It was a lazy weekend afternoon and I was seven years old. I had just spent the whole morning playing hard outside, circling the cul-de-sac on my pink and white Barbie roller skates and trying to learn how to stop without jumping off 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. She had something simmering in a pot on the stove and was rummaging through her spice cabinet, humming a church hymn.
“What are you doing?” I asked while simultaneously trying to scratch a scab on my knee and swat a fly that had managed to follow me inside.
“Dinner for my girl,” she replied. My mother’s voice was mocking, which always seemed to emphasize her Vietnamese accent. She looked at me with an affectionate smile.
“What’s that?” I asked
She had pulled a small container of some seasoning from the depths of the spice cabinet and was shaking it liberally over a plate of raw chicken breasts. It looked like salt (which I loved) with little yellow flecks.
“Garlic salt,” she said, turning to me and holding her hand out, palm up. I copied it, and she rocked the container gently in my palm. I licked the tip of my finger and gently dipped it into the garlic salt, then transferred the tiny grains to my tongue.
It was magnificent.
The garlic salt dissolved faster in my mouth than regular table salt (possibly because its pungency caused my salivary glands to go haywire), leaving a tasty radiance that vaguely reminded me of ramen noodle soup. After running my tongue along each crevice of my palm until the salinity had been licked away, I reached out for more.
“No, you have to eat something,” he told me. “You can’t just eat salt!”
Say oh! How wrong was I! However, unfortunately her words were true, because she could not do what she did not allow. No one seemed to understand my total devotion to salt, my craving for it. If I was allowed, I could easily have consumed an entire salt shaker, savoring it slowly, point by point, until my tongue was raw. I felt like I could never get enough.
As if sensing my situation from his perch by the backyard grill, my father walked into the house carrying a foil-covered platter. The sweet, smoky smell of grilled meat wafted under the aluminum foil. “The lunch is ready!” he yelled he, even though yelling was unnecessary because we were less than twenty feet away.
I watched him put the plate 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 bites were acceptably tasty, but after that it turned into a soft, rubber-like substance that made it impossible to swallow. It was like chewing on a bunch of matted hair. Or so I imagined.
As luck would have it, my father brought hot dogs, not steak. I let out an audible sigh of relief and allowed him to help me out. 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 she soaked the bun and made it undesirably mushy. The mustard was a joke, such a terrible taste that he was convinced the mustard fanatics must have been brainwashed at some point in their lives. The sauerkraut and relish were “acquired tastes” that I had yet to acquire, and the chili and cheese combo endorsed by my brother did not appeal to me. Too messy, too soaked, too much. I stared at my unadorned hot dog for a moment before realizing that I had just introduced a new and extremely tempting condiment into my life.
Without asking or waiting for my parents’ approval, I took my plate from the table and went directly to the garlic salt that my mother had left on the counter by the stove. I remember the weight she had on my hands as I took the lid off and carefully drizzled it onto my naked hot dog. Decorated with garlic salt, it looked like a sunburned appendage with some strange blotchy 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.
Darling.
