excerpt from my Sent folder: strawberries

Adam, I have a story to tell you. It concerns strawberries.

When I was a boy in Birmingham, Alabama, one of my great-aunts lived in the countryside about forty miles north, and we would visit her regularly. I had maybe a dozen great-aunts, most of them formidable Southern ladies schooled in poverty, but this one was an iron-willed widow farmer who rejoiced in the name Bethalee Basenberg. She mainly grew sweet corn and tomatoes, but had a sideline in a few other things, including strawberries and sugar cane.

Now, like all civilized people with a decent palate, I loved strawberries — but perhaps I carried it to an extreme. I loved strawberries more than any other food. On one visit, when I was ten or eleven years old, Aunt Bethalee allowed me to pick a bag of ripe strawberries and a few canes to take back to the city, and I was absolutely in heaven.

When we got home I put the strawberries in a bowl and squeezed the nectar from the canes over them, then took the bowl to my room and plopped down on the bed with a new book I had just begun: Dune. I ate and read, ate and red.

But I overdid the eating. (One cannot, of course overdo the reading.) I became violently ill and vomited red vomit, over and over again. I had never been that miserable before, and rarely have since.

Afterwards, I became nauseated when I looked at, or even just thought about, … Dune.

Apparently some executive decision-making region of my brain knew that I loved strawberries too much to be nauseated by them, so it shifted the nausea-induction to Frank Herbert’s innocent book. I continued to eat strawberries whenever they were presented to me, and did so with delight, but I set DUNE aside — I was maybe a hundred pages in — for decades. Even as an adult I got queasy when I looked at it. I was in my forties before I worked up the resolve to go back and finish it.

Vive les fraises!