Poor Starving Kids

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

Sometimes you make a meal and it just doesn’t turn out how you thought it would. There have been times my wife and I made something that sounded great, but the outcome didn’t match the expectations. We made Thai food once and it was good, but we thought we’d change a few things and it would be better. Unfortunately, it wasn’t, nobody really liked it and we threw most of it away.

There are times my kids don’t really want what we’re having for dinner. When they were younger, they had to have at least a little of everything, otherwise they would have lived on Mac and Cheese, chicken nuggets, peanut butter sandwiches and Cheerios. We didn’t guilt them out over not eating a lot of the food; we just told them that there was no dessert if they didn’t eat the spoonful of whatever we put on their plates. Seriously, one spoonful of green beans is not a lot, especially if dessert is on the line. Now that they’re teenagers, if they don’t like what we’re having for dinner, they can make something for themselves. They’re fully capable of cooking for themselves without burning down the house.

When I was a kid, there were a few meals that I just didn’t like and did what I could to get out of eating. My all-time least favorite meal was liver and onions. I guess it was one of my father’s favorites, so even though we only had it every once in a while, it was too often. I’d complain that it was too dry and I couldn’t chew it. Mom would say to cut it into smaller pieces. I’d complain that I didn’t like the taste of it. Mom would say it tastes just like steak if you put ketchup on it. I’d complain that I didn’t like the way it looked, or smelled… or something. Mom would say to mix it in with my mashed potatoes. If any of us complained too long or too loud, she brought out the line that told us the complaining was over: “There are starving kids in Biafra who would love to have what you’re having!”

Biafra? I had never heard of Biafra, except from Mom. I used to think, “Wait a second, is that even a real place?” Usually, one of us would say, “There’s no such place as Bee-afra.” Sometimes, one of us would get bold and would even dare to say, “Then send it to them!” To which the reply was usually something to the effect of “Be quiet, be thankful you have food to eat and eat your supper.” And that was the end of that.

Much to my surprise, I found out years later that Biafra really did exist, at least for a little while. I also found out that a lot of people my age got the “There are starving people in…” line from their parents. For some, it was China, or Africa, or Cambodia. One or two even got Biafra, so my mother wasn’t alone. All of us had the same kind of (mostly) silent reaction, which was to send whatever meal it was to those people and let us have something we like.

As I got a little older, I often wondered what mothers in other countries told their kids. Did they have the same set of poor starving countries, or did they have a different set? Maybe kids in England heard about poor starving kids in India; kids in France heard about poor starving kids in Bangladesh; kids in Switzerland or Sweden heard about poor starving kids in Russia. Who knows, maybe kids in Russia heard about poor starving kids in America as a propaganda tool. Wherever you grew up, there were always poor starving kids somewhere else who would just love to eat what you were having for dinner – without complaining.

But I think that was a lie. Maybe we should have sent those meals to poorer countries and just watched what happened. I can just picture those poor kids having to eat liver and onions three or four times a week from all the American kids who didn’t like it, maybe with beets or brussel sprouts. I can just hear the kids saying, “NOT LIVER AND ONIONS AGAIN! I’m NOT eating that. It’s DISGUSTING! And these beets look like hardened BLOOD!” Their Mom would look at them with that hurt face and say, “There are nice people in America who sacrificed to send that to us. You’ll eat it and you’ll LIKE IT! Now put some ketchup on it, if you don’t like the taste. Then you’ll know what steak tastes like!”

If they had to choose between liver and onions or going to bed hungry, I’d put my money on them going to bed hungry. I would have if I had the choice, but I didn’t, and that’s probably why I still don’t eat liver, with or without onions. I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich. That way I could still have dessert.

Dish Art

“Who’s been using my dish?”

Standing in the middle of the office was a coworker holding up one of those ugly dishes that most people would be glad to see disappear from their home kitchen. No one said they had used it, so he went on to explain that he knew someone had been using it. How did he know? Because there was still something brown on the plate and he wasn’t quite sure what it was. So, again, he asked who had used it. He was standing where he could see a good number of people and still no one admitted they had used it.

“I’m watching your faces and your reactions, so I’ll know who it was.”

After not getting an answer, he went back into the lunch room. When I went to the lunch room to rinse out my own container, he was washing his dish and some other stuff that people had left in the sink. People were laughing and he was joking about it, too. He was even looking at the clean stuff in the dish rack and taking some of it back out and washing it again because it wasn’t very clean.

“Look at this stuff. Do you know how much bacteria is probably growing here? It’s like a science experiment!” He was laughing as he said it, so I know he wasn’t too serious.

One of the women in the lunch room asked if he was going to dry things, too, which started a conversation about whether we just wash or wash and dry. Seeing as there were only four women and five men in the room, I wouldn’t call this a scientific study, but it seems that men just wash and leave things, while the women wash and dry.

A few minutes later, another male coworker arrived and added his two-cents worth, and probably the funniest line of the day. He explained how at home, he washes things and then piles them up in the dish rack. But he doesn’t just stack them, he gets creative. He calls what he does “dish art”, and he went on to explain how he piles up as much stuff as he possibly can. He also purposely leaves items sticking out, and his wife and kids need to be careful when they put things away. It’s almost like playing Jenga; one wrong move and the whole pile is going to come tumbling down.

When I was a kid, we had a whole bunch of dishwashers, none of them an appliance. We took turns washing and drying them as part of our chores. After a day at our house, there were a lot of cups, glasses, dishes, forks, knives and spoons, plus a few pots and pans. They all had to be washed, dried and put away. I used to hate when it was down to the last item and I thought I was done, and then someone brought over more stuff, especially when they had that goofy smile on their face. I think they were waiting for just the right moment to drop off their load and squash my happiness at being done. They probably quickly went around the house and found anything that needed to be washed. Heck, they probably got an extra drink or two of milk, using a clean glass each time, just to make more. OK, OK, so that was me that did that to them – sometimes the memories get jumbled.

Even though our house was not the neatest, you could always count on the cups, glasses, dishes and silverware being clean. No funky brown residue left on a plate, no hardened sour milk in the bottom of a glass, and no leftover mashed potatoes between the fork tines. Mom and Dad would have never stood for that. Your coworkers, if they’re like mine, probably would.

What the Heck

A town near where I live has decided that they’ve had enough of profanity in public and has passed a law that could get you a $20 fine for using off-color language while out and about. According to the local newspaper, “Officials in Middleborough say it's not intended to crack down on free speech or censor private conversation but, instead, is in response to the loud, profanity-heavy language used by teens and young adults in the town.” I’m not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I agree that many teens and young adults can be loud and can use “profanity-heavy language.” I also agree that it can be offensive at times and I was especially sensitive to it when my kids were younger. Unfortunately, I learned they were hearing this stuff every day on the school bus and in the hallways around school. Most PG and PG-13 movies have some kind of profanity in them (a PG-13 movie can drop the F-bomb up to four times as long as it doesn’t have a sexual meaning), so kids hear it in movies, too. Let’s be real. Kids are hearing it at home from their parents, too, and quite a few, let’s say “more mature” adults, can use as much profanity as younger people.

On the other hand, I don’t agree with a law like this because you cannot legislate morality, just like you cannot outlaw stupidity. Teenagers have always had their own sayings, phrases, words and terms of profanity. I’m not going to lie; we did, too, when I was a teenager. Here’s the difference between now and then: we were respectful to adults around us, especially elderly people, while today kids just blurt it out without thinking twice. When we used to take the bus to the mall in the next town, we talked amongst ourselves and goofed around, but we never swore in front of an elderly woman, let alone dropped the F-bomb.

I remember one time during the winter when we went to play ice hockey and I got asked to play with the older kids. I knew it was only because they didn’t have enough players, but I didn’t care. I was playing with the big guys. However, I wasn’t doing that well and at one point I gave away the puck to someone on the other team who then scored a goal. In the meantime, I did one of those moving-every-part-of-your-body-moves to try and keep my balance, succeeded for a brief moment, then failed and went crashing down. Needless to say, everybody laughed and I was embarrassed. To compensate, and to make myself look cooler, I let out a string of profanities containing everything I could think of. One of the older kids looked at me and asked me if I even knew what half of the swears I just said meant. I mumbled that I didn’t, and he told me to go sit on the side for a few. I looked to one of my brothers for help and he just shook his head and told me to go. I don’t think I ever got back into that game again.

Later that day on the way home, my brothers talked with me about the incident. I learned that you can’t just blurt out a string of profanity in public any time you want, that you have to exercise a little self-control and watch what you say. I got home a little wiser; humbled, but a little wiser. Things like this happened occasionally when I was a kid, in organized sports leagues, around the neighborhood, and at school. It didn’t take a $20 fine to curb our profanity 40 years ago. All it took was someone willing to speak up and tell us to watch our language, or to pull us aside and ask us how our Mom would feel if she heard us speaking that way. The look on her face would have hurt a hundred times more than shelling out $20. That would have been too high a price to exercise my right to free speech.

Dream A Little Dream With Me

I’ve been reading a book called “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak, and one of the main characters has a bad dream every night. The story is set in Germany during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the poor little girl, named Liesel, saw her brother die while on a train going to live with a foster family. They are then forced off the train at the next stop where the boy is unceremoniously buried. Liesel understandably does not want to leave her Mom, the only family she has left. Every night she dreams of her older brother dying in their mother’s arms.

I can relate to Liesel having nightmares. When I was a kid there was a time where I had a nightmare almost every night. I think part of the reason I did was because I had such a vivid imagination. The things I dreamed about sometimes were a whole lot scarier than anything that was on TV back then, and at that age I had never seen a horror movie. OK, I have to admit that up to about age 12, when Miss Gulch turned into the wicked witch in “The Wizard of Oz”, I was a little freaked out. I think it was because she reminded me of someone I knew, maybe a teacher.

The main nightmare I used to have started when I was about nine years old. A man, whose face I could never see, with a black leather hat and a black leather jacket with a high collar, would come out of the closet holding a big, sharp knife in his right hand and he was coming to get me. I could tell that knife was really sharp, just by the way the little bit of light in the room twinkled on the edge of it. And even though I couldn’t see his face I knew he had an evil grin on that shadowy face. The funny thing is, I never thought that the evil man was coming after my younger brother who shared the bedroom with me. Nope, he was just after me.

It also didn’t matter if we left the closet door open or closed, I still had the same vision of the guy coming after me. If it was open, he just slowly appeared; first his shadowy face, then his leather clad arm and then that big sharp knife as he stepped out of the closet. If the door was closed, the door would slowly and almost noiselessly open, and then the guy would slowly appear as when the door was open. I did the only thing a kid could do against a closet creeper – I screamed and then I ran. In the blink of an eye, I was out of bed, out of my bedroom and up the hallway, running to safety. Usually, one of my parents caught me before I got far up the hallway.

However, there were a few times, they weren’t quick enough. As added detail, let me tell you that we had a dog back then and we put a board across the divide between the living room and the dining room to keep him in the dining room at night. On one occasion, I ran up the hallway into the living room, jumped over the board, jumped over the dog and went out the door into the back half of the garage where there was a door to the back yard. My three older brothers (the "three middle ones") had a bedroom in the front half of the garage and caught me before I went out of the house into the yard. Where I was going, I have no idea, but I’m glad they stopped me before I got out.

My poor parents had no idea what to do with me. They asked me if someone at school was picking on me (Of course not, I got along with everybody). They asked me if someone in the neighborhood was hurting me (No, nobody touched me because of my older brothers). Unless you counted my own brothers, nobody laid a hand on me or threatened me. Besides, they didn’t really hurt me, at least not enough to rat them out at this time. I think my parents really thought there was something wrong with me, that maybe I needed some professional help.

I also feel bad for my younger brother who shared the room with me. My yelling and screaming startled him out of some peaceful, happy dreams and there were a few times he even decided to run with me. One particular night probably scarred him for life. He was sound asleep, all nice and snuggly in his bed when the knife appeared out of the closet, followed by the faceless man in his leather ensemble. I started my usual nighttime routine and, woken up by my screaming, he started to follow. However, on this night his feet got caught in the blankets and he couldn’t get out. I looked back and saw him thrashing around to get loose and yelling helplessly – he was trapped! It was every boy for himself, and I was out of that room and starting up the hallway. I don’t know who was louder, me or him.

Those nightmares stopped after a while, I don’t really know how long it was, and there was a little more peace at night. Over the years I’ve had people tell me to “follow your dreams”, but in this case I just have to say, “Thanks, but no. I think I’d rather live.” Disney may be able to make your dreams come true, but I think I’d much rather leave them behind. The dreams I had as a young boy, like Liesel’s in the book, are just not worth pursuing.