3/7/01: Furtive Spaghetti-Os
After the jaw surgery, summer, 1996
Before-hand, along with the free supplies of Ensure and Boost, they gave me a recipe book: "What To Eat After Your Maxio-Facial Surgery," or something to that effect. Every recipe ended the same way: Blend Until Smooth. It reminded us of a family joke we had about a cookbook we acquired at a tag sale of ways to prepare Jell-O. It was a horrifying cookbook. Some of the recipes involved Jell-O and mayonnaise in the same dish. Our joke was that they had forgotten the final step of all the recipes. The final step in each recipe should have been: And Then You Throw It Away. So we joked that wherever it said "Blend Until Smooth" in this new cookbook, we should add, "And then you throw it away."
Anyway, I had the surgery July 3, 1996. For a while I was too out of it to worry about food. Ensure was filling enough and I was mostly lying around with a low-level fever trying to get over the after-effects of the anaesthesia. I couldn't speak, and my face was so bruised, I couldn't leave the house without people thinking I had an abusive lover.
About a month after the surgery, all I could think about was real food. Something that wasn't liquid. I wasn't allowed, of course. Nothing solid for six months. But the lock had been off my jaw for weeks, and though I couldn't really talk yet, my face wasn't bruised anymore, so I felt like I could go out in public again.
It must have been a weekday. No one was around. It was beautiful out. I put three dollars in my pocket and grabbed the hand-operated can opener and a fork and threw them in Puppy's back seat. The whole time driving to the store I felt silly and secretive, humming the mission impossible theme under my breath. The store was deliciously cool, and I went right to them: the Spaghetti Os. A lady looked at me, confused. I would have explained that I had had a dream about them the night before, but I couldn't speak. So I just bought them, ran out to the car, and opened the can up.
It took me about 45 minutes to eat them. I was having trouble swallowing and stuff -- it's hard to explain about that. But it felt beautiful to have something kind of like food in my belly. I mean, how much do you really need to chew a spaghetti o?
I cleaned out the can, and then I threw it away, in the garbage bin in the parking lot. No one ever knew what I did. Until now.