at the International House of Pancakes, or hamburgers at the A&W Drive-In. After the age of ten, for Easter dinner we might go to the cafeteria, which was exciting and special as we got to choose our own food and have a dessert, whereas at home we only had cake at birthdays and freezer pie only at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sometimes my father would pick up Kentucky Fried Chicken. When my mother was in the hospital during the school year, we lived on sandwiches or cereal at night as we would be given the money to eat a hot meal lunch at school, and on the weekends we had sandwiches and cereal. When she was in the hospital during the summer we lived on sandwiches and cereal, hot dogs (often eaten cold), pot pies, and canned Chef Boyaredee ravioli. Because we, as children, weren’t taken out to eat, I was seventeen and out of the house before I had my first taste of Chinese food, albeit American-Chinese. I didn’t eat at an Italian restaurant until I was seventeen and out of the house. I never tasted Mexican food until I was seventeen and out of the house. I never tasted German or Greek food until I was seventeen and out of the house. I was seventeen when I had my first pomegranate, which was so special, mythic, and wonderful, that for me they are still prized jewels, and for this reason the couple I purchase every autumn I’ll often not eat as they are so special that though I might possess one it’s too precious to cut into and enjoy. I’m this way with fruit in general, we purchase fruits I like and then I don’t eat them as they’re too special to eat—this is a mental hangover from childhood and miserable as I feel guilt and shame also with the waste of money and food when it has to be thrown out. Steak houses and restaurants that served fish were popular for families but we never went to one. There was sometimes steak at home, by which I mean it was always a T-bone, always only for my father, my mother not caring for steak, and he would give me the T-bone to gnaw on afterward as a treat, for which I was always eager. It was like a gift. Then as my next sibling, my brother, B, grew older, he too would want the gift of the bone and I was then rarely given it. If we argued over it, the bone was thrown away and no one got to enjoy it.
Dogs are given bones for treats, or used to be before veterinarians warned about the consequential bone splinters being harmful for dogs.
Remembering how grateful and eager I was for the prized bone, how I would gnaw on it forever, digging out the marrow, drawing the last iota of flavor out of it, and thinking of how bones used to be conceived of as routinely reserved for dogs, I stop writing for a little while.