My mother was just as wonderful as my father, but she drove me crazy. Sometimes I think that mothers exist mostly to drive their kids crazy. Of course kids absolutely exist to drive their mothers crazy. It’s been going on like that for thousands of years, and there’s no end in sight.
One of the things that my mother did to drive me crazy was make up rules. She had so many rules, and most of them started with the same word: Don’t. “Don’t do this, and don’t do that, and don’t do this, and don’t do that, and don’t do this…and don’t ever do that!”
She had a special kind of rule that I’d like to tell you about, but first I have to give you a little more background. You see, when I was a kid, I discovered something that I strongly suspect you have also discovered for yourselves. I discovered that food was not only for eating. That’s right, I figured out that I could do other things with food.
Now, that all probably started when I was just a little baby in the high chair, and my mother was trying to cram some horrible stuff into my face. You know what I’m talking about: mashed turnips and smashed carrots and destroyed broccoli. Well, I didn’t want any of that stuff, so I flung it right back at her.
She used to try to give me medicine–horrible, smelly, sticky red stuff in a spoon. Of course I didn’t want it, so I did my best to avoid it. “Open wide!” she said. I just shook my head and kept my lips closed tight. “Open wide!” she said a little louder. I closed my lips even tighter and shook my head even more. “Open wide!” she said even louder. I shook my head so hard that she might have thought it would fly right off my neck. Then she got mad. “Open wide!” she yelled just about as loud as she could. I got scared and opened my mouth. She stuck the spoon in, and I closed my mouth. The medicine tasted terrible, so instead of swallowing it, I opened my lips just a little and sprayed her with it.
I used to do great stuff with food. One of my favorites was mashed potatoes. There are lots of things you can do with mashed potatoes. Sometimes I’d make a big mound of them and then chop up the mound with the side of my hand. I also made mashed-potato snowmen on my plate, using peas for eyes, a carrot wedge for a nose, and a green bean for a mouth. Once I made a well in the middle of the mashed potatoes and filled it with gravy. Then I made a diving board out of Popsicle sticks and put a bug on it. Eventually the bug dropped into the gravy and sort of swam around. It was lots of fun to watch.
This reminds me of my “spaghetti bug.” One day I smooshed a long strand of spaghetti onto the back of a cockroach and let it go. I’m sure that the cockroach wasn’t happy about dragging that spaghetti around. Perhaps it was confused. In any event, it headed as quickly as it could for the safest, darkest place it could find, which in our kitchen was under the refrigerator. The cockroach had just made it to the refrigerator when my mother entered the kitchen. She saw that strand of spaghetti apparently moving by itself across the floor and let out a shriek.
I used to squeeze food. Different foods behave in different ways when you squeeze them; it really depends on what you’re squeezing. If you squeeze a whole watermelon, nothing much happens. If you squeeze peas, they practically disappear. If you squeeze a tomato, it explodes, and if you squeeze an egg…well, that’s just gross. Another food that’s fun to squeeze takes practice and the right amount of mustard. Did you know that if you squeeze a hot dog just right, it’ll shoot across the room?
My all-time favorite foods to play with may have been meatballs and spaghetti. They were fun together, and they were fun separately. I’ve already mentioned one thing that I did with a strand of spaghetti, but there were other things. I used to wear spaghetti. I made headbands, neckties, and belts out of spaghetti. I used spaghetti as a whip to try to zap flies and mosquitoes. I also used to shove spaghetti down my little brother’s pants.
Did you know that I invented the meatball-and-spaghetti yo-yo? Well, I did. I’d stand at one end of the kitchen and wrap a long strand of spaghetti around a big meatball, then hold on to the spaghetti while I tossed the meatball underhand. I watched with tremendous pleasure as the spaghetti unwound and the meatball rolled across the floor to the other end of the kitchen. I do admit that it was a one-way yo-yo; the meatball didn’t come back. So I had two choices: I could retrieve the meatball and rewind the spaghetti around it and send it back in the other direction, or I could get another meatball. I did both. I yo-yoed half a dozen or so meatballs across the kitchen floor, then gathered them up and sent them back one by one.
The meatballs were fun by themselves too. I juggled them. I invented games like “roll the meatball across the table” and “obstacle-course meatball golf.” My brother and I played catch with meatballs. There’s one special game of meatball catch that I’d like to tell you about.
I grew up in the Bronx, New York, within walking distance of one of the most famous ballparks in America, Yankee Stadium. So it was only natural that I was a big Yankees fan when I was a kid. One day, when I was nine or ten years old and my brother was about five, we were in the kitchen. At that time we lived on the top floor of a six-story apartment house overlooking the street. It was a very hot summer day, and we didn’t have air conditioning. I don’t think anybody did, at least not in my neighborhood. Because it was so hot, the kitchen window was open. There was a grate with a little fence in front of it so we couldn’t fall out. Anyhow, I got hold of a meatball and decided to play catch with my brother.
I pretended to be Whitey Ford, a famous and fabulous pitcher for the Yankees, and my brother pretended to be Yogi Berra, an equally famous and fabulous catcher. He crouched down in front of the window at one end of the kitchen, and I held up the meatball at the other end. I said something like “Okay, kid, I’m going to show you my sidearm curve.” I wound up and flung the meatball as hard as I could in my brother’s direction. The pitch was a little high, he couldn’t catch it, and the meatball went sailing out the window.
At that very moment, six floors below, a man was driving by in a convertible…with the top down. We could hear him jam on the brakes as a meatball, apparently from outer space, landed in his lap. He probably scratched his head and stared at the meatball, saying something like “That’s a meatball! Where did the meatball come from? Where did the meatball come from?” He jumped out of the car, looked around, saw my brother and me at the open window, and yelled, “Hey! What’s going on up there?” My kid brother and I made funny faces, wiggled our hands, and yelled back at him, “Meatball attack!”
Needless to say, my mother did not approve of that sort of behavior, and she had a whole list of rules about things that my brother and I were not supposed to do with food. More than thirty years later I made a list of as many of her food rules as I could remember, added a few of my own, and wrote a poem called “My Mother Says I’m Sickening.”
My Mother Says I’m Sickening
My mother says I’m sickening,
my mother says I’m crude,
she says this when she sees me
playing Ping-Pong with my food,
she doesn’t seem to like it
when I slurp my bowl of stew,
and now she’s got a list of things
she says I mustn’t do—
DO NOT CATAPULT THE CARROTS!
DO NOT JUGGLE GOBS OF FAT!
DO NOT DROP THE MASHED POTATOES
ON THE GERBIL OR THE CAT!
NEVER PUNCH THE PUMPKIN PUDDING!
NEVER TUNNEL THROUGH THE BREAD!
PUT NO PEAS INTO YOUR POCKET!
PLACE NO NOODLES ON YOUR HEAD!
DO NOT SQUEEZE THE STEAMED ZUCCHINI!
DO NOT MAKE THE MELON OOZE!
NEVER STUFF VANILLA YOGURT
IN YOUR LITTLE SISTER’S SHOES!
DRAW NO FACES IN THE KETCHUP!
MAKE NO LITTLE GRAVY POOLS!
I wish my mother wouldn’t make
so many useless rules.
My mother had another sort of rule about food. I think that a lot of mothers have this particular rule: If it was on your plate, you ate it. If you didn’t eat it, it would be on your plate at the next meal. If you didn’t eat it then, it would be there at the next meal too. This sometimes went on for days. Of course food does get weird after a while, and my mother realized that I was never going to eat it, but she couldn’t bear to throw it out. She had a solution. My mother designated a space in the refrigerator, about a square foot, second shelf down in the back on the right side, for food that was too old to eat but wasn’t quite old enough to throw out. She kept it there until it was weird enough and old enough to throw out.
I love writing poems about things that really happened to me when I was a kid, so I wrote a poem about that space in the refrigerator. Of course I exaggerate a bit—a poet is allowed to do that—but the basic story is true. The poem is called “Deep in Our Refrigerator.”
Deep in Our Refrigerator
Deep in our refrigerator,
there’s a special place
for food that’s been around awhile…
we keep it, just in case.
“It’s probably too old to eat,”
my mother likes to say.
“But I don’t think it’s old enough
for me to throw away.”
It stays there for a month or more
to ripen in the cold,
and soon we notice fuzzy clumps
of multicolored mold.
The clumps are larger every day,
we notice this as well,
but mostly what we notice
is a certain special smell.
When finally it all becomes
a nasty mess of slime,
my mother takes it out, and says,
“Apparently, it’s time.”
She dumps it in the garbage can,
though not without regret,
then fills that space with other food
that’s not so ancient yet.