ValueSpeak
A Weekly Column
By
LOVE: THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS
Our youngest son Jon has this thing for
potatoes. It isn’t a good thing. It’s a bad thing.
It happens whenever we cook potatoes – especially
if we boil them. There’s something in
the steam from cooking potatoes that closes up Jon’s throat like a pair of
vice-grips chomping down on a garden hose.
He starts wheezing and coughing and struggling to breathe. And there’s nothing quite so
frightening to a parent as watching your child struggle to breathe.
The same thing used to happen when Jon ate fries
or chips or anything made from potatoes.
It was like he was allergic to them, only the doctors we spoke to said
they didn’t think he could be allergic to potatoes. The symptoms were like croup, and he usually
got some relief when we bundled him up and took him out in the cool night air,
sort of like you’d do with a croupy baby.
But he was too old to be getting croup.
And besides, nobody ever heard of croup being triggered by spuds.
So even though the doctors said it couldn’t be the
potatoes, Jon quit eating them. And
since even now, at age 17, he still goes into his wheezing, coughing,
struggling to breathe thing whenever we cook them, we rarely do – medical
science notwithstanding. For the most
part, we’ve survived without them. I
mean, we like potatoes, but we get along fine without them.
Especially since Joe Jr. left home. Jon’s big brother loves potatoes – boiled,
baked, French fried, hash-browned or mashed.
Especially mashed. And even though he loves his little brother
with all his heart and soul, when Joe was in his late teens he was occasionally
known to whine about the Great Potato Famine at our house. This was always troubling to Jon, who has
always worshiped the plate Joe eats off of.
So Joe tried to be careful about complaining in front of Jon, and we
tried to respect Joe’s teenage sense of bereavement and loss.
Which is why Anita used to
occasionally tempt the fates with a meal that included potatoes. One day when Jon was 7 she threw a pot roast
into the oven, along with the requisite potatoes and carrots. It was a family favorite, and we all started
getting mouth-wateringly hungry as soon as the cooking smells started drifting
through the house.
Well, OK – not quite all. The same air that carried delectable aromas
to our noses carried vice grips to Jon’s throat. Within a few minutes he was wheezing,
coughing and struggling to breathe, and Anita and then-16-year-old Andrea were
out on the porch with him trying to fight off the allergic reaction . . . er, croup . . . er, whatever it
is with some fresh, cool spring air.
For a while, it appeared to be a losing battle, as
Jon wheezed, coughed and struggled more severely than usual – enough that we
were about to take him to the emergency room.
“This is stupid,” said Andrea, who hated watching
her little brother suffer. “Why do we even cook potatoes if we know it's
going to do this to him?”
“Sometimes it doesn’t bother him much,” Anita
said. “And everyone else likes
potatoes.”
“Well, it isn’t worth the risk,” Andrea said. “We should never cook potatoes again.”
“You're probably right . . . “
”No!” Jon croaked between
gasps for air. “We . . . have to . . .
cook . . . potatoes!”
Anita was puzzled by Jon’s vehement reaction. “Sweetheart, you can’t eat potatoes,” she
said. “And look at what it does to you
when we cook them.”
“But . . . Joe . . . likes . . . potatoes.”
And for Jon, that was neither a good thing nor a
bad thing. But because he loves Joe more
than he loves himself, it was the only thing that mattered.
# # #
— ©
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