GETTING TO EMPTY

GETTING TO EMPTY

Maybe eating spinach worked for Popeye, but I am a 10-year-old American boy, I am no sailor, and I hate spinach. And pretty much anything else that looks or tastes like spinach! So this is why it’s there is real kitchen combat every night in our house. If I don’t “clean my plate”, my mother says, I can’t have dessert. And there won’t be any screen time for me (no phone, no iPad, no TV) either. “A growing boy like you, Timmy, needs a good diet to be healthy," she says.” A good plant-based diet.” Plant-based just makes me think of crab grass and creeping charlie. Or poison ivy. Isn’t that a plant, too?

Ok, it isn't so bad some days, cleaning my plate. Not when it’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes for dinner. But that’s only every other Sunday. Twice a month! In between, there is all that green stuff.

Sure, it’s not so bad NOT clearing my plate if there’s nothing to watch anyway, and the dessert “is dairy-free sugar-free ice cream (what a joke!) or one sliced kiwi! How is a single kiwi (they are the color of spinach) dessert? How is kiwi a dessert at all?

But today, dinner was 100% chicken-free. It was collard greens with something on top that looked like cheese but tasted like wet cardboard. It was tofu.! I tossed it in the garbage when she went out to the mailbox. She smiled when she saw the empty plate.

Yesterday's dinner was a bell pepper stuffed with something that looked like gritty confetti. Quinoa! And more fake cheese on top!

I managed to spoon most of it into the composter on top of the counter in the kitchen when she went back to wash the dishes.

It gets worse. Or not better, anyway.

The day before yesterday, dinner was a meatless meatloaf (how can you have meatloaf without meat?). “You’ll love it, Timmy, It’s made from seeds, nuts, and beans, she said, "Just imagine.”!

I managed to feed half of it to Freckles, our Labradoodle, who will eat almost anything, including jelly beans and beef jerky (but tofu or microgreens is a hard sell ) . And how often will that work anyway? Freckles would much rather eat chocolate cake or real meatloaf, like me.

Sometimes I wish we had a goat, an indoor goat. If it eats tin cans, I guess it would eat tofu!

Wouldn't it?

To make things worse, mom even writes the menu for the day on a chalkboard in the kitchen so I can see in advance what I’m probably not going to want to eat that day. That board is like a Bible to mom, like a sacred space.

See tomorrow up there in red letters? Tomorrow, she’s serving a big kale salad (yuk! What’s wrong with iceberg lettuce?), hot dogs, and beans. But they won't be real hot dogs. “Imagine, honey, they are healthy hot dogs. They are made from plants”, mom said. Double yuck!.

Then a lightbulb went off.. I asked her if we could use the “good “ china because, well, it will be Sunday. She said, “Yes, of course, Tim, honey. I didn’t know you liked those plates. They are pretty, aren’t they? With that little ivy motif around the edges. They came from England.’

It isn’t the plates I like, it is because the plates are smaller and won’t hold as much of the food that I don't like. (And I bet if I were eating on those plates in England, there would be roast beef and gravy on them! Not make-believe hotdogs and bunches of green weeds.

It’s not that my mother is torturing me. It’s just that she (her name is Sandra) is a health nut and she works as a remote home chef, testing recipes for a small boutique food company. She is always in a hurry because she divorced my dad, and as a single parent, there is always so much to do and I am always the last one at the table. There are only two of us in the family, if you don’t count Freckles,but I count her because she is family. Freckles has the life. She doesn't have to sit at a table and eat off a plate with the right silverware. And mom wouldn't think of feeding her meatless meatloaf.

The problem is that food is like a creative art project to mom and she doesn't have a sweet tooth (she actually likes things like sprouts and sauerkraut), which is why she doesn’t care about dessert, but I care! And I am tired of staring at a plate full of things I mostly hate every night! Except for Fried Chicken Sundays! My best friend Glen said his mom made him a sirloin steak with French fries last night AND a piece of apple pie. My Mom says all three of those foods are bad for your heart, your arteries, and your microbiome, whatever that is!

After I broke one of the English dinner plates (I was trying to bury some of the steamed kale into the fiddle leaf fig plant in the corner, and I slipped), mom went back to dinner on the big American dinner plates. Now, they seemed bigger than ever,

What I really need is a cool magic trick to make dinner disappear, or appear to disappear so I will have an empty plate, and mom will be happy, and I will get dessert (when it’s something good).

Well, I am no magician or hypnotist, but you can’t tell my handwriting from mom’s, and that menu board is like her boss, even though she created it. What it says is the law. And let's face it, between her job creating meals of all kinds for companies and restaurants, and the plant-based kind that I get, mom doesn’t always remember what she wrote up there, but I do. And tonight, I had a smile, not a frown on when I waited for dinner.

I unfolded my napkin (yes, a big, real linen one. Mom is old-fashioned that way) and I waited for mom to come back with the food. It smelled amazing.

“Timmy, surprise. Today, it’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Just like it says on the board. You know, I must be working too hard. I don't even remember planning that dinner. And I guess I forgot the salad, so no greens this time.

It doesn't sound like me, does it? But there it is!”

“Don’t worry,y mom.”, I said. “ I promise today……. I’ll clean my plate.”