The other night I woke up out of a sound sleep to find that something cold and slimy was nestled in the palm of my hand. Standing next to me was my son, Clyde, plaintively asking “Aren’t you going to eat it?” I could see from the look of expectation on his face that how I responded to this question was going to make a big difference in Clyde’s happiness quotient, and so, without too much contemplation, I quickly swallowed the substance in my hand. It was salty. Satisfied, Clyde left, and I began to repeat the mantra “It was just a pickle, it was just a pickle…”
Actually, this was not entirely wishful thinking: on those nights when Clyde and his Dad make one of their fast food runs, Clyde–knowing how much I like pickles–will usually bring me the pickle from his cheeseburger. And I, knowing how much this gesture means to him, will usually eat it. Of course, usually when he does this I’m awake enough to realize what it is I’m eating, and usually, the pickle in question is delivered to me fresh enough off of the cheeseburger so that it is still relatively warm. Usually. Who knows what happened on this particular night. Maybe Clyde got distracted while dismantling his cheeseburger (he likes to eat all of the parts–cheese, burger, bun–in separate stages) and didn’t deliver my pickle until later. Maybe it was already cold by the time they got it home. Maybe–and this is the option I’d like to consider last–they didn’t get fast food that night at all, and what Clyde put in my hand wasn’t even a pickle. No–it had to be a pickle. Didn’t it?
Those of you without children must be wondering what kind of person would eat an unknown substance delivered by a questionable source (after all, this is the same boy who sees no problem with eating a piece of pizza he found under his bed a week after we last ordered it). You might even assume that I just have one of those borderline thrill-seeking/reckless personalities, that I’m the type of person who, in high school, made “cocktails” by swiping a quarter inch of liquor from each bottle in the liquor cabinet and then mixing them all together, or who, in college, swallowed a whole bottle of unknown prescription medicine I found in my Grandmother’s basement “just to see what would happen.”
Those of you with children, however, will hopefully know the truth: that the same person who one day required a gallon of milk to be able to choke down a spoonful of peas can, seemingly the next day, blithely ingest substances of which the best thing even the most enthusiastic food reviewer could say is “that was probably a pickle.” This is because only those of you with children can understand how low, over time, your standards can become.
Of course, even if you don’t have children you can still think about all of the ways your formerly childless (and fun) friends have changed. Remember that guy who couldn’t even walk by dog poop without gagging? He’s now able to stick his hand all the way down a clogged toilet to retrieve a 79¢ toy car. And those people who prided themselves on being able to travel for months in foreign countries with only a small backpack between them? They now can’t even make it from the curb to the check-in counter without assistance.
The same goes for the person who once made a vow never to eat in any restaurant that had cloned itself all over the world. She now lives in a house with a happy meal toy collection rivaling the Smithsonian’s (if they have one). She has also been known to sometimes wake up with a pickle in her hand. At least, she hopes it is a pickle.