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Of thinking too precisely on the event

There have been occasions in my life when I feel I have been misread; when what I took to be the truth was scorned; when that which should accompany old age, as honour, love, obedience and troops of friends I must not look to have… Okay, I think I read that somewhere. Anyway, sometimes you just have to suck it up. You can’t be right all the time; it’s parents who have the big guns.

For years, I believed my mother’s warning that it was dangerous to stand under an oak tree. I don’t think there were many of those in post-diluvial Winnipeg, so I seldom risked apostasy. Still, I felt her proscription required further clarification in case, through no fault of my own, I found myself standing in a vicinity covered by the interdiction. She did not wish to be more specific when I was very young, for fear I might have nightmares, she later told me. But anyway, she had felt that it was incumbent upon her to warn me of something malevolent inhabiting Oak trees -something I wouldn’t be able to see until it was too late she hinted. I, no doubt influenced by my father’s rather strict Baptist background, assumed she must have meant the Devil.

Later, when I was old enough to be shunted into the Sunday School so my parents could attend the service unmolested in the church, I asked the teacher if the Devil lived in oak trees. She said she didn’t think so, but promised to ask the minister after the service and get back to me. She never did, but at least she seemed to think it was a good question because she kept smiling at me while the class worked its way through the Apostle Picture Book.

When I got older, though, my mother admitted the Oak Curse, as she called it, was something her mother had warned her about. Years later when she was in an elder care facility, I asked her if she remembered why her mother had been so afraid of Oak trees, but by then she was much too old and didn’t. I now think it could have been their mutual fear of ticks, but who really knows how the allocation of damnation is apportioned.

At any rate, my mother never wore her beliefs lightly. She was constantly trying out any new ideas she found in our bathroom’s extensive collection of Reader’s Digests. Colour TV’s were just being developed and at that time, far too expensive. So my mother, ever alert to progress, read about an inexpensive device that would instantly convert our black-and-white Fleetwood TV into a blaze of colour. It was an add-on feature which consisted of a sheet of tri-coloured transparent plastic -blue on top, orange in the middle and green at the bottom. You simply Scotch-taped it to the TV screen with the blue uppermost, and if you didn’t analyse it too closely, the effect it produced was nothing short of magic. I loved it immediately, but my father tore it off after a night or two fearing it heralded the arrival of some biblical curse.

And then there was the burnt toast era. Electrical toasters had not yet achieved their prime in post-war Winnipeg; they were still proof-of-concept models, by and large, and ours would burn the toast, no matter what we did with the dial on the front. The bread my mother always bought was white squishy Wonder Bread; it was perfect for a kid like me because you could squeeze it into a pulpy dough with your fingers and hide them in your pocket for later. Once she bought the toaster, though, she insisted she needed to toast the bread every morning whether it burned or not -it was for health reasons she had read about. Of course, when she wasn’t looking I’d grab a slice of untarnished bread and hide it on my lap, or inside my shirt.

It was common wisdom in those days that a good breakfast was important; mine always started off with a compulsory bowl of Quaker Oats, and then two pieces of burnt toast would find themselves seconded to my plate. At first I got away with scraping off every last burn mark on its surface when she wasn’t looking, and then heaping jam or honey on top to disguise what I had done. You can’t actually scrape char off toast without noise, however -at least not with maternal ears on patrol.

“Don’t you dare waste any of that, G,” my mother would say, pointing her eyes at the char I’d tried to hide under the plate. “It’s just as nutritious as the bread, dear,” she’d usually add just to make her voice seem friendly. 

But it didn’t seem nutritious; it was no longer the white bread I enjoyed. It had mutated, or as I used to tell her at the time, it had died.

“Just put the jam on the burnt part,” she’d say in response. “You can use extra jam if you want,” she’d then whisper conspiratorially, in an unsuccessful attempt at bribery.

My aversion to burnt food was not just confined to toast, however. My father loved roast beef, but only if it was overcooked and burnt on the inside, as well as the outside; it was the same with sausages, and even mashed potatoes, so I’m not exactly sure whose genes I inherited. Of course, my mother was married to him, not me, so I was forced to hunt through any meat I was served for pink, or even light brown colours. Fortunately my ever hopeful dog usually lay at my feet when I was at the table. He rather enjoyed my peccadilloes and learned there were often things hidden on my lap.

I never really lost my dislike of the taste of burnt food, but it was only much later in my life that I learned about the Maillard reaction that causes food to brown and gives it that distinctive flavour. It would seem that a substance called acrylamide forms when we apply heat over 120C to certain foods – including potato, biscuits, cereal, coffee… and toast.

Although its effects are still somewhat controversial, acrylamide apparently can be carcinogenic. Its toxic effects can be cumulative as well, so consuming even a small amount of acrylamide over an extended period of time could increase the risk of it affecting organs or causing such things as neurodegenerative disease in the longer term.[i]

For the record, however, I’m not blaming my mother for my recently undisguisable forgetfulness, but I will note that she herself was becoming increasingly absent-minded by the time she surrendered to old age shortly after she turned 100…

Also for the record, I have started to buy the occasional loaf of squishy white bread again since I retired, but in defiance of Maillard, I find I rather like it toasted occasionally. I really miss the dog, though…

[i]https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230224-should-you-avoid-eating-burnt-food

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