Replies to post #788 on Poet's Corner

[Poet]

Your kids eat squid???

My God, my nineteen year old won't even eat onions. Why am I being punished?

[E.]

I think the creamed corn and absence of tomatoes does make it child-friendly. It makes it sound E-friendly, too.

Lima beans figure large in my family history because my mother's lima bean rule was that every one of them had to be eaten, and my sister refused to eat even the first one. I think she simply couldn't. So on those long summer, southern evenings when all the neighborhood children were outside playing hide and seek, my sister would be sitting by herself in front of her cold lima beans from supper time until bedtime. She still talks about that (as a symbol of many grievances) with bitterness, and she still can't eat lima beans.