On the surface my parents would have had to be considered liberal and left-leaning. Certainly they voted that way. Their social views were in line with this, I think. In hindsight, however, I see my upbringing as being quite conservative. I guess it is the same with most beliefs. That which they held most dear they held with such fervour that it could be seen as a form of conservatism: strict in their liberalism. All of this means nothing except that for most of my formative years I was not allowed to eat pre-sweetened cereals or watch a lot of television. Or drink TANG. Remember TANG? TANG has not forgotten you. I loved TANG. A childhood friend drank it and it was a forbidden treat when I would visit his house and have a glass of TANG. My father would screw up his face in displeasure at the thought. That was over 35 years ago. I looked up TANG on the Billabong one-stop shopping website and there it was! And in several different flavours. Well, I am purist when it comes to these things so I ordered a tub of it, classic Astronaut Orange. It arrived the other day. I mixed some up and had a tentative sip. Amazing! It was exactly the same as I remember. Dee-lish! Why we are not all drinking this stuff? I don’t know.
I guess I have to rethink the food thing, because in reality I ate a lot of Jell-O. And hotdogs and Campbell’s Pork and Beans. Also my fair share of Chef- Boy-R-Dee Beef-a-Roni and Ravioli. Then again, I was a just a little guy and my mother had figured out that if I was eating, that as fine, regardless. So who had the distasteful views of these forbidden fruits? Probably my father, who was so strict on himself and with others he could never really relax. His disdain for modern comforts like air-conditioning was offset not long after he left us by his embracing the machinery of mechanical coolants in his own home: central air. The way he looked down on certain restaurants in Provincetown as being beneath us was eventually nullified by his making these places his favourite haunts. Was he aware of the hypocrisy? Maybe. Who cares? I have my TANG.
I was thinking about this because I woke up early this morning, about 04:30. I heard the steady patter of the rain. I started the coffee, fed the cat, brushed my teeth and went out beneath the pergola to say hello to the Cosmos and encountered a minor flood. The drain pipe on my terrace was blocked and about 8 cm of water had pooled on most of the marble balcony. I found a wire clothes hanger, unbent it, and, while being rained on (I was wearing a hat and raincoat) reamed out the top of the pipe. Gurgle, gurgle…and the rater began to flow. As I was doing this I remembered back to how my father would wake up in the middle of a rain storm to go pull a board out of the spillway so the pond wouldn’t overflow. He grew to resent these aspects of his life, those rural elements that distracted him from the urban (and snobbishly urbane) lifestyle he craved. So he left.
After that, the menu was more relaxed. I even ate my fair share of Captain Crunch, another item on the Culinary List of Scorn. It seems that only one of my parents had had such hard and fast beliefs. So were they both liberal or was one more so than the other? Or, perhaps, one was willing to be flexible, more easy-going, than the other and, in the end, more independent. I must not forget that my mother was also one to wake up at 3AM, slip on her rubber boots and barn coat (before it was fashionable) over her pyjamas and trudge out into the rainy gloom, yank a piece of wood from the concrete spillway and go back into the house for a cup of coffee. In fact, she probably did it more often than he did.
It is supposed to rain all day. This is good. The island needs it. It drinks it in and, in a few months, will reward us all with a symphony of wild flowers. I will stay inside as much as I can today, venturing out only to go to the PO. These are familiar rhythms, movements I have learned. I am flexible. I can bend. I can let it go. I have my TANG.
–JDCM
PS: sorry about the size fo the new header, my dental X-ray. I can’t make it smaller and still have it fit.
Love this piece.