Thumper

Author’s Note: It’s that time of year again for a short break so loyal Laughable Feast readers will be treated (or subjected) to a few weeks of summer reruns. Some of you have seen these golden oldies before, and may even remember them, but many haven’t so hopefully these posts from three or four years ago have stood the test of time. The summer lineup is as follows:

July 3rd – Discovering Lewis & Clark

July 10th – Romper Room

July 17th – The Doctor Will See You Now

July 24th – The Pink Slip

July 31st – Thumper

August 7th – Pick Up the Pieces

August 14th – Mad Man

August 21st – Lawnmower Man

August 28th – Dude, Where’s My Brain

I hope you all have a wonderful summer. We’ll be back with fresh cooking for the Laughable Feast table on September 4th.

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Thumper

I was a shy, retiring kid who didn’t have much outlet for sharing my feelings and frustrations. So, it was of great comfort that our dinner table was a place where we gathered nightly, and on Sunday mornings, to discuss the goings-on at work and school and with friends and family, and just laugh and love and sometimes cry over spilled milk. No, sadly, that was some other kid’s dinner table. Our evening meal was an hour-long interrogation that assiduously avoided any subject involving human emotion, was served with bland and often inedible food, and a place where spilled milk was treated as a felony.

Of course my father laid down the law of the table, and among the enumerated crimes and misdemeanors there was a strictly enforced rule in our house that only one person was to speak at a time.

I learned from occasionally dining elsewhere that this rule did not exist in other households, or at least was not enforced, and the result was a loud cacophony over dinner with multiple conversations taking place at the same time whereby absolutely no one had any understanding of what was being said even by themselves. Again, I was the shy, retiring type so I actually liked and fully supported the one-person-at-a-time rule. Unfortunately, Warden AO’s interpretation was that the one person talking was almost always him. Oh sure, my mother was required to submit regular social calendar updates, which were always poorly received, and my sister and I were occasionally called upon to report our progress in the educational system, but we were only given very short speaking slots and this inevitably led to a stern lecture about how I was ruining my future by getting a B in shop class.

But about the food. Mom, I know you’re up there and I love you, and although not a paid subscriber you’re no doubt a regular reader, so forgive me for what I’m about to say.

It’s not that the food was inedible it’s just that it wasn’t edible. Mary simply wasn’t a very good cook. To put it another way, frozen Swanson’s TV dinners were a significant upgrade and something we actually begged for, even if we had to eat them off those flimsy little folding TV trays that collapsed with alarming regularity.

Anyway, believe it or don’t, she graduated from Oregon State University (nee College) with a degree in home economics, and you’d think the curriculum for that particular four-year program would include teaching students how to cook. To be fair, my mother went to school in the 1930s so preparing a nutritious and delicious meal back then wasn’t as easy as ordering Hello Fresh or calling DoorDash. Remember also that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was probably still in its first edition and even the careful cook couldn’t be sure about the sources of the meat they bought and what if any sanitation practices were being used. Which is to say meat was dangerous and could kill you. So the standard precaution taught to responsible homemakers was to cook the bejesus out of any meat product and serve it with the same internal temperature as the sun.

I developed exceptionally strong jaw muscles because of this practice, and the meat still tasted somewhat like beef or pork or lamb or whatever, but that wasn’t the worst part of dinner.

On the other end of the chewability spectrum were the side dishes, which were almost exclusively canned vegetables and mashed potatoes that came in a box. These are the foodstuffs I referred to earlier as inedible.

In mom’s defense, the post-WWII boom was an exciting time in America when refrigeration was relatively new, canning and freezing was the stuff of science fiction, and products were being whisked all over the country on our brand-new interstate highway system and delivered to a supermarket near you. It was also a revelation that canned and frozen food could be stored for eternity, or at least until the first thermonuclear war, so the thinking at the time was why buy fresh products when you can enjoy the everlasting life and convenience of cans and boxes and it tastes just the same. It was also thought at the time that cigarettes were harmless.

But that lecture on the history of food safety only was necessary because I want to tell you about the rather odd collection of household pets we imprisoned, and one in particular. Stay with me.

Aside from our sturdy black labrador Mercury, there were a couple of goldfish who regularly died but were miraculously reincarnated by my mother, a couple of turtles who died and were not reincarnated because they were stinky, an ant farm which truly stretches the definition of pets, and a parrot named Thumper.

It was another one of my father’s ironclad rules that we were not permitted to leave the table until we ate everything on our plates. This practice dates back to the depression and I understand the reasoning, but, as I said a moment ago, much of what was on our plates was inedible. You do the math. This situation led to many a Mexican standoff at the dinner table between me and AO. Even my sister was unable to use her perfidious powers to bend this particular rule which did give me some small measure of satisfaction.

Now, if you’ve never had the pleasure, understand that canned asparagus and peas are foodstuffs whose ungodly color and vile odor are more reminiscent of baby poo, and when touched even lightly by a fork will collapse into a fibrous mass.

So during these tense protracted affairs, I would try heroically to swallow whatever the poo du jour was and after gagging it back onto the plate my father would glare at me and bark “Eat, Eric.” I don’t want to belabor my mother’s lack of culinary chops, but the dog wouldn’t eat this stuff so there really was no escape.

My sister eventually devised what I had to admit was a brilliant scheme surreptitiously wrapping the poo in her napkin and pretending it was necessary to take that to the bathroom with her. This ploy had great efficacy because AO was informed by Mary not to interfere with “girl problems”. And that left me at the table to face him alone.

Which brings me back to the parrot. Parrots of course invented parroting, and as far as I can tell it’s pretty much all they do except squawk loudly and poop. Or, all they’re supposed to do but Thumper was a slow learner and by no means an A-list performer. Despite nearly daily sessions, we were unsuccessful getting him to say even standard stuff like “hello” or “pretty bird” let alone graduate-level parroting like “my name’s Thumper” or “Polly wanna cracker”.

Eventually we decided he was retarded and gave up. I’m not sure if he did it out of revenge for the reproving comments, or maybe he secretly attended Toastmasters or something, but soon thereafter he began his career as a public speaker. And all of his speeches consisted of two words: “Eat, Eric.”

This became his standard stump speech and one he thrilled in giving all day every day. The fact that he could, and often did, vary the tone of his voice somehow made it even more annoying. You probably can see where this is going but it didn’t take long for my father to realize that because of that little, feathered martinet, he no longer had to be present at the table during our Mexican standoffs. I lost count of how many nights I sat glumly pushing stringy asparagus or mushy peas around on my plate, while the bird harangued me, until dear mother Mary mercifully dropped the curtain on the cage and removed my plate.

Thumper died about a year after finding his voice and I was not at all sorry. Eventually my father softened his stance on cleaning my plate, or more likely simply got sick of the nightly ritual, and I never again had to choke down canned asparagus or peas, but the emotional scars run deep and to this day I have to be physically restrained whenever I see a parrot.