I have never liked spinach. I don�t know if it really tastes that repugnant or if my loathing for this popular vegetable is directly related to an incident during my early childhood. It happened like this.
When I started to school, Mama did not make me eat in the school lunch room. Instead, she allowed my brother Bill and me to walk the quarter mile home to eat lunch. Since we had an hour lunch break, time was never a problem. I must admit that I�d gotten spoiled to Mama�s cooking. Then one day Mama announced that it was time we started eating at school. Though I was not thrilled at the prospect of eating someone else�s cooking, I figured it wouldn�t be so bad since I could sit with my friends, and maybe Paulita if I was lucky. I�d had my eye on her most of that fall. In fact, I kind of looked forward to it. Besides, not going home for lunch meant that I was growing up.
For the first week everything went well. The food wasn�t as good as Mama�s but it wasn�t bad. Suddenly, on Monday of the second week, my new-found love affair with the school lunch room ended. As I marched through the lunch line, Mrs. Nelson, one of the cooks at the school, plopped a pile of something which I didn�t recognize on my plate. It was green and stringy and smelled like Bill�s tennis shoes.
�What�s this?� I asked Mrs. Nelson who lived just two doors from us.
�It�s spinach, honey,� she said. �It�s really good for you.�
�Is it supposed to smell like this?� I continued.
�Move along,� she chided. �You�re holding up the line.�
I didn�t tell Mrs. Nelson, but spinach tasted the way I remembered Bermuda grass tasting the time Bill held me down and made me eat some because I�d told him he wore lace on his panties. I didn�t even know at the time what it meant, but I guess Bill did since he got really mad. I figured I would just eat everything else on the plate and skip the spinach. What I didn�t know was that Miss Isbell, who was in charge of the lunch room that week, insisted that every child eat everything on his plate.
�Waste not, want not� was her favorite saying, and she meant it.
When the lunch period was almost over, I noticed Miss Isbell walking down the rows checking everybody�s plate. She gave my friend Darrell her lecture about all the starving children in the world and then stood there while he ate his spinach and made an awful face. Since she would be on my row next, I knew I had to think of something fast. Without giving my next move sufficient thought, I picked up the spinach in my hand and squeezed as much of the water out of it as I could. Then I stuck the green wad in my bluejeans pocket. Bill, who was sitting close by, saw me and sat there in complete disbelief. Sure enough, Miss Isbell came down my row and when she got to me, she complimented me for eating all my food, even my spinach.
I thought Bill was going to bust out laughing, but somehow he managed to stifle it. He didn�t tell on me because I think he was waiting to see what I would do next. The truth is, I didn�t have a clue what to do with the spinach once I had to go back to the classroom. Any attempt to discard it failed because my teacher, Miss George, walked right beside me as we went back to her third-grade classroom. The last I saw of Bill, he was holding his nose and pointing to his pocket as Miss Nell prodded him on to his next class.
As the afternoon wore on, I wished I had just eaten the spinach like everyone else had chosen to do. It began to smell, and my fellow classmates began looking about the room the way they did when somebody let one and everybody tried to determine who the culprit might have been. To make matters worse, I hadn�t squeezed all the water out of it, and it began to show through my bluejean pocket and looked as though I�d messed in my pants, which third-graders still did sometimes.
So as not to belabor the story, I made it through the day even though Mama gave me a good talking to about almost ruining a perfectly good pair of bluejeans. So you see, I can�t be sure whether my distaste for spinach is actually a matter of taste or memory.
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