So Sick of It
When I was a young guy, my friend Earl Duane Barkley was staying with his grandmother Carrie Hall while his parents drove to the big town of Connellsville, Pennsylvania to shop for groceries. Carrie Hall was my neighbor and Duane and I were good friends. When he visited, came for short vacations, or stayed overnight, we’d get into trouble together. We were the same age. We didn’t actually get into trouble, but we’d build things, explore, and play games.
This particular day, I’m not sure what we were doing when his Mom came home, but she gave me some cashews to eat. She purchased some at one of the five and ten stores. Most of the five and ten cent stores had a confection area of candies and a windowed section that displayed hot Spanish peanuts and cashews near the entrance to the store. They were in a lighted glass case and rotated on a carousel under a heat lamp. The enticing aroma filled the store from the time you entered until you would leave. It beckoned customers to purchase hot nuts. There was a person who would use a large metal scoop to fill the bag with the selected nuts into a white and pale orange striped paper bag. The person would place the bag onto a scale to measure out the correct amount.
They brought some home and gave it to Duane and I to eat. It was the first time I’d ever eaten cashews. I liked the flavor and probably made a pig of myself, eating more then I should have. Later, I got so sick from them. I puked and thought I’d never stop. For years, even the mention of cashews made me turn green.
Another food item that made me so terribly sick was a zucchini boat. My wife Cindy Morrison Beck was given a zucchini. She scooped out the seeded center and filled it with bits of bread, onions, and some of the flesh of the zucchini. She added mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce then baked it. The concoction tasted good on the way down, but it was horrible coming up. I spent the entire evening hovering over the porcelain toilet bowl. Again, it was years before I could think of the words zucchini and food in the same sentence. Looking back at the whole ordeal with the zucchini, it may have been something else that sparked my ill-feeling and aversion to the zucchini, but I still couldn’t see it being served on my dinner table for years.