My mother always loved asparagus. She would usually wait until the spears reached the size of my thumb, then harvest them, boil them endlessly to fill the house with fragrance, and serve them up in a “delightful” cream sauce complimenting their woody texture.
It was like chewing binder twine and swallowing a wad of cotton. Dad would say nothing and eat what Mom served him.
After all, he loved my mother.
As I got older, the mere odor of asparagus caused me to gag and triggered an emotional, guttural reaction whenever I encountered it.
I married an asparagus lover. I put off meeting with asparagus for as long as possible.
However, I finally surrendered to my wife’s desires and bought some asparagus from a friend (we’ll call her Susan).
She was teaching her grandchildren the value of work and money. The children were picking asparagus and selling it. I thought: “Well, at least my money is going for a good cause. I’ll buy this asparagus and deliver it as a peace offering to my wife.”
None of the spears were larger than a lead pencil. I grilled it with some olive oil sprinkled with pepper and garlic salt — no “delightful” cream sauce or bad odor. To my surprise, it was firm but quite tender — no stringy baler twine texture.
I didn’t gag. I actually liked it.
Susan has since made me a hero many times over. The universe changed.
This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Responding to an unpleasant gut experience often becomes a defense mechanism when “fight or flight” takes over and blocks reason. However, it is not reasonable to avoid all women just because one was distasteful. And not all women are like asparagus.
Nov. 27, 2018 — “Trump says his ‘gut’ can tell him more than ‘anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.’” Does this bother you?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to be like-minded. He has just eliminated all members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Vaccine Advisory Board.
He now has a different collection of advisors — many of whom are anti vaxxers. RFK Jr. has also ruled that no CDC scientist may publish his or her research results in major medical journals. Why wouldn’t you want people to see objective research results?
Similarly, the new head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, recently told staff that he was “unaware that the U.S. has a hurricane season.”
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration advises FEMA on the course of storms so that FEMA’s help to the public is in the right place and prepped for a storm disaster.
However, 600 NOAA employees — mostly meteorologists — have been fired, making the accuracy and the timeliness of NOAA’s predictions more questionable and dooming FEMA’s failure.
Weather predictions are called “FOREcasts” for a reason. Florida’s weather broadcasters are already apologizing to their viewers for their safety. Theoretically, Florida’s weathermen have imagined NOAA’s dismantling like closing all the firehouses and telling the public to buy their own hoses.
It seems that federal agencies like FEMA, NOAA and the Department of Health and Human Services are being rendered ineffective and, thus, likely to be cut from the federal budget because of their predictable failures.
It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The alternative becomes an “every man for himself/ rats jumping off of a sinking ship” environment unless state and local agencies fund these services.
Who do you think would pay for that?
My question: Does our federal electorate feel, in their guts, that help or emergency services to “the people” who elected them should not be the federal government’s problem/responsibility? Please correct me if this makes sense to you.
As a side note — and as contrary as I am — I found myself agreeing with much of Alan Webber’s June 11 column in the Ford County Chronicle entitled “Time to pump brakes on Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill.’”
It is worth the read. Thank you, Alan, even though we come from different planets.
Wonder if you like asparagus?
Merle McCallister is a
Gibson City resident and was a Frito-Lay corn supplier for 41 years. He can be reached at merle.mccallister@gmail.com.