Despite being born in a time of plenty I was a skinny underweight kid. Because I had no hips a belt was always unsuccessful, even when my dad with a nail and hammer put extra holes to tighten it further. Suspenders did the job but when I ran my pants were free to bob up and down, like a ball at the end of a bolo bat. So naturally my parents’ focus was to encourage me to eat anything and everything so that I would, in their words, put on some beef. My mother’s hand-wringing mantra was “eat, eat, eat”.
My brother Bill was born the day before I turned four years old and arrived home at our upstairs Fourth Avenue flat a few weeks later. I took a keen but brief interest in this new creature. My mother assured me that he was a future friend and playmate. My initial curiosity waned however when at the change table, about nose height, I observed what this little guy was doing in his diaper, a disgusting yellow paste.
A few short days after that discovery, I watched as my father prepared a mustard paste for our Sunday roast beef. It was the conjunction of these two events that lead to my early aversion to mustard.
Over the next months my distaste for what had been my favourite foods, hot dogs and hamburgers, grew as I watched my parents and older siblings wolf these down, fully laden with mustard. My parents expressed concern with my expanding reluctance to eat as I suspect they feared that their already slight son would suffer from the conditions associated with malnutrition. They coaxed me with un-mustarded offerings but these were poor imitations and only reinforced my memory of brother Bill’s change table delicacy. Almost two hamburger seasons passed and I still held fast to my conviction.
I might have faded away to a sliver of nothingness but for the fact that I was discovering a universe outside of my immediate family.
