This is a tale of deception and avoidance.
A story of cunning and guile.
A confession from an ignoble past.
Our story begins in 1969 in a kitchen which, due to factors both economic and cultural, is short on fresh fruits and vegetables.
The economics of the household would best be described as "living on a shoestring" and the cultural background as anglo-saxon, northern European.
Which means that, when it comes to food, we either freeze it, can it, pickle it, or boil it to death.
This brings us to a staple of the 1960's dinner table and the crux of our story.
Frozen Mixed Vegetables.
Frozen Mixed Vegetables With Lima Beans.
I don't know whose brilliant idea it was to take a perfectly good bag of peas, corn kernels and diced carrots and muck it up with lima beans, but, if I ever meet him, it ain't going to be pretty.
Here's the thing about lima beans. Their flavor falls into a category - along with coffee and cabbage - that overpowers any and every other ingredient they keep company with.
And there are some of us (guess who) who have a very sensitive gag reflex. So sensitive that even a hint of lima bean - even the aroma of a lima bean - spurs us to upchuck.
Now, we may not have had Frozen Mixed Vegetables With Lima Beans every single night for dinner - I mean, how could we have had them every single night - but, in my memory, we did.
Which is where the cunning and guile comes in.
Because there came a point at which my sister and I decided that we had choked down our last lima bean.
From then on, dinner became a sort of chess match between us and our parents. We won, not only by not eating the dreaded lima beans, but by convincing them that we had.
Gambit number one (and my personal favorite) was invented by my sister. It was easy and almost foolproof. You simply put the lima beans into your mouth, pretended to eat them, and then took a drink of milk. You then spit the lima beans into the glass of milk where they drifted down to the bottom and waited for dish clearing time. Success depended on two things. First, not exceeding the milk glass's capacity to conceal the lima beans (the average glass was good for about 9 beans before they would start to show at the edges) and, secondly, you had to be allowed to clear your own dishes and wash the whole mess down the drain before anyone noticed.
Gambit two was the hardest. It involved sleight of hand, timing and luck. Sleight of hand in that you had to get the lima beans into your hand without anyone noticing. Timing in that you had only a narrow window of opportunity to get those lima beans down to where the dog was waiting. And luck in that you had to hope that the dog by your feet - there were two - was the one who would actually eat a lima bean. If you got the other dog, the lima bean hater, you were not only out of luck, but also usually caught, as the dog would take the lima bean, make a sort of smacking sound while he diagnosed its edibility, and then a spitting sound as he ejected it.
Gambit three depended upon the parents losing patience with your refusal to eat your vegetables and leaving the room while grounding you to the table. Once you were alone in the room, it was a matter of stealth. The goal was to get the unwanted vegetables back into the serving pot which involved leaving the oak kitchen chair, (which squeaked) tiptoeing across the wooden floor, (which also squeaked) getting the lid off the pot (which clanked) and back on again (another clank), and getting back to your place at the table where you could call out musically "I'm finished...." If you were quiet enough and convincing enough, they would buy it.
Gambit four was the easiest but also brought the harshest consequence when you were ultimately caught. We ate dinner at an antique pedestal table that could be opened up to add wooden table leaves, thus expanding it for guests. Which meant that underneath the table was a warren of nooks and crannies into which you could insert unwanted food. As with gambit two, sleight of hand skills were required. You also had to be sitting near a spot with an opening, which wasn't always possible. An advantage to this approach was the delay of punishment - one tended only to get caught when, two or three times a year, the table got opened for company. At that time, a multitude of dried up breadcrusts (another unpopular item around our house - we would eat the centers out of our sandwiches but then stash the crusts in the table) and other now completely unrecognizable food items would spill out onto the floor. When that happened, you hoped you had the good fortune to be elsewhere because the parental wrath was high and the punishment rarely extended beyond the child that happened to be in the room.
At some point, the lima beans stopped showing up at dinner. I'm not really sure when it was. It may have coincided with my mother going back to work and family dinners becoming more of a rarity. Or maybe she just got tired of the chess match.
Or maybe she wanted to - just once - open that table up without dealing with moldy bits of food.
I've never had the nerve to ask.....
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