the mourning dove pipes

the mourning dove pipes

the mist dissolves the mountains

just empty moisture

The LDS make good citizens

President Russell M. Nelson

“ … I hope you'll teach these children to be good citizens
of this wonderful country."

President Russell M. Nelson, speaking in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Though set apart by stricter rules than others may obey,

The Saints are peaceful citizens and all their taxes pay.

Counseled by the Prophet to observe the local laws,

Members love their country (even when there ain’t much cause.)

The Mormons make good neighbors -- you can always check the stats.

(And there are very few of them who vote as Democrats.)

put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem

. . . put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem . . .

Second Nephi. Chapter Eight. Verse 24.

No shabby garments clothe my soul when I am with the Lord.

Such raiment is so priceless that a king can scarce afford.

Golden silk and gemstones are but dross to me when I

Contemplate the beauty of the God of earth and sky!

He clothes the lilies of the field; He makes my robe to shine.

If I do but obey him then my wardrobe will be fine.

Studying Pantomime in Mexico. Part Three.

Teatro Degollado. Guadalajara.

And then . . .

I do most of my writing early in the morning, when my energy levels and focus are at their zenith. This morning, however, I have been stalled in writing my final chapter about my time in Mexico because of psychological distractions. This is a recurring state of mind for me. As I review the events of my past I begin to question if any of them really happened at all; that it’s a story I have made up to bypass the shame of admitting to a humdrum and shabby existence. My past must be a continual round of hair raising or zany exploits; otherwise I’m a complete washout, a monumental failure. This state of mind freezes my fingers over the keyboard. Am I just creating and animating a flock of false memories?

My answer to that question varies from day to day, even hour to hour, and is never going to be definitive. The only seeming certainty is that writing is as vital to me as breathing and eating. I must write, or die. And today is NOT a good day to die, Worf.

And then . . .

After our triumph at the Teatro Degollado in Guadalajara I ran up against a disturbing verity. Namely, men and women come together in a love that often degenerates into war. My parents were a prime example of this, with dad forever escaping the sharp tongue of his spouse by keeping late hours at the Pine Tavern,irresponsibly drinking and playing pinochle, and mom forever referring to dad as “that toad on the stove.” Yet they never separated.  When I joined the LDS Church after leaving home for Ringling Brothers I figured I would never have to deal with that kind of emotional fallout again. The fact was, I didn’t take all that much to girls anyways; outside of an occasional hormonal flare up that I quickly doused when I considered how costly it was to woo a modern maiden. In my case, the skinflint won handily over the lover. And I have battled those misogynistic tendencies in myself ever since.

But now I was plunged into the midst of this discord once again. Robin Shaw, Smith’s former girlfriend, a nurse from Ohio, showed up unannounced at our doorstep in Patzcuaro. She had driven an old clunker straight through from Zanesville to ‘reconnect’ with Smith, who seemed perfectly happy, to me, with his current bachelor existence. Smith moved out of our hacienda into an apartment down the street with Robin. He feigned great enthusiasm for her return, but it didn’t fool me. When the two of us rehearsed new routines for the upcoming tour of South America he acted like a newly freed prisoner whose pardon had been revoked. With Robin upon the scene, the comic chemistry between Smith and I quickly diminished, and we were unable to come up with any further pantomimes with real panache. And Robin wanted to join Payasos Educados as a full-fledged performing member, with a full salary -- even though her experience was limited to juggling bedpans at a hospital. This put Smith in an awkward position, and he sweated pea pods trying to figure out how to approach Sigfrido with her veiled ultimatum.  

Worse still was the widening breach between Sigfrido and his wife Amel. Amel was American, and pretty ‘hippy-dippy’ in an unfocused, disregarding way. She had no formal training in pantomime, but she, too, had to perform in the troupe. Her ungainly attempts at comedy were painful to watch. I quickly grew to resent how much stage time Sigfrido gave her in our shows. Their son Andres, on the other hand, was a natural born scene stealer -- catching flies with an ease that belied his tender years.

What they fought about and why I no longer recall. Likely there was never any true reason at all -- just the natural bile that built up between two people who never should have been together in the first place. After Guadalajara we continued to tour schools while the paperwork was being completed for our South American tour -- and now each show was preceded by a blazing row between Sigfrido and Amel, with little Andres running to Smith and I in terror until it blew over. These fights never affected Sigfrido’s performance -- he was as brilliant as ever onstage.

Offstage he stopped talking to Amel, and then moved out of their hacienda -- taking a room at the hotel on the Plaza Grande in Patzcuaro. He left her in charge of booking the tour and handling the finances for it. Smith finally asked Sigfrido to give Robin a small part in the show. He slowly shook his head back and forth, but what he said was “Go ahead, Steve -- it cannot make much difference now.”

The English playwright William Congreve first came up with the concept of “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” 220 years ago. He knew what he was talking about. Amel bided her time until the money came through for the tour; then she took every last centavo and vamoosed to parts unknown -- along with Andres. Sigfrido was held accountable for the loss by the Mexican government, and spent the next several years dancing with abogados. With no money for a tour and our Maestro Sigfrido in the legal doldrums, Los Payasos Educados ceased to exist. Steve and Robin drove back to Ohio where he enrolled in an advanced theater class at Kent State, and I flew back to Minneapolis to begin preparing for an LDS mission -- I needed a few years away from the bright lights and heartbreak of show biz. Or so I thought. In less than a year Smith and I would be back together again, doing the advance clowning for Ringling Brothers.

Twenty two years later I ran into Amel in Bangor, Maine. She had a small boatyard where she and a few hippy dippy partners hand crafted wooden skiffs. Andres also worked there. He had grown up an exact duplicate of his father -- the same willowy physique, liquid brown eyes, and shy, engaging, smile.

Amel and I conversed briefly; I had no desire to renew our acquaintance, so I quickly invented some urgent business I needed to attend to. As I turned to walk away she grabbed my arm to whisper in my ear: “He sent men after me, you know. I’m still in hiding. Don’t tell him where I am!”

I promised I would keep her secret. I told Smith about our meeting, but not Sigfrido.

Studying Pantomime in Mexico. Part Two.

Sigfrido Aguilar 

Those first few weeks in Patzcuaro were a sleepless time for me. Not so much because of excitement over a new venture, but because it was mating season for the local iguanas, who spent the long chilly nights rolling around on our red tile roof, squalling like cats. Then there was no central heating in our hacienda, just a modest fireplace tucked into the corner of the bedroom. Smith and I shared a bedroom, which we vainly attempted to keep heated at night with inexpertly laid sticks of oyamel. As soon as we got a sputtering flame going we dived under our thin cotton blankets and feel heavily asleep, only to awaken in the middle of the night with our chops chattering like gag wind up teeth and the fire nothing but cold greasy ashes.

At five each morning the nuns across the way played an old scratchy record of Schubert’s Ave Maria over their loudspeaker, to call the faithful to early Mass. And the abattoir next door went to work about the same time, zealously slitting the throats of dozens of squealing swine. A small brook ran through the backyard we shared with the slaughterhouse; a pretty thing to look at, except when it turned crimson red with pig blood. I never cared to go wadding in it; the frogs that croaked on its banks had a particularly carnivorous look in their bulging eyes.

Smith and I breakfasted on hard boiled eggs and cups of steaming atole -- a corn starch concoction that approximated hot chocolate. We did all our own cooking, which was very minimal and pragmatic; canned peaches, boiled eggs, atole or Sidral to drink, and the local mini loaves of white bread eaten with chunks of the local soft white cheese. We ordered a beefsteak dinnerseveral times a week for lunch down at the hotel on the Plaza Grande, and munched on the Lake Patzcuaro dried pesca blanca like potato chips.

Sigfrido’s studio was a good mile away, in the center of town. An asthmatic old bus came down our street every twenty minutes or so, spewing diesel fumes, but I preferred to walk the distance, enjoying the stately eucalyptus trees that lined the roadway, their lower trunks painted white, and the profusion of nanny goats -- each one carefully staked in the middle of a small dusty yard, where they appeared to relish eating stones and cacti. Patzcuaro was a small dusty tourist hideaway back then -- hardly developed, with only one hotel on the Plaza Grande. Our arrival as gringo estudiantes ignited a keen interest among the beggars of the town. Each morning as I walked to school I was accosted by nearly a dozen of them, meekly holding out an upturned palm while requesting some pesos. At first I was nonplussed as to what to do about them. I was living on my savings, not bringing in any money; so my budget was tight. Sigfrido dismissed them all out of hand, saying they were con artists whose racket was mulcting soft-hearted tourists. Still, I didn’t like turning them away. So each morning on my way to the Academia I would stop at the outdoor market to buy a basket of fruit for a few centavos.Whenever I was approached with a request for aid I simply dug into my basket and handed out an apple or an orange, wishing the recipient ‘buena suerte.’ After a few days my generosity was rewarded by a beggar boycott -- whenever a shabby mendigo saw me coming he would do a quick volte face and skedaddle.

Sigfrido had studied corporeal mime under Etienne Decroux in Paris. He put together a series of mime exercises for us that was extremely demanding -- and, to my way of thinking, extremely boring after the first few weeks. Although I was enamored of the balletic comedic grace of the great French mime Marcel Marceau, I also adored the frantic silent gyrations of Red Skelton; his work was so broad and robust that it could be understood and enjoyed by anyone. Whereas I was beginning to think that classical French mime was more of an acquired taste, if not downright snooty .

And as the weeks wore on I realized that the classical mime exercises that Sigfrido used were not what I wanted. What I wanted was to learn the facial and body tropes that conveyed basic emotions like happiness, anger, fear, boredom, and so on. I knew Sigfrido had mastered that kind of silent physical communication, because his solo performances were rife with hilarious double-takes and bodily tumults that only a Chaplin could pull off. That was the kind of stuff I wanted to learn, not the elegant ‘inside a box’ exercises that we did hour after hour out in the courtyard of the school.

I talked this over with Smith. He agreed with me; we needed more Vaudeville and less Versailles. At last we approached Sigfrido with our dilemma. He was initially aghast at our desire to abandon our rigorous course of classical training to pursue a more slapstick style. He told us that he himself had not been allowed any comic training from Decroix until he had studied the basics for nearly two years. But Smith and I were adamant; with all due respect, we told him, we were not prepared to hang around Patzcuaro for two years just to perfect pulling on an imaginary rope. I told Sigfrido I needed training in how to become more freewheeling and open as a clown, and that mincing around in leotards had never really been part of my agenda.

And that is when the true and delightful genius of Sigfrido Aguilar came into play. Instead of berating us as impertinent popinjays, he immediately began to play with the idea of a clown/mime fusion of performing styles. A few days later he formed the three of us, along with his then wife Amel and their five year old son Andres, into the prestigious troupe known as “Los Payasos Educados.” He announced that he was applying for a government grant to take our troupe on an inaugural tour of Mexico, displaying the silent art of both the clown and the mime. Sigfrido informed Smith and I that we would need to concoct a dozen or so silent clown routines with a minimum of props for the show. Working like beavers on Red Bull, the two of us rifled our collective memories for every bit of business we could remember from Ringling Brothers and Three Stooges movies  -- and then repurposed it all to loosely fit within the parameters of mime. We had a ten minute bit about slipping on an invisible banana peel; about a visit to the doctor’s office (in which Sigfrido played the libidinous nurse with balloons for a bosom -- and yes, they were popped during each performance); and Sigfrido came up with an odd piece of phallic buffoonery in which he discovers a large plastic cigar onstage, begins puffing on it, and is thus turned into a strutting, arrogant aristocrat. Each member of the troupe grabs the cigar in turn and transforms into a similar patrician character -- even little Andres! And I managed to work up a silent routine with my musical saw, along the lines of Gene Sheldon’s whimsical performances with his banjo.

We took the show on a shakedown cruise to a dozen high schools throughout Michoacan and Oaxaca. The show was a smash; the kids loved the slapstick and the teachers were impressed with the elegant portions of mime. The grant money from the Mexican government came through; Sigfrido’s wife Amel became our troupe treasurer, and we booked our first professional engagement as Los Payasos Educados at the Teatro Degollado in Guadalajara.

We spent a week at the Teatro Degollado, a nineteenth century opera house that had tiered balconies and gilded putti crawling down the marble colonnades. And once again, we were a smash. The crowds especially liked Sigfrido’s cigar bit (and to this day I still don’t know WHY.)

It looked like clear sailing from here on out. Good reviews in the newspaper; the backing of the Mexican government; and growing international interest in both clowns and mimes. A golden trifecta that should have taken us right to the top. Sigfrido began lining up an extensive tour of South America, with handsome salaries for both Smith and I.

And then . . .

(to be continued)

une lettre de ma fille missionnaire

Helloooo tout le monde !!

D'accord, donc les transferts (quand les missionnaires se font dire s'ils vont rester ou aller dans une autre zone toutes les 6 semaines) viennent de se passer aujourd'hui et j'ai été transféré de San Clemente à Dana Point! Mon cœur a des émotions super contradictoires parce que je suis tellement excitée d'aller dans une nouvelle région et de rencontrer de nouvelles personnes, mais je suis tellement triste de quitter les gens que j'ai appris et aimé au cours de ces quatre derniers mois. Hier, à l'église, il était difficile de dire au revoir à tout le monde, et la soirée a été remplie de plus de visites d'au revoir. Les adieux ne sont jamais faciles, mais je sais que ce n'est pas pour toujours. Je voudrais pouvoir dire en mots ce que les gens de San Clemente signifient pour moi et tout ce que j'ai appris là-bas, mais les mots ne sont pas adéquats. Je suis tellement chanceux d'avoir cette expérience en tant que missionnaire. Je ne m'inquiète pas de savoir où j'irai ou ce que je ferai parce que je sais que Dieu est toujours à mes côtés! Je n'ai pas beaucoup de temps aujourd'hui, mais j'aime tellement chacun d'entre vous. Et je sais sans aucun doute que Dieu aussi. Je vois des preuves chaque jour, à chaque coucher de soleil, lever de soleil et sourire! Avoir une semaine positivement belle, paix et bénédictions!

Amour, soeur Torkildson

Tithing Will Break the Cycle of Poverty

President Russell M. Nelson

"We preach tithing to the poor people of the world

because the poor people of the world have had

cycles of poverty, generation after generation;

that same poverty continues from one generation

to another, until people pay their tithing."

President Russell M. Nelson.

Put your money where your heart is, give your tenth share to the Lord,

And your poverty will vanish in a prosperous accord.

For our God is ever willing to share with his children dear,

And the key is to pay tithing with a spirit free and clear.

There is no cycle strong enough to dodge the Father’s will;

He can make us proof against privation’s dreadful chill.

Studying Pantomime in Mexico. Part One.

In the fall of 1972 I decided to leave off clowning with Ringling Brothers Circus in order to explore the possibilities of mime. My clowning, I felt, suffered from a lack of communication with the audience. Not verbal communication, but the kind of visual communication that veteran clowns like Otto Griebling and Prince Paul possessed; it was a visceral physicality that immediately communicated their thoughts and emotions to the audience. This skill let them display their comic ideas to full effect, whereas my gag ideas usually fell flat when I put them out in front of the circus crowds. I felt as frustrated as a chicken trying to lay an apple.

I had a strong hunch that improving my pantomime skills would make me a more effective clown, would give my gag ideas more 'punch.'

The show was in Chicago that fall for a 3 week run near the old Stockyards. The train was parked on a siding that had been used for cattle cars for the previous seventy years, and the ground still reeked of their panicked feces and blood. It rained constantly. And it was Contract Time.

Old man Feld came down from Washington D.C., where the Ringling headquarters were located, to view the clowns; noting which ones still had clean and bright costumes and which had let their wardrobe fall off. He gauged the effect of each clown gag on the popcorn munching audiences, and quickly removed any gag that had run out of belly laughs. And Charlie Baumann, the Performance Director, would breath into his ear the names of those clowns considered to be ‘heat merchants,’ or troublemakers. The clowns he decided to keep for another season were called into a plush office, one by one, for a brief word of praise from Mr. Feld, and the offer of another year’s contract, with a small raise. If you weren’t called in, you were out -- for good.

I was called into the office, where old man Feld called me by name, sort of -- he pronounced my patronymic as “Torkill-twinkle” -- and praised my clowning style.

“You’re a real nut act” he told me expansively. “When you’re out in the ring nobody knows what you’re going to do next! I like that. Like it a lot. The crowds think you’re completely crazy. That’s good for business, that kind of clowning. So how about it -- you ready to sign up for another year with the Greatest Show on Earth?”

He pushed the contract and a pen towards me; saying he was raising my First-of May salary by twenty-five dollars a week, so I’d be pulling down a grand total of 150 smackers each week. It was a tempting offer to a still green kid like me. I had no idea when I’d ever see that kind of money again. But I silently shook my head, then explained that I wanted to pursue more training in classical pantomime to become a better clown.

He didn’t seem too put out by my defection; I guess he was in a hurry to sign up the rest of clown alley for the next season. So he took back the contract and pen, stood up, wished me luck, shook my hand, and the next thing I knew I was outside his office, sans steady employment.

But I had savings in the bank and knew right where I wanted to go for my mime training.

During my stint at the Ringling Clown College our mime instructor was Sigfrido Aguilar, a noted maestro of the silent art, from Mexico. Impressed with my earnest efforts to scale invisible walls and walk against invisible winds, he had offered me a student scholarship at his Academia de Pantomima in Mexico whenever I wanted to quit the circus. I still had his address in Mexico, so the very next day I dropped him an aerogramme asking to be enrolled in his next class.  Three weeks later, just as the show was closing in Hartford, Connecticut, I got his reply: “Felicitaciones, Tim. We start our new classes in January!”

After a brief stopover back home in Minneapolis to mooch off the parents for a few weeks, and to have dinned into my ears my mother’s baleful warning that once I was south of the border I would be shot, garroted, and skewered with machetes before I could say ‘Pancho Villa’ -- I took a flight to Mexico City to begin a new chapter in my quest to hopefully increase the world’s fund of hilarity.

Back in those halcyon days an American citizen didn’t need a passport to reside in Mexico for as long as he wanted, so there was no paperwork for me to deal with. That kind of simple freedom existed in abundance when I was young -- and mourning its loss may yet turn me into an anarchist of the Kropotkin variety.

I would not be friendless in Mexico. My pal and Ringling cohort Steve Smith (after whom my son Steve is named) was also attending Sigfrido’s Academy. We met up in Mexico City, where we had reserved a double suite at a cut-rate caravansary that featured zoonotic ice water and hot and cold running cucarachas. After a few days of dealing with Montezuma’s revenge, we boarded a Tres Estrellas bus for Pátzcuaro, in the province of Michoacan, where Sigfrido personally met us at the bus station, which smelled strongly of roasted coffee and cacao beans, to escort us to our living quarters on a quiet side street, next to a pig slaughterhouse, with a fortress-like Catholic nunnery across the calle.  

(to be continued)

Uncle Louie

These are the stories of my life and my family, reconstructed from direct memory and from fleeting snatches of conversation and observation. Plus a little creative guesswork. As the years ripen I grow more determined to take charge of my own history, to leave behind a narrative that informs my children, and their children, and maybe the whole damn world, that there once was a man named Tim Torkildson, and what things befell him and his family . . .

My Uncle Louie Hedges was married to my mother’s sister, Aunt Ruby. How they met, how they fell in love, how he courted her -- of these things I know nothing. What I do know is that Aunt Ruby was a fastidious housekeeper and upholder of the bourgeoisie faith, while Uncle Louie was a rowdy, somewhat loudmouthed gambler -- always bright red in the face. A chain smoker, he trailed cigarette ash all over Aunt Ruby’s house, and liked to call me “Bowtie” because I once was dragooned into visiting them right after Mass, still dressed in my Sunday best, which included a bright red bowtie. I despised him for attaching that nickname to me.

They lived in a large house on a large piece of land in the suburb of Edina. Before the freeway came through, it was a long tedious drive out to their place from our home in Southeast Minneapolis. I spent those long drives in the backseat, counting trees. I once got up to 654 before letting out a scream and punching my sister Sue Ellen in the small of the back -- for which I was hauled out of the car and threatened with being abandoned by the side of the road. I don’t recommend counting trees as an effective game for children on long road trips.

Coming from our cramped 3-bedroom home, which housed 2 adults and 4 children, with only one bathroom, Ruby and Louie’s house seemed immense. The upstairs had 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. And they only had one kid. In the master bedroom was a spacious walk-in closet, in which there was a ladder that led to a trapdoor in the ceiling -- which opened into a tremendous attic under the peaked roof, lit by round mullioned windows at each end. The attic smelled of camphor and fried dust. It contained steamer trunks and leather suitcases and gateleg tables and precariously leaning stacks of National Geographic and The Saturday Evening Post. There were cribs and toothless old radios and a rusty black Singer treadle sewing machine. A creaking mahogany wardrobe brooded in one corner, filled with three piece wool suits and floppy Easter hats; the floor was littered with brittle leather high button shoes and some weirdly shaped things I took to be dead bats but which I later learned were spats.  

In our own house back in Minneapolis we didn’t have a real attic -- just a low space under the roof that had a mattress of spun asbestos laid down. It was of no consequence. People of consequence, like Aunt Ruby and Uncle Louie, had big jumbled attics, with enough stuff in them to start a thrift store. When I grew up the idea of an attic of consequence stayed with me -- I wanted a dark and musty and unheated attic at the top of my house where old magazines and morris chairs with the horsehair showing could be stored. But the only house I and Amy ever owned with a decent attic, on Como Avenue in Minneapolis, had been invaded years before we bought it by pigeons and squirrels -- who claimed squatter’s rights until I poisoned them with little plastic bowls brimming with bright green antifreeze along with some rodenticide pellets. But by then the accumulated guano was more than I wanted to deal with, so I sealed the holes and locked the trapdoor and we never kept anything up there -- branding me and my family, in my own eyes, as people of no consequence.

Uncle Louie had a fawn-colored Great Dane, named Tiny. The dog was extremely patient with me, letting me mount and ride it around like a pony, or pull its ears when it displeased me. I was never afraid of it -- rather, I treated it like an idiot companion, taking it around the backyard and pointing out obvious things it probably didn’t understand.

“See there, Tiny” I’d say to it, “that big tin tub? That’s where Uncle Louie keeps his grub worms for fishing. Let’s take some out to throw on the porch roof.” Or in late summer when their plum tree was full of succulent ripe fruit that the wasps guarded jealously from my questing fingers, I’d command Tiny to go pick me some, and when the poor dumb brute just looked at me, wagging its tail, I would fly into a rage and box its ears.

Uncle Louie owned a Ford Dealership in Edina. He did very well with it for many years until, so I was told by my mother, he lost it in a card game. He then wangled a job as train conductor on the Great Northern’s Empire Builder run. Back in the early 60s this was considered a peach of a job, since conductors not only punched tickets but facilitated round robin card games for big spenders out of Chicago, and provided cooling adult beverages when the club car was padlocked for the night -- all for a hefty fee. Louie enjoyed the job immensely -- in fact, he enjoyed it too much; he gambled with the high rollers and lost his shirt, and he always took a convivial drink along with those he was serving liquor to. When he died of liver cancer at the age of 59 Aunt Ruby had to sell their big home in Edina to pay off his gambling debts. She moved into a very modest home, with no attic, out in Eden Prairie. And there she met Bill, a retired school teacher, who liked what he saw, pitched some woo, and relieved her of her widow’s weeds. His ample teacher’s pension provided for both of them very well. Once she was remarried she never spoke of Uncle Louie again, at least not in my hearing. My parents never mentioned his name again, either. It was like he had never existed.

********************************************************
My nephew Rob Torkildson sent me a FB msg with a few corrections and observations of his own:

SiffyandTor Torkildson A few things that are in question. Louie had a towing company, not a Ford dealership. He played for the Green Bay Packers, which I have verified and I remember him showing me his leather helmet. He was pretty old when I met him, but, he liked me because I played sports. He liked the hand slap games and would tell me about chasing deer, pinching their asses, before he killed them. I thought Louie a great character. Tork and Louie swilled many nights away downtown at the Annex and Auggies. Yes, he was a gambler, drinker, and lost everything is what I learned. His son, Bob, became a high ranking Officer in the Air Force, and Ruby retired in luxury. 900 19th Ave was a weird set up, that damn tiny bathroom and kitchen. Why? I preferred washing myself in the limestone soaked basement sink. Enjoyed your Story! Keep them coming Tim, Rob

The Awful Tuna Fish Casserole

There is something terribly wrong with the concept of a baked tuna fish casserole. It grates against every aesthetic sense that mankind possess. Like antimatter, it is not meant to exist in this solar system.  Yet my mother insisted on serving it to me as a child, creating some of the most harrowing scenes of domestic anguish and melodrama this side of Sarah Bernhardt.

Let me set the record straight. I like tuna fish sandwiches, in moderation. And I can tolerate a salad nicoise with some tuna fish in it, as a garnish. But rather than ingest a single mote of baked tuna fish casserole I would cheerfully undergo a season of waterboarding at Gitmo.

To begin with, unless canned tuna fish (for that is all my mother ever dealt with, and all I can afford today) is painstakingly disarmed with a flood of condiments, such as red wine vinegar, lemon juice, salt, pepper, tabasco sauce, brown sugar, and a dab of sesame oil, it smells and tastes just like the cheapest kind of cat food. And I am NOT being persnickety about this; quoting from Wikipedia, on the subject of Canned Fish, under the heading of Tuna: “ . . . with the dark lateral blood meat often separately canned for pet food . . . “  So there.

And that’s not all, boychick. Even though tuna fish undergoes hours of pressurized steam cooking in the can, which kills all sorts of nasty germs, it does not guarantee the absence of histamines that can produce an off putting fetid tang.

Yet many a night at our dinner table, even though I moaned “Oh, the rancid histamines!” my cruel mother would shove a large gooey portion of tuna fish casserole onto my plate and insist I at least try it.

Try it? I couldn’t even LOOK at it!

My mother’s recipe for baked tuna fish casserole was fiendishly simple, and calculated to raise the gag factor in any discerning child way beyond the “choke a goat” factor.  Fill a casserole dish with boiled egg noodles, top with a can of green peas and a can of tuna fish, pour a can of Campbell’s cream of chicken soup over it, sprinkle with parmesan cheese and bread crumbs, and bake in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour. The resulting abomination was always served with a side of warmed up canned lima beans -- adding severe insult to injury.  

Like many other misguided souls of that era, my mother believed that simple hearty meals, the kind that were imagined to ‘stick to your ribs,’ were good for children -- that filling them up with cheap starches and carbs and processed pet food produced happy and healthy children. What it actually produced, for me anyways, was a persecution complex and an early hint of ulcers. The holy kitchen mantras of my childhood were “clean your plate” and “starving children in China would love to have this to eat!” When my older brother Billy challenged the second one of those axioms by brazenly asking “Oh yeah? Name two of ‘em!” he was chased down the street by my mother with a broom. Good thing he was fleet footed or he’d still be picking broom straw out of his hide.

The final showdown came one winter night in 1961, when I was a very stubborn eight years old. My mother had tried withholding dessert as a motivation to get me to try the tuna casserole. No soap; I turned up my nose until I looked like Bob Hope. Then she tried the opposite tack, offering me TWO helpings of her luscious lemon meringue pie. No dice; I was still not interested. So now it was time for direct action. No more beating around the bush or pussyfooting around. The ukase was clear and simple: You don’t leave the dinner table until you eat some of that tuna casserole. You can stay there the whole night through, if you choose.

I sat, arms folded in silent dissent. The hours dragged by. Dad came home from Aarone’s Bar and Grill, where he worked as a bartender. He had a glass of buttermilk and some crackers for dinner. (What injustice! HE didn’t have to eat the tuna casserole!) My sisters were put to bed. Johnny Carson came on the TV. Still I sat. But my rear end was getting sore, I was terrifically bored, and I needed to pee.

“Mom!” I yelled into the living room. “I’m gonna take one bite, that’s all!” Barely concealing her brazen air of triumph, my mother came back into the kitchen to gloat over this historic occassion. The casserole, naturally, had long ago congealed into a cold disgusting lump. There were no such things as microwaves back then, to warm it up in. I took one small bite, chewed, swallowed, and immediately threw up.

The resulting hullabaloo was uncomfortable, to say the least. But ever after, the dreaded tuna fish casserole was interdicted and never darkened our dinner table again. It is one of the very small number of childhood victories that still warm the cockles of my heart.