I won’t eat that. I just won’t.

Ok, so you now know about the haggis. Well, you do if you read one of the earlier posts. If you didn’t, you should. You’ll learn another random thing about me and about international cuisine.

My dad grew up in the lean years of the Depression and those years just following. So as a kid he was all about eating everything on your plate whether you loved it or not. And that’s just the way it was those days. Lots of kids don’t like to eat their vegetables, but you did anyway. My dad didn’t often leave left-overs. Why not just eat a little more; no sense leaving just that little bit, right? And my step-mother’s creedo was “Life is an adventure!” And though I can certainly see the truth in that saying now, a young boy is usually most likely to miss the value of that sentiment entirely when it relates to the green stuff on his plate.

So, like many boys, I wasn’t crazy about vegetables. But some I hated more than others. I was especially not fond of brussels sprouts. I wasn’t crazy about cooked cabbage, so why would I like these miniature versions of cabbage? So, my dad and step-mom said “Go on! You won’t know if you like them until you try them!”

This is a faulty theory, in my opinion, simply because I CAN SMELL THEM. If they smell like crap, then why would I find them tasty? But a kids logic is easily trumped by parental logic, so I reluctantly tried them. And no, of course, I didn’t like them. My outward response was non-plussed.  My inward response was a hacking scream born of revulsion.   I tried not to say how bad I thought they were because I didn’t want to disappoint them. My step-mom was looking at me with a smile of anticipation- she LOVES brussels sprouts- and somehow I felt obligated.

That was, of course, the worst thing I could have done. For YEARS afterward, every time she served brussels sprouts (“They’re anti-cancer food!”), I begrudgingly ate some. Only after I had been out of the house for years did I pass on them at the dinner table during one of my visits. My step-mother was shocked.

“Aren’t you going to have some brussels sprouts? You LOVE them!”

“Umm, no, I don’t really. Never have, actually.”

I proceeded to explain my feelings about those insidious little green things and how they have actually made me physically gag at dinner. They are my kryptonite. My step-mother was dumb-struck.

One of the greatest things about leaving home was that I would never have to eat those vile little things again.

Other foods I avoid eating are:

Onions – WAY too strong- they over-power everything you add them to.

Tomatoes – Oh, I don’t mind tomato sauce, tomato paste, pizza sauce, BUT raw/diced tomatoes? No thanks. There’s all that weird snotty goop inside. That’s just wrong.

Beets – What’s with the weird bitterness of these things? No thanks.

Squash – I guess it’s not TOO bad, but my dad and step-mother liked to mash it all up into this orange mashed-potato-like stuff and I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it. I suppose one of the reasons is because….Ok, here we go:

There was this gorilla at the Cleveland Zoo. When I was a kid I loved the zoo (still do), and I’ll never forget that ape. He would be sitting in his cage, on the right, with his back facing the wall. He seemed to be chewing something. He would lean forward, with his face inches from the ground, lips moving…and spit this orange-colored…stuff, onto the floor.

If that weren’t bad enough, he would proceed to sniff it, and then scoop it back into his mouth! (Ack!) This process would repeat without pause for what I presumed was FOREVER, because for as long as I stood and watched him, that was all he did.

Fast forward, oh, maybe 8-10 years, the year before they were to close that gorilla pavilion so they could build a new ape habitat. I’m back at the zoo, walking into said pavilion, thinking to myself, “Man, remember that one gorilla that would spit up that orange stuff and then eat it up again? Yeah, like THAT gorilla is doing!” “Wait a minute…it’s EXACTLY like that gorilla…..”

Yep. Same gorilla. Sitting in the same place. Doing the same thing. For nearly a decade. Granted, he was a little grayer, but holy crap, what the hell?

So, I’m not crazy about squash.

One of the problems now is that my step-mother steams vegetables, but she cooks them for too long. She says vegetables that still have some snap in them are hard on the digestive tract. So she steams them for 20 minutes or so. Really. Regardless of the color of the vegetable, it will come out as nearly white with a tinting of green. And mushy. (Are you getting that shiver down your spine, too?)

I hope I don’t have that to look forward to in my 70’s. That would suck. I can’t eat vegetables with all the life and flavor drained out of them. It just isn’t fair. It’s hard enough to like them as it is.   🙂

Yell at me, PLEASE, just yell!

My dad is the kind of guy that NEVER raised his voice when me or my sister got in trouble. He would sit down and give us a lecture. I can tell you, I’d have paid good money just to get yelled at for ten minutes as opposed to getting the one, two, yes, even three hour lectures. Lectures that by the second hour you’re already silently screaming in your own head, “Sweet baby Jesus, will you just let it end!!”. Seriously, at this point my mind attempts to wander. But you always had to appear to be listening, and occasionally a response from me was required, so I couldn’t completely withdraw into the comforting depths of my own imagination.

And my dad had a way of making you feel small even if it wasn’t his intent. I guess I’d call it ‘condescending’. He really knew how to rub your nose in your mistakes even though he was just trying to teach you something.

In contrast, my step-mother is the kind of person to express every emotion she felt. She’d raise her voice and let you know exactly what she was thinking. Strangely, she also often exhibited “blonde moments”, as it were. As a random example, once I had come out to the kitchen as a break from doing homework and I went to the ‘fridge to get a glass of milk. As I’m pouring the milk, my step-mother looked at me from the dining room and asked, “What are you doing?”

I said, “…I’m getting a glass of milk.” “Oh, ok.” She responded.

Then I went into the cupboard and was getting a cookie. Again, while about to eat said cookie, my step-mother queried, “What are you doing now?” Perplexed, I said, “Um, I’m eating a cookie?”

Again, she responds with “Oh, ok.”

I gave my dad a look, who was watching this all transpire from the dining room table, and he just chuckled and said, “She just wanted to make sure. ” We all laughed casually, but in my head I couldn’t help but wonder if dad had married her to make him look like a genius.

I’m just sayin’.

I didn’t need to see that.

So, living with my dad and step-mother certainly had some benefits. I got to go on various trips to places around the country I might not have seen if I had lived with my mom during those years. And of course, I got to know my dad and step-mother much better.

And get to know them, I did.

There are certain things as a teenager that you most definitely do NOT want to experience or know about your parents. One of the most important of those things is…sex.

One night after being out with friends, I come home a little earlier than planned because I was to get a new record and take it over to my friends’ house across the street. So I go in the house, and immediately notice the TV is REALLY loud. I walk down the few steps in the foyer, and turn right down the hall. Man, it’s loud. I start getting a weird feeling…I turn my head left to the TV room to say I was going back out, and I see …two naked bodies on the couch. Ack!

I didn’t even slow down; I just kept walking past the doorway. I took a left down the hall and stopped a second in shock. I listened, they hadn’t seen me. In fact, it sounded like my dad was explaining something that was in the movie they were ‘watching’; the porn movie, that is. I just walked down the hall to my room. I was 17. I was freaked out. This was NOT something I wanted etched into my brain. Stupid eyes! Damn you, eyesight!

I had enough focus to get the album I was there to get, but then knew I had to leave the house- immediately. Holy shit…I HAD to get outta there! Luckily it was a ranch style house and the window in my room was one of those tall windows that starts about 2 1/2 feet from the floor. So, out came the screen and I ran like Hell across the street to my friend’s house. This is the first time I would use the window as an escape route.

I wanted to claw my eyes out. I wanted a beer, even though there wasn’t enough beer in the world that would squelch that image from my visual cortex. It was just something that a teenager doesn’t want to know. : )

Regarding my father the surgeon, cuttin’ stuff open, and the magic of haggis.

My dad was a surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic for 35 years or so. Anyone that knows anything at all about the medical field knows the Cleveland Clinic’s reputation as one of the world’s most respected medical facilities in the country, or world, for that matter. And my dad was one of the pioneers of staple surgery. He seriously has made a mark on the world regarding medicine, no doubt.

Naturally, I suppose, it would rub off on home life as well. My dad is in many ways, a man of science. And he’s definitely a teaching father as opposed to the warm, cuddly friend fathers. So, we’d go down to the Farmer’s Market in Cleveland where the mayor of Strongsville (the town where we lived, and he was a friend) had a butcher shop/deli. Dad would buy meats from him and he would proceed to point out all the anatomical structure of the animal from which the meat was cut. “Here’s the tendons that connect the thigh to the knee”, or “here’s the heart and gizzard of the turkey”. All that kind of thing. I was only half interested in any of it, really. I didn’t care that much about the specifics of what I was eating, I just knew I liked steak, or mostly white meat turkey, or shrimp, or flounder. I didn’t want to see its’ internal organs.

But alas, my father’s a surgeon. And if there’s anything he likes to discuss, it’s his bread n’ butter. So one time he bought some fish; maybe bass or something, and he took me out to the picnic table and put down some newspaper, and he proceeded to give me a filet knife and taught me to gut a fish.

Yeah, I wasn’t all that happy about it. I guess I was about 12 or 14 years old. I didn’t want to get my hands all over this dead fish. But dad was quite persistent about things like, “go on, get your hands in there!” Probably thought I was some little pussy, not wanting to get my hands dirty. Hell, my dad did grow up during the depression, so growing up to do this kind of thing was just second nature. Then on top of that, he rummaged around inside of bodies for a living, so I suppose that’s a natural way to look at it.

I half-heartedly got into it and through the chopping off of the head, the scraping of the insides (ack) and pulling out the intestines. Oh, but of course dad had to stop me at every item removed: “Now Neil, if you look here, this is the small intestine, and this is the large intestine. And here is the liver, the stomach, and the spleen…”. yeah, we analyzed every little thing. Sometimes it’s obvious why people become vegetarians. But no, I didn’t. Go throw a fit somewhere else, please.

I’d say the most memorable experience was the making of the haggis. I’ll explain.

for those of you not familiar with haggis, it is a traditional Scottish dish. My step-mom is Scottish and her father born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland. So my dad got the idea that he’d like to make a traditional haggis for his father in-law.

Haggis consists of various meats and oats ground up together and then stuffed into a sheep’s stomach, then boiled. The sheep stomach is only a container of sorts; you don’t eat it. Sort of like sausage, but it’s not long shaped and with haggis, after it’s done cooking, you cut open the stomach and spoon out the haggis content. You eat it with “‘neeps and tatties”. that translates to “turnips and potatoes”.

So once again, my dad goes to the Farmer’s Market and asks the mayor if he knows anyone selling…sheep stomachs. And of course, he does. So one Saturday afternoon in January my dad comes home with a couple big black trash bags with sheep stomachs in them. And much to my glee (not), he involuntarily volunteers me to come out to the garage to help him CLEAN THEM.

A couple things to keep in mind: It’s REALLY cold out. We’re in the closed garage in the middle of winter. And the stomachs were NOT empty. Honestly, there is nothing quite like the stench of fresh sheep stomach in a closed garage in the dead of a Cleveland winter. That leaves a mark on a teenager, let alone anyone else. Wow, when we opened those bags and got the first whiff of those things…Holy crap, I didn’t know if I was going to pass out and puke or the other way around. Didn’t phase my dad at all, or if it did, he never showed it.

Then came the cutting. My dad had a couple pair of shears, or maybe they were tin-snips, something like that. He and my step-grandfather had a wood shop in the garage there, so there were tools galore. But even before we started cutting, dad was telling me “look, here’s the top of the esophagus where it connects to the stomach…”, and as we were cutting, “here- look at all the villi in the lining of the stomach”, and “here’s the various linings of the stomach wall”. Wow, it was a cornucopia of education. Yet, all I could think of was, “Fuck this- stomachs are made to put food IN, not eat food FROM”.

Needless to say, after cleaning all those stomachs (six), the last thing I wanted to do was eat something out of one. But, life was all about being an ‘adventure’ to my dad and step-mom. So, I tried it at dinner and didn’t really care for it. But I was a teenager and wasn’t really into foods I couldn’t identify (or could identify too well). : )

Many years later, however, while traveling in Edinburgh, Scotland, I made it a point to have some haggis, ‘neeps, and ‘tatties, and found them to be quite good. Go figure. Turns out something in my youth actually paid off.

Cat fights and irrational fears…

Before I moved in with my dad and step-mother, my sister and I would visit them holidays and the summer. Now, my dad has always been (since I’ve known him) a guy that doesn’t really show a lot of emotion. He’s more the teacher kind of father. He doesn’t yell, he lectures, if you do something wrong. My step-mother, Peg, says what she feels. She’s the one that raises her voice, or gives you the silent treatment. They’re pretty opposite, now that I think about it.

So, I have recollections of various shouting matches between my sister and Peg. Karen, my sister, felt the common “step-mother came in and ruined everything in our family” stuff. Naturally there were going to be clashes over this. My dad would just sit and calmly try to diffuse the situations, usually by trying to tell Peg that he would take care of it, and that she should just relax and stop poking the lion with a stick, as it were.

And I remember some of the things Peg used to say. I was only about eight or nine, Karen eleven or twelve. Peg used to say things, supposedly in her defense, about our mom being a liar and a cheat. This, in my opinion, was a poor strategy. 🙂 I mean, really. How could anyone believe yelling that to a kid that age would make them see your side of an argument? I was a pretty quiet kid for a while at that age. I didn’t speak up about stuff, unlike my sister. And because of not speaking up, I wonder about certain effects it had on me.

At that age, a boy shouldn’t worry about much other than when he gets to go out and play and if can have pizza for dinner. For some reason I found myself waking up in the middle of the night with an over-powering fear of death. Not knowing any reason why I’d have that fear, I was plagued by it for years. But now I wonder if it wasn’t some sort of manifestation of my anxiety about my family situation. I’m no psychologist, so I don’t know. But I have to wonder.

Now, years later, I know more about the details and the truth of those arguments between my sister and Peg. We’ll get to that soon enough. 🙂

Time to choose…

So, when I was 14, and visiting my dad and step-mom over the summer, they ask me one night at dinner if I wanted to move in with them.  I had a feeling it would happen, since my mom gave me a heads-up that they might, because 14 is the age when children have the right to choose with whom they want to live.

Funny thing is, my dad and step-mom claim I begged to move there with them.  And my mom claims she didn’t know anything about it until about two weeks before the end of the summer.  I most certainly did not beg, nor did I even bring it up myself.  How can they remember it all so wrong?  I’m quite clear on the events of that summer; quite certain of how it happened, but they have completely seperate, individual and different recollections of it.

Everybody’s got to put spin on it.

See ya later, dad.

I was watching TV when my dad moved out.

Well, so my mom and sister told me. When my parents separated, I don’t really remember.

Slippery slope…

As far as I know, my parents have always been enemies.

They got divorced when I was about seven. I have no memories of them being in the same room together. The only thing I do remember is my dad coming to the front door one day and my mom going outside and closing the door, but not latching it. There was some yelling and such, then my mom came back in and my dad had scratches on his face. That’s it. That’s the extent of my memory of my parents being together.

My sister, three years older, remembers my mom coming in and laughing hysterically while lying on the floor of the living room while my dad said goodbye. I suppose it’s a good thing I don’t remember this.

And thus ends today’s entry. 🙂

Signs and portents…

My first bad experience is one I don’t remember:

I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck. You’d think things could only go uphill from there, right? I mean, attempted suicide at birth? How could it get any worse?….