It’s a good thing when we decide to make friends with our childhood fears and phobias. They can cause us to miss out on some really good stuff.
If you know any kids — or ever were one — you know that little folks have a funny way of deciding for no particular reason they don’t like something. My oldest nephew had an aversion to people with anything on their heads. He didn’t like hats, caps, hoods, bonnets or hair curlers and not just on his head. He didn’t like them on anybody else’s head either. And if you were wearing any of them, he wouldn’t have anything to do with you until you had removed the offensive items.
His phobia extended to hair dryer bonnets, as well. My mother had a stand hair dryer like the ones in beauty salons. If any of us were sitting under the dryer, Russ refused to even come in the room.
Did I mention that Russ also disliked noisy motors? The vacuum cleaner and air conditioner sent him into hiding. We finally were able to calm him about the air conditioner because we assured him it was only outside and would not come into the house to “get” him.
Kids often decide they don’t like a particular food or another. In the movie “A Christmas Story”, younger brother Randy didn’t like to eat at all; his mother had to play ten kinds of games to entertain him into eating. The piggy snarfing mashed potatoes was especially disgusting.
My daddy had turned up his nose at tomatoes for as long as I could remember. (That would probably be because he and his dislike had been around a lot longer than I. It’s funny how that works...)
Daddy loved to eat and usually ate just about anything put in front of him. But he had managed to reach adulthood without eating a tomato — at least not a raw one. He liked ketchup, tomato soup, stewed tomatoes, spaghetti sauce — just about anything with a cooked tomato — but had decided he didn’t like tomatoes fresh from the garden. He didn’t know why. He just had decided he didn’t like tomatoes.
The tomato thing came to a screeching halt one summer when Sara Wall started bringing in fresh vegetables from their garden. Sara and her husband Clarence had a big garden. They grew scads of tomatoes, corn, beans — heaven knows what all they had out there in Statham — and Sara was always bringing fresh vegetables to the drug store to share with all of us. We never lacked for home grown vegetables in the summer. They grew some of the most beautiful corn I’ve ever seen. The tomatoes were so big, I had to use both hands to hold one of them.
It became a summertime ritual for Sara to make tomato sandwiches for everyone. She’d spread some paper towels on a counter in the office, break out a loaf of bread, a jar of mayonnaise, and the salt and pepper.
Those big ol’ tomato slices absolutely dwarfed the bread; we’d have to wrap the sandwiches in paper towels to corral the juice so it didn’t trail down our arms as we devoured those heavenly summer feasts. Before long, the aroma of fresh sliced tomatoes permeated the air and everybody lined up for lunch.
Everybody except Daddy, that is. He would automatically respond that he didn’t like tomatoes. But being a man of science, he came to question why he liked everything with tomatoes in it — even chicken stew and vegetable soup — but wouldn’t eat a raw tomato; it just didn’t make sense.
Whether it was the scent of those juicy tomatoes or the eagerness with which we all devoured our sandwiches, I’ll never know, but I remember the day my 60-some-odd year old father finally decided there was something unnatural — certainly un-Southern — about his distaste for fresh tomatoes.
There’s no telling how long he’d been puzzling over it. He once pondered a leaky bathtub faucet for over three months before accepting that the problem was not a faulty washer and he needed to call Bob Sharpe to come fix it. This tomato thing had been going on for decades.
So he made the sacrifice. He asked Sara to fix him a tomato sandwich and he’d give it a try. And he liked it. So he ate another one. And then another one. He became an overnight connoisseur of the fresh tomato sandwich.
Over the next 25 years, Daddy and tomatoes made up for lost time. He even started watching “Victory Garden” and planted tomatoes every summer ‘til just a few years ago.
As for Russ, he made friends with hats and noisy motors. He became a pilot.
Helen Person is a Winder resident and columnist for the Barrow Journal. You can reach her at helenperson@windstream.net.
