Baby corn: Why?

Our chubby hands reached for the tongs at the same time.
"Go ahead, you were here first," I told the woman who looked amazingly a lot like me.
"No, you go...I'll dig into these mushrooms," the woman said without making eye contact.
I don't generally talk to people in the salad bar line at the local Sizzler. Odds are we will become rivals over at the taco bar or perhaps race to get the last greasy fried chicken wing. People in line at a salad bar cannot begin to form any kind of bond. It will end when a single brown and serve dinner roll is torn four ways by seniors who paid their $7.95 and damn it, want their money's worth.

And yet, knowing that this woman obviously had a love for baby corn, I felt a kinship, some kind of bond. No one loves baby corn. The corn bowl at the salad bar is always full, while the garbanzo beans have begun to turn gray and only a few lay there in that thick broth that makes garbanzo beans palatable. When you can find canned baby corn at the grocery store, the tops of the cans are always covered in a film of dust. Are they the neglected vegetable because they are small?

They don't appear on the Thanksgiving table nor do they fit in at an Easter buffet. If you attend a back yard gathering you're gonna find the usual: cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, broccoli flowerettes.

So when I saw this woman lusting after the tender delicacies, I felt a need to talk to her.
"I love these," I said in a husky voice. "I mean, I really love these." I worked to grab a number of them with the silver tongs. The woman leaned closer to me and whispered, "I do too." Her eyes darted around the room and she continued, "Sometimes....sometimes I buy a whole can of them and eat them by myself."

I pushed her in the shoulder and said, "Shut Up! I do too! No one in my house likes them, so when I buy a can, I know I'm gonna end up eating the entire thing."

She nodded knowingly. It was her turn to handle the tongs and attempt to load her plate with these odd little garnishes. We studied their perfect little rows, their uniquely similar size and their firm but tender texture.

At the same time, we both questioned, "Who shucks these?" We both studied the bowl of corn imagining a farm with tiny rows of green that supported little bitty ears of corn. Did either of us know anyone who shucks baby corn? That would be "no." So who is doing it and how could any farmer make a living harvesting premature corn. It's not like you can take it to the fair, shove a stick into it, slather it in butter and sell it for two-bucks.

The two of us moved through the salad bar, considering other fixings but limiting ourselves to one or two. We worked as team, scanning the options, making careful choices and when we came upon the marinated artichoke hearts, we had to ask: "What do they do with the leaves?" Both of us agreed that besides baby corn, the buttery meat on the leaf of an artichoke, earns a close second. Who was it that discovered that the meat on the leaves was a good thing, while the hair around the heart was a bad thing and the mush in the stem area, was the "heart". And who among us hasn't learned that you don't throw artichoke leaves in the garbage disposal. Sure, when you leave home and your mom is prepping you for building a life of your own, she tells you how to remove candle wax from the rug and what to do if you get constipated, but not once does she tell you, "And by the way, if you cook an artichoke, for cris sake, don't send those leaves down the disposal."

And so the two of us carefully layered our plates, knowing that once we got to the cottage cheese we would part ways, her returning to her family of baby corn haters and me to mine. We knew the conversations at our tables would turn to cruel remarks like," Oh God, how can you eat those?" And so, as the bus people cleared tables and the waiters fetched clean plates, we both stuck our fork deep into one of the yellow delicacies and toasted each other. She probably went home satisfied that she'd had her yearly allotment of baby corn, and I sat down at my computer, opened my blog page and felt a need to share our story. None of this would have happened if she'd have reached for pickled okra. I would have studied her for a minute and deemed her to be crazy for eating such a slimy, tasteless veggie. And she would have taken less okra than she really wanted, knowing that I would be judging her.

I would have and I wouldn't have written this blog about a woman who ate okra. You only share the very special things in your life, like baby corn.

Everyone has gone home, husband is sleeping, the house is dark and cold but in one corner of my room, a blue light flickers, reminding me that there is still battery life on my laptop.
I grab one of my flat Cost Co. two-for-ten-bucks pillows and try to bring it back to life. If you pile up about ten of these discount pillows, you can almost get comfortable. At this time in my life, I had expected that down-filled pillows with 600 thread count cases would be at the head of my bed, but no, this recent downturn in the economy has dashed that frivolous dream. I'll probably be laid out in a coffin purchased with an American Express card at Cost Co. And for eternity, my head will rest on 10 or 11 flat-as-a-board-hard-as-a- rock pillows and no matter how hard the mortuary that has prepared me for my eternal sleep tries to make me look as good as a dead woman can look, I'll have an unmistakable pissed off look because I never got a down-filled pillow.

I struggle to find a comfortable place in bed regret that I didn't unplug that damned lap top computer. The blue light seems to grow brighter as my sleepless night grows later. Wordlessly it beckons me. "Get your ass outta bed, submit to me." I knew that crops were rotting in my Farm Town game. Gold lay ungathered in my Fairyland application. And God knows that my "lil' Green Patch" need to be examined.

The thing is, I take Xanex to sleep and sometimes instead of sleeping, I find myself sitting there in bed, a bowl of microwaved canned corn with butter sitting on the night stand and my lap top logged into my Face Book account. I didn't do it. My unconcious personality did it. She made the corn and put all that salt and butter on it. I tried to stop her, warning her that Oprah said the worst thing you can do is to eat at night. If I'd only hung on for another hour, it would have been midnight, officially the next day, with emphasis on "day". The corn could have been consummed without guilt.

The lap top is now in my bed and I am logged on. I have created a personality online that is interesting, friendly and approachable and for this I am proud. Who wouldn't want to virtually hang out with this photoshop enchanced beauty. I am amazing at 57, appearing half my age and half my weight. In my life, on Face book at least, I have accomplished so many things that it's hard to believe that I'm only one person. But we all know that our Facebook profile might be enhanced a bit, embellished to portray a woman who fears nothing, lives beyond society's boundaries and appears to have it going on.

In truth, I'm a woman who opens cans of corn late at night just because she needs a vehicle to carry butter. And salt. I'm a woman with flat pillows and boxed bras. Common. That's me. Common - at best.

But my Facebook friends see me as a super hero. Or an idiot but at least they see me. They actually "see" me, unlike the people in my real life, who only see me when they have to. When I reach a point where my invisable status in this world, has reached a limit. When a person reaches a certain age, they are often discarded or at the very least, discounted and deemed to be uninteresting. Their stories have been told too many times. Sadly, those tired old stories illustrate an entire life. Good times. Yup, good times. And some bad times. Times that have left scars that those close to us don't want to look at anymore.

And so, on Facebook, we are all superstars. Writers, artists, mothers, people with lives that are so colorful they go beyond the written word.

I have never blogged before. Don't know that I'll blog again. But for now, I feel like I have an audience of friends who know exactly what I'm saying. Or as they read, maybe they earn a fear that life could hold for them exactly what it holds for me. A life that is created with thoughts and dreams, some unfullfilled but holding a promise that there's always tomorrow and corn with butter late at night happens to the best of us.