Way back in my college days, one of my room-mates brought home a bagel from Safeway. It was marked as “day-old”, but unless the person in charge of marking things down counted days the same way some fundamentalists do when they assert that the Earth was created in seven days (with each day corresponding nicely to modern geological time periods of hundreds of millions of years), this bagel hadn’t been “day-old” since time was measured by sundials.
The first clue as to this bagel’s geriatric state came when we tried to cut it in half and it shot out from under the knife and made a dent in the drywall. The next came when someone tried to take a bite out of it and nearly lost a tooth. (We were college students, not college graduates.) At this point the bagel ceased to interest me as a food item, but did interest me immensely as a piece of art; kind of a “non-functioning functional” piece of performance art, one that, despite the promise shown by its first graceful flight across the room, didn’t really perform.
No matter: so enchanted was I with my miraculous new find that I painted it with glow in the dark poster paint and mounted it on permanent display in our living room (ok, so I used the convenient hole in its middle to hang it on a pre-existing nail in the wall). There it remained for over a year, until the time came for me to move; of course I packed up the Sacred Glow Bagel (or, SGB, as it had come to be known) and took it with me to my next house. And the next. Eventually I got to the point where the SGB was the first item I moved into a new abode, the same way Christians will first move their crucifix, or Jews their mezuzah. (Admittedly I didn’t actually worship the Sacred Glow Bagel; but I did think that it was a pretty good joke, which, for me, is as close as anything ever gets to religion.)
Fast forward twenty years or so. The Sacred Glow Bagel, like so many other precious and irreplaceable items, is now lost to history, (along with some other not-so-precious and easily replaceable items, like all three of my copies of Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty), and yet, somehow, the spirit of the SGB lives on. Unfortunately, where it lives on is in my children.
I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but somehow my children managed to inherit my ability to hold on to perishable items long after they should have perished, but not my ability to see these items as the kitschy works of folk art that they are–to them, they are just another legitimate building block in the healthy food pyramid.
Even for a housekeeper like myself, who is relaxed to the point of slovenliness, there is just something about watching your son come strolling out of his room eating a piece of pizza when you know for a fact that you haven’t had pizza in over two weeks. Or watching your daughter pull a fuzzy Christmas cookie out her pocket and eat it. In June. I’d say that it was like watching squirrels put away acorns for the winter, except for the fact that the squirrels’ actions fill an ecological niche: what niche can possibly be filled by secreting Easter Peeps in your sock drawer until November? (And don’t say it’s for the ants–even an ant has more sense than to eat something that has been in close contact with one of my children’s socks.)
If this keeps up I fully expect to come down to breakfast one day and find my children gnawing, rat-like, on the newly rediscovered SGB. Actually, that’s probably the best case scenario; I’ll probably wake up to find them listening to Jackson Browne.