Intestinal Fortitude

"Did I ever tell you about my dad and his eating habits?" Dr Aquarius looks at me with reckless abandon, his curly black hair slightly moving above his shoulders.

Turning down the speakers on my work computer, I smile broadly and say,"Um, no, not that I remember."

"Yeah, he's really interesting. Like he'll fly in from New Mexico and he'll say 'lets go eat', and I'll ask, 'where', and he'll say 'oh, anywhere is fine.' So I'll suggest something fun like Thai, and he'll go, 'WHAT?! What's Thai? No, that won't do!!' My dad is a very meat an potatoes kind of guy, you know, a lot like those people from the 1950's with June Cleaver, where boy's are boys, girls are girls, and the only meat you eat is steak."

"Hmmm. I see. He's even more meat and potatoes than Dr H?" (Dr H is our resident Midwesterner, hailing from the corn fields and cheese factories of Minnesota. If you get anything containing more than 1/2 a teaspoon of non-starchy vegetables near him, he hisses and jumps on the wall in a vampiric manner.)

"Yes, very much so." Dr Aquarius's eyes grow a little. He plays with the pens in his pocket protector and continues, "Like one time when I was a young boy, I was talking to this one girl at my school. She looks at me and says, 'my mom is a vegetarian'. I had no idea what a vegetarian was, so I asked. The girl told me, 'oh, it's someone who doesn't eat any meat.'"

I grab a handful of organic popcorn and tell Dr Aquarius to go on.

Provokingly throwing both of his hands up in the air, Aquarius continues, "and so I was mystified with this whole vegetarian thing, and I asked the girl why her mom doesn't eat vegetables. The girl said, 'well, my mom was jogging one day and she saw a dead cow on the side of the road, and it scared her. She swore off meat from then on.'"

I finish the popcorn and take a sip of bottled water.

"So I went home," Dr Aquarius huffs about the front of my desk, switching his medical coat from one side to the other, "and I told my dad all about this fascinating new way of eating. You know what he said to me?"

"I have no idea. What did your dad say?"

"My dad snorts and says to me, ' Well, lord forbid the woman come across a rotten potato - she'd starve to death!'"