I didn't like to eat beans. I was 5 years old and had just gotten a hair cut. My dad told me that if I didn't eat my beans then my hair wouldn't grow back. So I sat there, with my big boy spoon, and shoveled cold, canned chili beans into my mouth and rather disdainfully chewed them up into a mush of brown goo, which as I had learned, was the only way that my hair would keep growing.
I also hated spinach. My parents would buy the frozen kind, and dish it out on my plate, in which it looked like lost limbs of the creature from the black lagoon. It was stringy, and icky and I didn't like to eat it. My dad made me sit at the dinner table until I finished eating the pile of nasty dark green bile. It felt like I was sitting there for days, under a dining room light, interrogated - no, rather, tortured by the vegetable that had once been frozen and likely depleted of nutrients.
I guess a lot of people believe that carrots are good for your eyes, and that fish is "brain food". I've never really ate that well, and as an adult, I guess I don't have a good grasp on how to cook or how to eat a "balanced diet". We ate frozen spinach, and asparagus out of the can - the kind that is mushy and clammy tasting, and drank Sunny Delight - as it was our replacement for vitamin C. My dad made up his own "benefits" of eating these foods, so we/I ate it.
I used to sleep on top of my bed, without using any blankets. I often went to bed fully dressed from the previous day - shoes, socks and all. I played in the sandbox a lot in kindergarten and first grade so when I'd go to bed fully clothed, sand would be deposited in my bed sheets (and lots of it). It never got too cold in Aiken, but my parents didn't like that I wouldn't sleep under the blankets. So my dad told me that if I slept with the blanket up to my shoulders, the monsters wouldn't be able to get me. Before this, I had no idea that I was allowing myself to be susceptible to any monster attacks. I didn't sleep very well, for a week or two after being told this, but I certainly slept under my blankets, and with them up to my neck (if not covering my eyes).
I had a bad habit of brushing my teeth, and then never putting the cap back on the toothpaste. I was told that if I didn't put the cap back on, then roaches would crawl inside.
My sister had a gold fish, and it lasted a long time. It probably lived for a year, maybe two. She had had one before, but it died fairly quickly, so my dad got her another one. I forget what the name of it was... I think it may have been Lucy? One day, the goldfish was gone. We asked my dad what happened to the goldfish, and where she went. He told us that the goldfish got sick, and that he had to take her to the hospital. We were quite concerned that the goldfish was sick, and worried quite a lot about it. Every other day, then eventually once a week, and maybe even a couple of months later, we'd still ask about the goldfish and how she was doing. My dad would tell us over and over that she was still in the hospital...
I asked my grandfather how to tell the difference between a boy dog and a girl dog. He responded - Stick your finger in its heiny, and pull your finger out and smell it. If your finger smelled good, then the dog was a girl. If it smelled bad, then the dog was a boy. (note: I never tried this clearly scientific method of finding the gender of pooches)
On my sixth birthday, I learned that the world as I knew it, would end one day. It was a Sunday, and it was my birthday - the most exciting day of the year besides Christmas. My mom brought me to my Sunday School class, I was wearing my nice red Izod (Lacoste) polo matched with khakis. As soon as I was seated, I got out to to tell my Sunday school teacher that it was my birthday. I may have told her several times in a row until she acknowledged it and congratulated me. It was a pretty big deal, being six years old that is.
We talked about space, and the solar system. We talked about Pluto and the Sun. My Sunday school teacher told us that one day the sun would expand, and get so big that it would eat Mercury. Then, it would expand and get even larger and eat Venus. This was strange to me, I had no idea why the sun would want to eat other planets. She then told us that the sun would keep getting bigger and eventually consume the earth. All would be lost, and the earth would never be replaced. I had never really thought about mortality too much, besides seeing bad guys getting killed in the action movies my dad would watch. I knew people, and plants and bugs died, but I never thought that the earth would die. Eventually, she said, the sun would keep expanding and eat all of the planets, and then the sun would explode and die. For some reason, I guess I felt that souls were somehow still attached or connected somehow to their buried bodies on earth after you've died and gone to heaven. So I asked her what would happen to all the bodies of people who've been buried. She said that all the bodies of people would be gone, and that people would no longer reproduce.
For weeks, I had dreams about the sun expanding, and destroying a beautiful world, the world that I loved. And I thought about my family disappearing and never being able to reconnect with them. When the earth is destroyed, not only will people, places, objects, and animals be destroyed, but also any trace that these things and people had ever existed. I thought about myself a lot, and although she told me it would be millions of years in the future, I thought about my material possessions and my body, deep underground in a casket being incinerated and reclaimed by the fiery appetite of the sun. I'm not sure if I ever found resolve, but I think I learned how to make the dreams go away, and I'd replace the thought of the earth being destroyed with happier thoughts.
15 years later, scientists have concluded that Pluto does not fit the accepted scientific description/categorization of a planet. However, it will be destroyed by the sun one day like the rest of the planets and spinach and beans and monsters.
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