Good morning! This will be short and sweet as I am going to run up to Mission Hills Library to catch a discussion of Proust's Swann's Way. Theodore will obligingly drop me off for an hour. How he will amuse himself I do not know; perhaps he will come into the library and read the Wall Street Journal, or go to Trader Joe's.
This post is less about oysters than about the title up there. I chose that title yesterday (an arresting one, isn't it?) as a tribute to a theme written by my son Alexander many years ago, entitled, "Artillery Then and Now." This effort is bound up into a red folder and bradded in strongly. It has a title page, and in every way conforms, I am sure, to the instructions for its presentation. I look at it every now and then when I want to enjoy a gentle laugh.
Is it wrong to laugh at our children? Of course not, if we don't mock them to their faces. It is good to have a little laugh once in a while at the absurdities they practice as they work their way up to committing adult absurdities, is it not? I am lucky enough to have preserved some of the writing efforts of my kids, all seriously marked and commented upon by the teachers lucky enough to have them in their classes.
I would also like to report that they turn the tables on us when they are grown up and do not hesitate to indulge in rollicksome merriment when advised on topics such as finances, ailments, personal health, intestinal parasites amongst their restless children, the coming collapse of the USA as we know it, and vitamins. Among other topics. And they do not trouble themselves to be discreet either.
Back to oysters. My mother allowed us to put catsup on seafood when we wanted to. I thought that was wise, for some kids just have too active imaginations. If catsup makes something more palatable, let 'em use it. I did that for my kids, and they cheerfully ate any amount of liver, strange seafood, or anything else as long as I allowed them catsup.
The only things they ever refused to eat, period, were : eggplant, which turned out to be because I put green pepper in the mix, and an asparagus quiche I once made (it was simply delicious, at the beginning of the quiche era when we used all the eggs we wanted and made the whole thing with lots of rich whipping cream). NOBODY would go near that quiche, which proves that the boy is father of the man.
Now, in those days, my readers, kids ate at the table in our house or they did not eat at all. After the big refusal, I offered to make anyone who cared enough to purchase it, an alternative--a cheese sandwich for twenty five cents. Alex and Greg were broke and had to go hungry, but the youngest, Ben, went upstairs to his room and searched around for ages and finally came down with twenty five cents. Gregory told me many years later that he would never forget the sound of Ben rooting around in the toy box for those coins. I didn't think of offering catsup for the quiche, but I would have if I'd thought of it.
Right now, all the oysters in Port Isabel are freezing in record low temperatures in their oil-sludged beds at the mouth of the Rio Grande, at the conjuction of river, bay and Gulf. I pray they survive in good health for the delectation of all of us. I seem to have gotten away, largely, from the subject of oysters and onto the subject of kids. Aren't they wonderful? Oysters, and kids? YAZZYBEL
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