Soup

During this first week after treatment, I’m down to eating a bit of normal breakfast and then soup for the rest of day. I’ve discovered that growth hormones and chemo drugs are not good companions. One makes you want to eat all the time, and the other messes with the plumbing. I’m hungry right now, and when I go to see Rosalyn for lunch in a bit, guess what special treat she has waiting on my request? Soup. And that is a good thing, because I can actually taste soup. I can’t really taste much of anything else because the inside of my mouth is completely numb. In the words of the so articulate Lewis Carroll, “Beau--ootiful Soo-oop! Beau--ootiful Soo-oop! Soo--oop of the e--e--evening, Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!”

And this reminds me (of course it does, Anne) of other times when there has not been much variety in my diet. I think of living in the refugee camps in La Mosquitia, Honduras, and walking to the cafeteria three times a day. Our Chinese cook did the best he could, but we ate the same food the refugees did, our supplies coming from the same warehouses, and it wasn’t great. The Mosquitia was once under sea, and when you fly over it now, it glistens with trickles of salty water. Nothing grows there except along the river banks, and these could not support the thousands of Nicaraguan Miskitu refugees fleeing the hostile Sandinistas across the Auka River into Honduras. (It’s hard to understand why the Sandinistas would attack their own people unless you realize that the Miskitu were not Hispanics like the Sandinistas, and they had been converted by Protestant, American Moravian missionaries, whose culture suffused theirs. So when war came, the Miskitu were unsympathetic with the new communist regime, and, therefore, suspect.)

None of us had much else to eat other than what came out of the warehouses. Food supplies came to us on boats whose fumes left everything smelling slightly of diesel, especially the “oreos” in their clear and apparently permeable plastic. The beans, full of holes, had to be sorted for bugs, and the flour sifted for worms, which also left a taste. There was no fruit, no vegetables, just beans, flour, rice, oil, and whatever scraps of protein, usually eggs, the cook could find. Once, Italy sent us a shipload of noodles (we assumed it was Italy; who knows) and we ate that for months—a treat. My friend Rebecca, a nurse and inveterate researcher, put herself on refugee rations to see if one could survive. She said yes, though you were always hungry and craved oil. She upped the oil ration.  I was hungry all the time and weighed 110 pounds.

While Robert and I lived with the Mixtecs in Guerrero, Mexico, I got pregnant. Robert would walk to the next village 20 minutes away just to buy chips for me, anything to break the monotony of oatmeal and powdered milk for breakfast, tortillas and beans for lunch, tortillas and beans for supper. We brought in cheese, bouillon, and canned tuna to add flavor. Robert hasn’t requested a tuna casserole since. He once picked 40 pounds of lemons from a tree in the market town, a five hour drive away in the back of a stake-bed pick up. A landslide closed the road, still a two hour hike short of our village, and Robert carried that unwieldy box on his shoulders, up and down over the mountain range. My hero.

I am glad to say that the Mixtecs perceived no such monotony. Their endless variety of corn and bean dishes (which I did not have skill or stomach to make), and herbs, and mushrooms, and salsas kept things interesting for them. The kids who were always in our home never understood our tolerance for oatmeal.

What food did I miss most back then? What food most represented the culture from which I had come? Hamburgers? Spaghetti? Ham sandwiches? (Ok, I admit, I did miss the hamburgers). Not really. The most representative dish in North America is called: Variety. We don’t eat the same food three times a day. We don’t even eat the same dish two days in a row if we can help it. The most representative food of North America is not any one dish but a thing called Variety. And variety is a luxury. So here is what I say: Enjoy this luxury; just don’t get used to it. Someday, something might pick you up and land you at a week of tables, where there is only soup. And then you’ll give thanks for the soup.