Commandments From The Great Depression

“If you’re offered food, and you decide to accept it and take a bite, you’d better finish eating the entire offering.” Now, I’m not sure if that preceding line was a commandment in other homes, but it sure was in mine as I was growing up.

My mom would add, “It’s rude to taste something that a woman bakes and then not finish eating it.” As I grew older, I deduced that my parents were not only concerned about hurting others’ feelings, but their thoughts on the consumption of food were also a result of them growing up during the Great Depression when families couldn’t afford to waste anything.

However, what follows is an example of when my parents’ stringency came back to haunt them.

Aunt Ann’s homemade buns

My eyes lit up with excitement when I spotted those freshly baked buns one Sunday morning. We stopped in for a visit like we often did, after our church service. And the aroma emanating from my aunt’s open oven hit this six-year-old’s olfactory senses well ahead of my visual discovery.

This time there was a variety of baked goods on the oven trays, and as usual, I wasted no time in grabbing a bun as soon as my Aunt Ann placed a little butter on its top to keep the bun moist.

My worst nightmare

As that warm bun hit my tongue and lips, I knew in a millisecond that it was not plain bread. It was a bun made of rye. And rye was one of the many things I couldn’t tolerate as a kid. In fact, it was one of the items that made me downright sick to my stomach.

What did I do? Without so much as giving my situation another thought, I just ate it - all of it. I knew that making a fuss about it was fruitless. I do remember that it did not go down easily, and with each swallow, I became more and more distressed.

As I glanced toward my mom, the expression on her face said it all. She knew fully well that I had grabbed a rye bun. But like page two of a Paul Harvey commentary, her face also said “you’d better finish that bun.”

There was no way that my mom was going to allow me to give her sister Ann the impression that she wasn’t an excellent baker.

The ride home

I’m not sure how far into the trek home before that rye decided it wasn’t happy in its new surroundings, but I eventually became aware of that fact as I sat in the middle section of our new station wagon.

My parents were deep in conversation with each other as we headed home, and I wanted to scream, “I’m ready to vomit!” but I knew better. Another household commandment was, “thou shalt not interrupt adults when they’re talking.” We’d often been told to wait for them to stop speaking before we said anything.

So, I had no choice - I let it fly. Luckily for my siblings, I somehow managed to miss them, but I have no idea how that happened.

My bewildered parents

Afterwards, neither my mom nor my dad could fathom why I hadn’t made a loud proclamation concerning my impending regurgitation. After I explained my situations, both at Aunt Ann’s and on the way home, they were speechless. After all, what could they possibly say?

Funny thing about those household commandments after that eventful Sunday - I don’t recall ever hearing them again. Perhaps my dad and mom’s arduous task of cleaning up remnants of rye from the car’s interior had something to do with that.

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