It was a lazy weekend afternoon and I was seven. I’d spent all morning playing rough outside, spinning down the cul-de-sac on my pink and white Barbie skates and trying to learn how to stop without jumping from the sidewalk onto someone’s lawn. Sweaty and invigorated, I burst into the cool silence of the kitchen to see what my mother was doing. He had something simmering in a pot on the stove and was rummaging through his spice cabinet, humming a church hymn.
“What are you doing?” I became concerned as I tried to scratch a scab on my knee and squash a fly that had managed to follow me inside at the same time.
“Dinner for my girl,” she replied. My mother’s voice was teasing, which always seemed to emphasize her Vietnamese accent. She looked at me with an affectionate smile.
“What’s that?” I asked
She had pulled out a small container of some seasoning from the depths of the spice cabinet and was shaking it generously over a plate of raw chicken breasts. It looked like salt (which I loved) with little yellow specks.
“Salt garlic,” he said, turning to me and holding his hand palm up. I copied it and she waved the container lightly on my palm. I licked the tip of my finger and gently dipped it in the garlic salt, then transferred the little grains to my tongue.
It was magnificent.
The garlic salt dissolved faster in my mouth than regular table salt (possibly because its pungency made my salivary acorns go crazy), leaving a savory glow that vaguely reminded me of ramen noodle soup. After running my tongue along each indentation in my palm until the salinity was licked off, I reached out to ask for more.
“No, you need to eat something,” he told me. “You can’t just eat salt!”
Say ah! How wrong I was! However, unfortunately her words were true, because I could not do what she would not allow me. No one seemed to understand my total devotion to salt, my craving for it. Had I been allowed, I could easily have consumed a whole shaker of salt, savoring it bit by bit, bit by bit, until my tongue was raw. I felt like I could never get enough.
As if sensing my plight from his position by the grill in the backyard, my father entered the house with a tray covered in aluminum foil. The sweet, smoky smell of roast beef wafted from under the aluminum foil. “The lunch is ready!” He yelled, although yelling was unnecessary because we were less than twenty feet apart.
I watched him put the platter down on the kitchen table, cautiously. If it was steak, I’d be in trouble. The steak was bad. When eating a bite of steak, the first two chews were acceptably tasty, but after that it transformed into a soft, gum-like substance that made it impossible to swallow. It was like chewing on a wad of matted skin. Or so I imagined.
As luck would have it, my father came with hot dogs, not steak. I let out an audible sigh of relief and allowed him to serve me a portion. Nestled inside a soft bun, the hot dog looked sad and lonely, but the seasonings were a problem for me. The tomato sauce tasted good, but it soaked the bread and made it undesirably soft. Mustard was a joke, such a terrible taste that I was convinced mustard fans must have been brainwashed at some point in their lives. Sauerkraut and relish were “acquired tastes” that I had yet to acquire, and the chili / cheese combo endorsed by my brother did not appeal to me. Too messy, too soggy, too much. I stared at my unadorned hot dog for a moment before realizing that an extremely attractive new seasoning had just entered my life.
Without asking or waiting for my parents’ approval, I took my plate from the table and went straight for the garlic salt that my mother had left on the counter by the fire. I remember the weight in my hands as I turned the lid and carefully sprayed it on my naked hot dog. Garnished with garlic salt, it looked like a sunburned appendage with some strange spotted disease. I didn’t care. Back at the kitchen table, I ignored my parents’ gagging expressions, sat down with my creation, and took a big bite of it.
Sky.
