Yesterday my wife and I went to retrieve a few groceries to round out our dinner plans. A prominent store display proclaimed earlier it was National Strawberry Day. Naturally, we purchased two pounds of juicy red goodness, along with miniature angel food cakes and (Zero Sugar, Keto Friendly) Reddi Wip. Yes, Mister Spellcheck, that is how you spell it (but that’s a gripe for another day).
As the kids devoured their shortcakes after dinner, one of them asked if strawberries were my favorite fruit. I paused for maybe half a second and replied, “No.” I know, I know, most people love strawberries. Honestly, though, strawberries are okay, and I will eat them when offered, but they are nowhere close to being my fruit of choice, and I believe they are probably only my 6th favorite berry (after raspberries, cherries, blackberries, boysenberries, and huckleberries. Whichever of my offspring asked the question apparently lost interest in me and went away, but I started pondering my history with strawberries.
Now, I have always liked strawberry-flavored things like Skittles, Jolly Ranchers, Twizzlers, Slurpees, etc., so I had to dig deep to remember why I didn’t like eating strawberries. It took a while, so after hurting my brain and consuming more than my fair share of the berries, I uncovered an incident from my childhood that apparently took many years to overcome.
I believe I was about five years old—I remember that we lived in Sherwood, Arkansas, and that I had gone with my dad in his beat up blue pick-up truck. We had gone to visit a family for some reason. I seem to recall that Dad did some kind of manual labor, while I remained in the truck. I think I was scared of a dog—my mind recollects an ornery Doberman—and this was shortly after a dog gnawed on my ankles in a friend’s back yard, but I digress.
I remember that the window was rolled down, the sun was setting, and I was browsing through my 1980 Empire Strikes Back collectible cards from Burger King. Someone called to me and asked if I was hungry. Of course I was. The wife of the family brought me a beige Tupperware bowl with some strawberries fresh from their garden and left me to enjoy them. Soon my fingers were stained red, and my belly sloshed.
I’m not sure how it actually happened, but somehow one of those teeny strawberry seeds got stuck under my left thumbnail. No one else noticed, but it caused some real pain. I started to cry. (Those of you who know my high threshold for pain, think about that.) Being five, I decided I needed to be a man and take care of the injury myself. I set down the berry bowl on the bench seat, moved over to the open window, leaned the forearm connected to my injured hand across the window sill and I began to operate.
Like a perfectly rational kindergartner, I first pounded my fist on the side of the truck to try and knock the seed out, but the infernal thing stayed put. I then attempted to dig it out with the nails on my other hand, but no matter which fingernail I tried, I couldn’t extract the seed. I needed to be smarter about this surgery. In desperation I looked around the truck cab for some tool. Paper? No. Key? No. And then it hit me. Ever so delicately, with the corner of my 1980 Snowswept Chewbacca Burger King card, I tried to work out the seed from under the nail. Like my other attempts, though, I only succeeded in creating more suffering.
Frustrated, I threw the card. To my astonishment, it fluttered for a few seconds before sliding down the window well into the abyss of the passenger door. I scrabbled for it in vain, but even my small hands were too big to retrieve Chewy. He was gone forever. That was the last straw. I began to wail.
Everyone came running to see what happened. Embarrassed about my carelessness with the card (I knew we couldn’t afford to go back to Burger King to get another), I told my dad through my sobs about the seed. He examined my thumb for a minute or three and found nothing. When he announced that nothing was lodged under my nail, I realized that it actually didn’t hurt any more. My pain at that point was only for the loss of my card! Irrationally, though, I declared to everyone there and to my mother back at home, that from that point in my life, I hated strawberries.
Obviously, I am over it; however, for perhaps over a decade, I never purposely consumed another strawberry. Strawberry-flavored candies or beverages? Absolutely. Actual strawberries, heck no. And on a related topic, I also have banana issues, but I’ll share those another time.
I think my point here, if there is one, is that sometimes, especially as children, we have experiences that in the moment are traumatic. And even though the connections might not be rational, they are still real. So…whenever you are dealing with human beings, specially of the smaller variety, remember to be patient. You never know if someone’s pain and hatred is caused by a strawberry or a missing Wookie.
