Monday, April 14, 2003

Drinking Shiner Bock at the end of the day makes me feel like Percival each evening. I'll never forget the mad dash in Texas, almost missing the plane, hauling that case back for Brendan. And now it's here. And not skunky from too much travel. It reminds me of the way beer tasted to me growing up in Wisconsin. Which probably isn't necessarily how it actually tasted. Just the way my young tongue interpreted the taste. I'll always remember the sinking realization that my adult taste buds had a different sensitivity than my child taste buds when I stocked up on King Vitaman first year of college. And it was awful. It would have been better as packing material. Part of me still wants to give it another chance, blame it on a bad batch, but I don't want to mar that olfactory memory further, as one of the few times as a kid I got to eat sugar cereal at home, when we weren't visiting my Aunt Betty, who would buy the multi-pack cereals, or at church camp, where getting a hold of a box of Sugar Smacks at breakfast was like finding shoes in a Siberian Gulag - which seems somehow more neutral than saying concentration camp. If I were a neurology researcher, that's the type of stuff I'd want to research. Taste. Olfactory memory. Even if all my funding came from Phillip-Norris, Kellogs, McDonalds. I wouldn't care. Just as long as I could figure out a way to make those childhood food pleasures come alive again. What it was that tasted so good about pebbles and dirt. I've been thinking lately about the idea of poor smart kids, specifically because someone described herself as being a poor smart kid among a bunch of superwealthy med students. And I can't help thinking about the fact that her parents probably made two to three times as much money as mine. But I've never considered myself poor. There were times, in college, when I was frustrated, watching other kids with stuff, and other kids going on trips. My college girlfriend, Claire, thought I was poor. That I grew up poor. But that was a perspective from the opposite end of the spectrum. We didn't have money. That I was aware of. But I never felt poor, which probably had much to do with the richness of my experiences as a child, and my exposure, through the Episcopal church, to people with money - making me feel a part of monied culture, rather than marginalized. 11:15:12 PM