"I Say It's Spinach..."

Otherwise known as "the Mom story" and always worth repeating at this time of year.

I don't think I fall into the "picky eater" category, but I do have a list of foods I don't like. Cooked green vegetables are at the top. I'll eat salad veggies any day, but boil those suckers and turn 'em limp and you insult my digestion.

In any case, I tell people I was the only kid in school who hated weekends. Religiously obeying my pediatrician, Mom fed me the three foods I hated most in the world on Friday and Saturday (always those days because my dad loved routine and we ate the same kind of food on the same day of the week all the time).

Friday night was fish. Now, I'm not totally adverse to fish. Shellfish make me swoon. Crab I'll eat until I'm stuffed. I love steamers, clam chowder, scallops broiled in butter, shrimp scampi, the rare bit of lobster (I was 54 before I ate my first lobster roll—that stuff is just too expensive!), and tuna fish. I've even been known to eat a few bites of salmon steak if it's been cooked nicely and has a fruity sauce upon it to kill the fish taste. But I hate your run-of-the-mill freshwater and especially saltwater fish. Mom bought what she could afford at the little cinderblock fish market once on Park Avenue, and this usually ended up being haddock or halibut. Worse, the only way my parents would eat fish was breaded and fried. I hate foods with coatings, whether it's battered or bread crumbed: fried chicken, chicken fried steak, fried appetizers, etc. When I eat a food, I want to taste the food, not this noxious grainy coating that too often has that even more noxious condiment, pepper, in it. (The one exception to this rule is onion rings.)

I'd sit there on Friday nights and try to pick the middle out of the breaded fish, but Mom had always breaded 'em too well. The bread crumbs were well mixed into the flaky fish flesh and I'd end up disgustedly digesting fishy flesh and flaky fried bits.

Saturday afternoon was scrambled eggs. Remember, this was the 1960s, back in the days when no one worried about cholesterol and eggs were "good for you." You were supposed to eat one or two every day.

As far as I'm concerned, eggs belong in cake batters. Mom got around this dislike by having me drink an eggnog every morning. This was also back in the days when no one made a fuss about salmonella in chicken eggs—we got our eggs fresh from Stamps Farm out on Scituate Avenue, where you could hear the chickens from where you stood buying the eggs—and she could make me a real eggnog, not those gloppy, thick, oversweetened concoctions that show up in cans and bottles before Christmas. She beat one egg, one cup of whole milk, and a teaspoon of sugar, and I drank the delicious beverage without a quibble. On frigid winter mornings when the thermometer barely rose to double digits, totally supported by the same pediatrician mentioned earlier, she would put a tablespoonful of brandy into it—can you imagine a doctor recommending this today for an elementary school kid? My pediatrician did; in fact when Mom told him about the brandy and the amount, he teased her: "Cheapskate!"

Now, granted, if you have to eat an egg, scrambled is the way to go. But even that she got down me only forkful by desperate forkful for Saturday lunch.

Saturday supper was the worst. If the spinach I had to eat wasn't bad enough, she cooked it Italian style. This mean you sauteed the wretched stuff in olive oil until it was limp and saturated with this greasy warm coating. Even with the oil poured off it was slimy and nasty. But this was the way she had been brought up to cook spinach and the way my dad enjoyed it.

(Many years later I figured it might have been the oil that I hated, not the spinach, so one day when a salad bar was offering spinach salad, I gave it a try. No dice. As far as I'm concerned, the taste of spinach is as bad as sucking on the monkey bars in the schoolyard.)

Anyway, I ate this wretched concoction for years, through three schools, several best friends, three presidencies, hippies, Vietnam, changing mores on TV, bellbottom pants, the maxi skirt, the decline of Downtown Providence—you get the idea. (Cue nostalgic film montage...)

One Saturday evening when I had just turned seventeen I was sitting at the table. Mom had just started to get the utensils out for dinner and I was considering setting the table; it was a little early but I might as well get it over with. And we were talking.

She took out the smallest, tiniest saucepan she used for the spinach (and boiling water for tea) and I said, "You know what? I can't wait until I turn eighteen."

She laughed. "Are you going to go out on your own and leave us?"

My parents and I got along very well 99 percent of the time and I shook my head. "Of course not. But at eighteen I'll be an adult and be able to make some of my own decisions." Now, mind you, I tried not to swear in front of my mother. Like Ralphie from A Christmas Story I still lived in everlasting dread of getting my mouth washed out with soap. But I had to make my point. "And then I won't ever have to eat that goddamned spinach ever again."

She put the saucepan down and blinked at me, not even scolding me for "that word." "You really don't like it that much?"

Heavens, parents can be so dense sometimes. "I hate it, Mom. It tastes awful and greasy and nasty and it makes me sick to the stomach."

At that time I took vitamin supplements. So she sighed and said, "Well, you're healthy enough. Okay, you don't have to eat it anymore."

If I wasn't flabbergasted enough by that, she added, "Good, then I won't have to eat it any more either. I hate spinach."

Blink. "You what?"

"I hate spinach. I've always hated it, but the doctor said it was good for you, so I ate it, too, to show you a good example."

My mother ate something she hated for sixteen years every Saturday night just to show me a good example.

If that ain't Mother Love, I don't know what is.