Story Dilemma

At the last Us R Writers group of which I am a member, the homework given, write about a favorite food recalled from your childhood, or one that was your most disgusting experience when you were a kid posed something of a problem for me. It seemed, though I could certainly remember some wonderful foods from life at home as a small girl, I couldn't make quite enough of the subject. Not much more, that is, than a sentence - or a paragraph perhaps.

I had thought of my mom's cream puffs, made from scratch and fresh from heaven, as one memory-lane food I could possibly use. But would it be enough to talk about mere physical senses? Would the aroma of baking that filled our house, wafting into every room and drifting out the open windows to lure us kids inside - or the tingle as the combination of thin crusty outer layer and thick creamy inside sank in, crunching slightly, then giving way to melting-smooth custard sweetness be sufficient? Great as it was, there was nothing beyond. I judged it wouldn't be a story to say I always wanted just one more.

And then there was my favorite breakfast food when I was four: chicken farina. But how could I create a plot out of, "I ate one bowl and asked for more please." My mother didn't react with outrage. Just glad to find something I would eat a lot of she laughed, "Another one?" I could never seem to get enough chicken farina. But probably no one at writer's group (well maybe one) ever heard of such a thing. And what's more, even if they did hear of it in a story I would write, they could hardly have their heart stopped by anything so common as chicken-flavored hot cereal.

I also gave passing thought to a simple snack I loved, real longhorn cheese slices on saltine crackers. But even if in great demand in my old neighborhood, I sensed it would seem boring compared to the bizarre combinations in fast food available nowadays. No, that one wouldn't do either.

Some few others came to mind; I won't enumerate. In the end I discounted each as unworthy subject matter to fill up several pages of writing about tasty childhood foods. There was however, in the disgusting category, a glimmer from the past that kept reappearing on my brain film. So as time wasn't getting any longer, I sat down this morning, and the following is a rough cut of what came forth and what I think will suffice (with some editing) to fulfill my assignment this coming Saturday. I'm pleased enough with it - at least today I am.

Just Like Chicken.

She was doing it in the wash yard. And my parents were letting her. I couldn’t see my aunt, but I knew what was happening. I had heard the adults talking about it. My mother told my Father, "Lena’s just horrified! All that good food, going to waste!" But I was the one who was horrified. Why were my parents allowing this? I felt something in my universe move then, as if all kinds of things could now come rushing in with no one to stop them.

It began with Funny Bunny. Funny Bunny was my pet white rabbit I loved because he could make me laugh even when I was determined to have a sad, dramatic day. Who could resist him with his tall pink ears, inquisitive expression, and velvet nose, pushing off a quick hop from those ungainly back legs? Nobody, that’s who and certainly not eight-year-old me.

That’s why I’ll never forget the day Funny Bunny got lost. Someone left the door of his hutch open and the whole family spread out in a frenzied search. My brothers were all red and sweaty - nothing new - when one of them called out, "We found him! We found Funny Bunny!" But it wasn’t Funny Bunny, it was a stranger; a white rabbit that looked like Funny Bunny got poked into the hutch, to be joined by the real Funny Bunny we found later that day.

I was so happy to get Funny Bunny back. And the bonus was now I had two white rabbits. But we were town people and thought nothing of keeping the two rabbits together in the same hutch. We didn’t regard them as girls or boys, male or female, just rabbits. But were we ever surprised to look out one day and see white popcorn, popping all over the bottom of the hutch. That was even more exciting. At least to me it was. Mother said, "I’ll swan!" but on the second hatching, when my brother paraded a half-eaten pink rabbit infant around the Sunday dinner table with company present, Daddy wasted no time building a partition down the center of the hutch.

I don’t remember how big the white crowd in the cage had grown the day my Aunt from the country came to visit. Only that brutality entered my world with no warning. Why do adults think children are stupid? Kids have eyes and ears and if something is as important to them as my pets were to me, they should know little people know what is going on.

Two scenes emerge, clear as yesterday: black and blacker. I am standing in the back yard, knowing my Aunt is doing her bloody deed and wondering why on earth my parents aren’t stopping her. And though I don’t know who planted the idea that she was using the clothesline to hang the corpses on, the thought persists even as I write.

That and the next day seated around the Sunday dinner table. It was company again, good china, white napkins - best glasses clinking with ice and water. The food is being passed around, family style. "Would you like a piece?" my mother asks, holding out a platter of meat, brown and flaky like fried chicken - only different.

I eye it and query, "What is that?"

Lowering the plate, Mother speaks up with cheer, "Rab-chicken!"

"Mm-mm!" I reply in the negative. I start to scoot my chair out then and ask to be excused. "My stomach hurts!"

"Well, alright, then. She stares at me. "You better go lie down awhile."

I head for the bathroom, her voice tracking me, "Anyone else like some rab-chicken?"

Christian Fiction Book Review, "Charade" by Gilbert Morris

What started out as a lark, has now become an aggravating habit. When I am just a little way into whatever book I happen to be reading, I see it made into a movie, type-casting characters with actors as they appear to me in their respective roles. I say aggravating because once I get that thespian in my head it refuses to leave. This book was not different, but with the exception of one only, lest I influence another, to their chagrin, I will try to keep my players to myself.

The book Charade by Gilbert Morris opens with the main character, Ollie Benson’s, avowed obsession for mirrors - a bit of irony in that his real obsession is avoiding them in whatever way possible, even to the bizarre. Ollie is grossly overweight to the tune of 406 lbs. and because of it compromised in almost every aspect of his personality. I don't believe I have ever read a book before where the protagonist was a fatty.

Though tops in his field of computer technology and in his private life as a gourmet cook, Ollie has allowed his passion for food and its consequence, too much of a good thing, to overshadow no pun intended his greatest strengths, his intellect and creativity. He is an interesting person, genius if not wise, and kind, but few it seems are willing to look beyond his mountain of human cutaneous tissue to learn his heart. This is his cross he bears and again no pun intended, it is a heavy one. Ollie has only one friend, a co-worker, who also ironically seems driven to matchmake, fixing Ollie up with blind dates, consistent to end in disaster. Ollie is in a catch-22 situation, compulsed to do the very thing that merely worsens his problem, staying to himself and eating, eating, eating.

But Ollie’s reclusive life-style acts as a kind of ‘forest for the trees’ as regards his true persona, a double entendre, as I see it, for the title which describes something more obvious in the plot. In Ollie I see the easy-going extrovert forced into solitude; John Candy cast in the role of a hermit. For example Ollie often wears Hawaiian-style shirts, ostensibly to cover flab, but that which sends a less direct message: ‘here is a fun-loving guy.’ And despite all the pain and discouragement people cause him, subconsciously Ollie still harbors hope for that one profound relationship that is someplace out there waiting. A true introvert gathers strength in solitude; but I sense Ollie is not really satisfied with the great Alone.

And so of course voila! Into this most vulnerable of vacuums steps Ollie's worst nightmare in the person of Dane, a formidable antagonist if ever there was one. And close on his heels Marlene.

Ollie has come up with a unique computer game called Moviemaker that is about to make him absurdly wealthy. A top software company is ready to snatch it up for big bucks. But Dane who has advance knowledge of this has already shown up and bamboozled Ollie into hiring him as his personal agent and marketer. The reader guesses all along that Dane is a con-artist and Marlene his henchwoman, but Ollie seems clueless. It is one of the most maddening yet endearing aspects of Ollie’s character that he can be so smart and yet so naïve. In California, married to Marlene, Ollie faces the end of all things at the hands of the two people he has come to trust most implicitly, his wife and his partner in business.

As the plot unfolds, in the process of conquering the enemy without, Ollie learns that his real enemy, not unlike the rest of us, is mostly inside. His quest for vengeance threatening to destroy him, he learns just in time there is another way out, the only way. And he takes it, following the path trodden before by four people God sends into his life. And God’s providence is seen once again in His economy when the reader recognizes Ollie is also God’s provision for these same four, as well as for others.

The externals of this book belie its tone, which except for the panicky places, carries a subtle humor and lightness of spirit. Again, it is the John Candy chimera that does it. The pace is fast, but not too fast, bearing one right along like a willing voyager on the water of swiftly moving currents. There are few flashbacks and those are minor. I read the book in two sittings and could have done so in one, were the night a little longer. It is written in first person POV.

With apologies for the hackneyed, I have to say Charade is a real page turner.