Suzy Says

This morning’s soundtrack: Elvis Costello’s Get Happy. The fact that all the music I have on minidisc is at least 15 years old makes me feel old myself. Maybe the music of one’s youth always sounds best. And with my short attention span and hair-trigger boredom reflex, songs that are 3 minutes or less are perfect. No long guitar solos for me.

With one thing and another, John didn’t have time to do a love/hate this week. Instead, I will reveal the schizophrenic contents of our refrigerator.

It appears that one’s upbringing, however resisted at the time, can still have lasting effects. Indeed, one often reverts to the very things that were rebelled against. My parents limited how much TV we watched, so we basically didn’t watch any, except when we were at friends’ houses. We lived in the country and played outside a lot, and when we were inside, we read or our parents read to us. Our cottage in Maine, where we spent the summers, didn’t have a TV or a phone, just a radio. I never got used to violence on TV or in the movies, so I still find it shocking and upsetting and often can’t look, though my tolerance level has risen since I married John.

Whereas John stayed up late watching horror movies with his father, with the condition that he had to be able to get up and go to school the next day. If he couldn’t, even once, no more late-night movie festivals. This turned out to be good practice for getting up very early for work as a grown-up. And he can watch (and read) scary and disgusting and horrifying things that would give me nightmares. It’s the early conditioning, I’m convinced of it.

The same goes for food. Just think of Proust and his madeleine. At my house, Dad made a great dinner every night, and we always ate together and talked about our day. I also learned which forks to use and so on. My parents gave us whole grain bread, no soda, no junk food. So at my friends’ houses, I loved eating Wonder bread, potato chips, cake made from cake mix, and other delicacies that could not be found at our house. But as an adult, I wouldn’t dream of eating that crap. For a few months, I worked across the street from the Wonder bread factory, and the smell was quite vomitable, as Peter Lorre would say.

But John was raised on and still loves that crap. So our refrigerator has a split personality:

Suzy
Alvarado Street bakery multi-grain bread (with the cute kitty on the label).

Sugarless jam (usually marmalade).

Odwalla tangerine juice when in season.

Fruit (strawberries, grapes, etc.).

Variations of mustard: Mendocino mustard, Maille dijon with tarragon, seedy Grey Poupon, Dijon with cassis (blackcurrant).

Cornichons (tiny French pickles).

Liter bottles of Calistoga sparkling mineral water, various flavors (lemon is my least favorite). I really do think I drink enough water every day. And I buy organic wherever possible. Hey, my father got DDT banned. I was brought up to be environmentally conscious and can’t help myself.

John

White bread (not actually Wonder bread, but Wonderbread-esque).

Creamy peanut butter.

Aerosol cheese (but to be fair, he also has excEt 5 year old Canadian cheddar).

Stashes of Canadian delicacies (Crunchie bars, Maltesers, Coffee Crisp, Aero bars — further proof of early conditioning). I never got a taste for cheap, waxy milk chocolate as used by Cadbury and Hershey. Give me Baci or Valrhona or forget it. Milk does not belong in chocolate.

French’s squeeze bottle bright yellow mustard; Heinz ketchup (secretly lusts after green squeeze bottle ketchup).

Vlasic pre-sliced dill pickles.

Soda (ginger ale, Coke, Lemon Pepsi, Dr. Pepper), never diet. Ever.

You may be wondering why we refrigerate bread. I have one word for you: Jack. If we leave it out, anywhere within jumping distance, she’ll tear open the wrapper and eat it. Yes, just bread. And yes, she is a cat.