She Who Hesitates is Lost

I got invited to India before Paul checked out the travel costs. Did you know that a first-class ticket to India is $14,000? He's not going first class and I'm not going at all. I think if I had flung myself into the whole adventure, had run off to the health department to get my shots and had not asked repeatedly, "Are you sure it's going to be clean and nice like Epcot?" that I probably would not have gotten myself dis- invited.

I'm not great in crowds. I dislike football games for that reason, and also because I really hate football. And I'm a bumpkin kind of tourist, forgetting to watch where I'm going while marveling at the sights. I trust everybody. I have an open kind of face that attracts crazy people. And I try to help them, because I fail to notice that they are crazy. I don't look like I know what I'm doing or where I'm going. I look like a target. Or so Paul tells me.

And then, I'm funny about food. In fact, if I weren't so squeamish and high maintenance about eating at places in St. Martin where there were more flies than people and the "refrigerate after opening" condiments weren't sitting out in 95 degree heat in the sunshine (translation: can't eat there), I probably wouldn't have gotten the, "I think I'd be too worried about whether or not you were having fun to work," discussion. Yes, I'm afraid I'm not the sort you can drop just anywhere and I'll be fine. I'll be fine, but I probably won't eat. (This could be a good weight-loss strategy.) And I have the gift for making everyone with me just as squeamish as I am.

I love Indian food and cook it quite a bit. (One of my favorite cookbooks is Quick and Easy Indian Cooking.) But when it comes to eating it, I need to know what's in it? (My new experiment is with Moroccan cooking -- absolutely delicious. I'll post on that later, once I've gotten the turmeric stains out of my fingernails....)

When we used to go to China Town in Philadelphia, I loved absolutely everything until one day we went to Dim Sum. There were no menus in English. Nobody could tell me what things were on that little cart with all the dishes, but the things I could recognize were chicken feet and duck feet. Nope. If that's what I can recognize, who knows about the things I've never seen before.

I feel a need to apologize for all of this. But I can't help it.

When my sweet mother, child of the Depression, would cook the squirrels that my father and brother would kill, I would skip supper. I didn't eat my grandmother's famous liver mush (what a name!) and in fact couldn't be in the house while it was cooking. I don't eat frogs, though I have eaten snails just because they were a vehicle for garlic. I won't eat goat, prefer not to eat lamb, and wouldn't dream of eating a rabbit. I've eaten Bambi to be polite. I've got a narrow view of what's edible in the animal kingdom. Vegetables and spices are no problem at all.

So what makes this so silly is that I'd probably really enjoy the vegetarian dishes in India. Maybe next time.

In the meantime, we're going to try for a romantic weekend getaway. I have no idea what that would be like.

Comments

[Anwyn]

Liver mush! I too am a child of the Carolinas. It was the only way I would ever touch liver at all. Haven't had it in more than twenty years, I'm sure.

My grandmother never served squirrel or rabbit, however. Well, not to me. They had those quite a bit when my mother and her siblings were growing up, I think.