<p>Poor dogs and cats…</p>
<p>P.S. Now that I’ve got your attention… When I was six-and-a-half and growing up in New York City, and having just experienced bouts with chicken pox, mumps, and measles, all in the space of four months (maybe rubella, too – this has become the stuff of family mythology), apparently I was dehydrated, and absolutely refused to eat. (My maladies all had the positive benefit, by the way, of keeping me out of school.) I won’t chalk up my refusal to my mother’s now legendary status as a lousy cook (in case she’s reading this, I don’t want to damage her self-esteem, so let me rephrase: I applaud her for putting in all that effort in attempting to feed us all [even if that included the infamous lungen stew (beef lungs), now banned for human consumption by the Food and Drug Administration – See, there really is a God, and He takes pity upon the abject plight of little children. This being written during the summer Olympics, I thus hereby award her a shiny 27th place medal in double boiler. (My mother could burn soup or frozen vegetables in a double boiler.) And to make sure I get this right, I shouldn’t say she is a lousy cook; it’s just that her cooking is abominable]. I wouldn’t have known any better about the food at the time. </p>
<p>No, I expect that the combination of being six-and-half, having lost control of my body, and having my mother chasing me around the house and neighborhood with a fork was enough to make me realize that regulating my own food and water intake was one of the few places I could actually exert some power and realize even the barest modicum of autonomy. Fuming, screaming, and crying not having succeeded, my mother (who was yet to become a first-grade teacher) resorted to gold stars for eating.</p>
<p>Now I didn’t care in the least about the gold stars. But 50 stars accumulated and I “earned” a toy gun. And so I ate. To this day, I remember heading out to the toy store on Union Turnpike, my mother having decided that she wouldn’t buy plastic, and so I got a terrific one, with a shiny wooden stock and metal barrel. All of a piece with my Davey Crockett cap (poor raccoon, although maybe it was ersatz). Fantasy gunplay for six- and seven-year-olds makes very healthy good sense. It is one place they (we!) can express autonomy and some power over a world of which we rarely have any other control. Except in doing the Gandhi no-food thing.</p>
<p>Food wars continued for years thereafter. Gold stars were lost to the repertory. And every time she praised a few forkfuls, I felt that I had engaged in an act of self-betrayal. I learned to hide and dispose of food I wouldn’t eat (occasionally got caught, too), and to beg to be allowed to do my “homework”. I was now a legendary poor eater (two legends in one family! But I better rephrase that: I wasn’t a poor eater; I just consistently didn’t eat. Except at grandma’s.</p>
<p>I am writing this essay 56 years later from my elderly mother’s apartment in Florida. I’m probably 20 pounds overweight, and almost fine with it. My mother just burned the turkey meat sauce, made from the overabundant leftovers from what could have won this year’s summer Olympics as the world’s worst turkey meatloaf. No self-respecting turkey should be subjected to being made into my mother’s meatloaf. There is blue and gray smoke filling every corner of the four-room apartment, and, sitting on the balcony overlooking the outhouse on the golf course, my eyes are tearing up. Well, at least we’ll be able to go out and have Chinese. As we leave the apartment, we see there is a red fire truck parked out front. Not for us, though.</p>
<p>“How often does this happen?” I ask her. “Oh, about once a week,” she replies, both unselfconsciously and unapologetically. The end of the turkey is clearly not a blow to her self-esteem. She is still 27th in double boiler. With a medal and a trophy. And a cherry on top.</p>
<p>(P.S. We had some Bloombergs living down the street…)</p>
(I attribute this law to the FDA having visited my mother on that special night…)</p>