My dreams of being a criminal mastermind were thwarted by zucchini when I was about eight. I mean, there was also a stupefying lack of foresight on my part but mostly I blame the zucchini.
I wasn’t really a bad kid back in the 1970’s. I just hated vegetables. That made me pretty typical. The entire list of vegetables I liked was: corn, mashed potatoes, and French fries. (Does anything say eight year old more than counting French Fries as a vegetable? I say no.) I also liked peas but only the way my Nonna made them—drowned in olive oil, sauteed in a skillet with more garlic than actual peas, then served with a warm hunk of bread to wipe your plate with. Since that recipe would have made even nine volt batteries taste delicious, I can’t say I “liked” peas so much as I liked anything served with enough garlic to make every vampire in Twilight 100% less sparkly and annoying.
My mom harbored illusions of being one of those parents who served their kids nutritionally balanced meals with lots of vegetables. So I spent a lot of time figuring out how not to eat any of them. There was the classic “stuff them into my napkin and toss it in the garbage before Mom notices” approach. There was the very similar “hide them under the bones and gristle before dumping it all in the trash” trick, which was only an option on chicken or pork nights. The last resort was, of course, “grabbing a handful of them, claiming I needed to go bathroom repeatedly, and flushing them down the toilet.” This also required a bit of praying that steamed cauliflower was just pliable enough to not clog the pipes, which seemed to be a waste of a perfectly good prayer that could have been used for a snow day instead. It did not take long for my Mom to catch on, which resulted in getting even more vegetables. Something had to change. Luckily something did: I got older.
One of the great things about growing up is that you are given more responsibility, which you can promptly abuse. In our house that responsibility involved Mom delegating the fetching of things we needed, like milk…and the vegetables from my Nonna’s house.
Back then there weren’t any farmers markets or CSAs, at least in our little town. Nonna was our CSA. She was already retired when I was a kid, so all I ever saw her doing was cooking and gardening. Her backyard was the size of most people’s gardens and her garden was the size of most people’s backyards. She would work in it all day then give away what she grew to those of us in her family that still lived in town. We only lived a couple streets over.
Nonna would call to let my Mom know when she had a bag of veggies for us. My mom, in turn, would have me walk over to get them. I didn’t mind doing this. First, it got me out of the house and wandering around the neighborhood, which was always better than being home. Second, whenever I went over to Nonna’s house I got food. And I’m not talking about vegetables. Once the cheek-pinching part of the visit was thankfully over, I got a treat. Sometimes I got bread and butter. Sometimes cookies. And sometimes I even got to pick something from the freezer. She had one of these white, all metal refrigerators from the 1950’s. The refrigerator was on top and the freezer section was this gigantic basket down below that you pulled out. That’s where she kept the good stuff for when the grandchildren came over. Popsicles. Italian ice. And ice cream bars. Not just any ice cream bars–the ones with the crumbled cookies stuck to the chocolate covering. Those things were Summer on a stick.
It was on my way home from one of these trips, fat and happy thanks to ice cream bars, that it dawned on me. I was coming to the bridge that I went past on the way to Nonna’s house. I looked down at the paper bag full of vegetables that I didn’t want to eat when I realized the direct input I had into this equation. I mean, if the veggies never made it home…they couldn’t be served with dinner. Pretty straightforward. Now of course I couldn’t throw out ALL the veggies, that would be too obvious. But if a few of the most disgusting items—which was always zucchini—met with an unfortunate demise in the stream below the bridge…well that was a win-win for everybody.
Ok, I knew that was not a win-win. You cannot chuck several large zucchinis off a bridge—after looking both ways to make sure no one saw you—and later claim you thought it was a totally fine thing to do.
Another thing I will not claim is that I was merely sharing our nutritious bounty with the fishes in the stream. I may have been eight but I was not an idiot. I was well aware that fish do not eat zucchini. I knew full well that those zucchini were going to float downstream until they washed up on a bank at some point, where they would be found by some animal that would also not want to eat them because they too were sick of vegetables. But they would have to because they lacked the opposable thumbs needed to hunt things with guns, which is how you get the good stuff like pork chops and ice cream bars.
The next several weeks were glorious. Knowing dinners would be zucchini-free somehow made the vegetables I did have to eat less vegetable-y. I remember basking in the glow of knowing that I, the mastermind of Lyon Street, had saved the entire family from the terrible fate that was my mother’s steamed zucchini. I remember kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner.
And I remember, too, a few weeks later when it all went to hell.
What you have to understand about our apartment in the 1970’s is there was exactly one phone. And it was right smack dab in the center of our eat-in kitchen. It had a cord that was just long enough to almost, but not quite, make it into any of the bedrooms. So the person calling you didn’t just have a conversation with you—they had it with everyone who was home at the time. It was in this way that we all developed a skill that has since been lost with the advent of wireless phones—namely, the ability to discern the identity of a caller within, at most, three seconds based off nothing more than the length and tone of the “uh-huhs” uttered by the family member who had answered it.
I was, I recall, sitting at the kitchen table, doing homework or writing poetry or whatever else would be sure to disappoint my Dad, when the phone rang. My mother answered it and by the two terse replies she’d uttered after saying “hello” I knew it was Nonna. Which, by itself, was not alarming–she called all the time. About a minute later, though, the conversation veered into what clearly were inquiries into what my mother thought of the freshness and variety of the vegetables I’d just brought home for her. That was when the first pangs of fear matriculated up from the lower reaches of my duodenum to the rocks where my brains should have been. Even the rocks understood the jig was about to be up. I stopped my scribbling and peeked over at my mother, who had her back to me as she bent over the kitchen counter making dinner. They discussed the plumpness of the tomatoes, the vibrant greenness of the lettuce…and then there was a pause.
A long, silent pause.
The kind of long, silent pause that you can hear at least three houses over.
My mother stood up straight. “Zucchini?” she asked.
She then turned and stared straight at me with the cold, level eyes of someone who knew they had been hoodwinked and, more importantly, knew the eight year old hood that had done the winking. Finally she said: ”We didn’t get any zucchini.”
I don’t remember the exact details of the whupping I got when she hung up the phone, only that it was one of the Top 5 on the “Why I Don’t Take Risks Even 40 Years Later” scale. What I do remember, however, is how, for weeks afterwards, all of my dinners were served with a ridiculously evil amount of steamed zucchini.
