My cousins from Canada came to visit for the summer in 1987. My mother got us pizza for lunch. As my sisters and I digged happily into our slices, the cousins stared at their plates in bewildered puzzlement.

“Where’s the knife and fork?” asked the Cousin with the soda bottle lenses.

“You don’t need them,” I said.

“How are you supposed to eat the food then?” questioned the confused Cousin with the Dorothy Hammill haircut.

“You pick it up and eat like this.” My sister picked up her slice with two hands, fold the wider end in the center, and bit off a mouthful on the tapered end.

“Eat with your hands?!” the cousins asked incredulously.

“That’s the way everyone eats pizza.” I said.

The prim cousins looked at their lunch perplexedly, trying to figure how to best approach this low-brow fare challenge. Soda-bottle Lenses lifted the plate to his mouth and nibbled at the pizza. Dorothy Hammill Hair used her finger tips to hover her slice about an inch off the plate, trying her best to work at it with utmost dignity and pinky fingers out.

And I wondered how these two cousins, who grew up in the Western world, influenced by Western cultures, managed to reach school age without knowing how to eat pizza.

A few years later I came across an Ann Landers column in which a finishing school graduate said the proper way to eat a banana is to slice it in half length-wise, serve on a plate, and spoon the fruit out of its skin. This way is considered “much more elegant than holding the banana, stripping the skin and looking like a monkey.”

Then I understood what school my cousins came from.

[originally published on LiveJournal]

Circa 1984, in the grade school lunchroom

The cafeteria was serving fried chicken for lunch. A Polish kid was happily gnawing away on the chicken bones and sucking out the dark marrow inside. The whole table fell silent at the sight of splintered shards of chicken bones strewn about his plate and tray. “I like to eat the inside of the bones. They’re good!” said the Polish kid as he licked the skeletal fragments clean. Our 5th grade classmates could do nothing but continue to look on in horror and disgust.

I like to eat marrow out of chicken bones, too. I often do that in the privacy of the family dinner table. My mother would cluck disapprovingly as I brazenly cracked open the chicken bones to get at the tasty livery goodness inside. “Proper ladies do not do such things!”, she rebuked.

But on that day, I was not brave enough to admit this to a packed lunchroom full of judgmental punks and join my bone marrow eating classmate in the joyful extraction of secret culinary treasures. Because Americans do not do that kind of thing that weird Polish kid was doing. Because it would turn you into a stinkin’ commie, don’cha know?

I forlornly looked down at my plate with the naked chicken bones lying there in neat little rows. Naked bones silently begging to be broken into. Naked bones silently mocking me for my cowardice.

[originally published on LiveJournal]