Yoder and the Five Odors
by
Matthew Mark Miller
to my
friend Sheldon, by way of disclaimer and lawsuit avoidance: I know a man can only stomach so much
ridicule. Please believe that my heart
is not to merely regurgitate old embarrassments, neither is it my desire to
needlessly divulge the contents of something you’d just as soon I chuck
aside. I don’t mean to ruminate too long
on an old gag.
This,
for certain, be one long and torrid tale.
In
the heart of every good storyteller, there is a great story. And in the mind of every good storyteller,
there is a subconscious quest for permanence.
We long to build the next Notre
Dame, to shape the next David, or
to write the next Henry V, for there
is truly no greater immortality than to enter the hallowed afterlife of high
school textbooks.
When
storyteller meets story, then, he knows he has work to do. The burden of proof lies with the storyteller
to “get it right.” The task is to take
the irregular pulse of some tale and knit of it a “greatest hits” retrospective. One must leave one’s listeners thinking they
have heard the entire skein, when in fact they have only been fed a juicy yarn.
This is the job of the storyteller, and it is not an easy one. The onus, as it
were, is on us.
All
too often the listener’s mouth opens, the world readies itself…and the story
lodges in the throat like so much unchewed meat, unfit for digestion by the
grade school world. Our world is fat
from junk food literature and unexercised brains.
In
that vein, I begin this story with a preambling tale
of historical import.
My
parents had not long been married before they invited over a couple for dinner. Said couple had attended their wedding and
given them a wedding gift, a matching set of tall, ornate salt and pepper
shakers. The two shakers were absolutely
flawlessly identical, so much so that my parents kept them separate solely by
their position on the kitchen table.
My
blessed mother broke the cardinal rule right off; she attempted to make a meal
she had never made before. She decided
to make a roast, serving fruit salad as a side dish. The couple arrived on time, the woman wearing
a lovely outfit, complete with a new white blouse.
Well,
as things would have it, Mom misjudged the cooking time of a roast. Badly. In fact, she misjudged it so badly that after
the couple had arrived, after the typical pre-meal chatter had subsided to
muted hunger pangs, there were/was still two hours left to go on that bloody
ex-beast.
The
wife was gracious, and she offered to help Mom in the kitchen slash dining room. The husband was typical, and offered to sit
at the breakfast slash lunch slash dinner table with Dad, yakking. Mom put the woman to work straightaway,
directing her to pitting the cherries for the fruit salad.
The
men bantered as only men can do, and soon the subject fell to the salt and
pepper shakers, featured, as I have mentioned, prominently on the table. This particular set of ornate, expensive
shakers had been given to my parents by this very couple, a fact which escaped
both of the men and neither of the women.
The
husband asked Dad, “Mark, how do you tell those shakers apart?”
My
Dad, ever the joker, quipped, “Simple: by the number of holes on top.”
Mom,
sensing impending danger, tried to give Dad the international “Knock it off, dimbo; you’re embarrassing me” symbol. Dad, never the linguist, totally missed it.
Our
friend the husband, having counted the holes on both salt and pepper shakers at
least twice, shot Dad a quizzical look.
“How do you tell them apart?”
“Simple,”
quipped Dad. “By the
number of holes on top.”
The
counting commenced again, much to my mother’s chagrin.
Meanwhile,
back in the kitchen, my mother was feeling sympathetically embarrassed; the
helpful lady had managed to splatter her new blouse liberally with cherry
juice. It was a pitiful sight.
The
roast, in rare fashion, was taking its sweet time approaching the safely edible
stage. Desperate times were about to be
met with quick and decisive action. Mom
reached for a big knife.
Cutting
the roast in thin, bloody slabs, she placed them in the ubiquitous toaster
oven, and roasted the dog out of them.
At
the dinner table, the first bite was met with a stunned and awkward
silence. Things couldn’t be worse. The wedding gift had been mocked. The blouse had been ruined. The roast was…boot material. You can’t hide grief like that for long, and
I’m sure it was evident somewhere on my poor mother’s face. What choice, caring, gracious words would my
father use to dispel the tension?
Putting
his fork down next to his plate, my father famously declared, “That must’ve
been one meeeeean
cow!”
When
the couple finally left, my mother collapsed into my father’s arms and sobbed,
“We’re never having anyone over again!”
And let me tell you, in my sixteen-some-odd years in the Mark Miller
household, we pretty much didn’t.
Jump
forward with me to the establishment of the Matthew
Miller household. Within a month or so
of the wedding, Becky and I felt like we’d gotten down the “dishes” and “sex”
parts of young marriage, and were feeling feisty and ready to tackle that
“hospitality” bit. Well, one thing led
to another, and after rejecting Becky’s initial suggestion of, “Let’s have my
boss and his wife over!” I proposed we invite over a guppy. A guinea pig. A crash test dummy. Somebody foolproof, a “takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’” kinda feller.
I
knew my man. His name, pause for
emphasis, is Sheldon Yoder.
Sheldon
is a quality gentleman who hails from that portion of
He
couldn’t have timed it better. Sheldon was due to arrive at
The
crumpled newspaper for this particular conflagration was, as with so many,
completely inane. And
stupid. I believe we were
fighting about cleaning. It was kinda like, “Why aren’t you cleaning that? Why isn’t the house clean yet? Why can’t
I blame you for all of this?”
Well,
to make a long story longer, Sheldon arrived promptly thirty minutes late. Perfect timing:
One
great thing about fighting is that it is a one-track sort of undertaking; you
can’t very well come up with poignant nastinesses
when you’re half-engaged in doing something else. This in part explains why our apartment was
still not quite clean when Sheldon arrived.
For the ten minutes immediately prior to his arrival, we scurried around
like madpeople, trying to make up for lost time.
And
so it was that when Sheldon arrived in high fashion at
Odor #1: Cleaning Products
We
quickly ushered Sheldon into the dining room slash kitchen, and I began the
hospitality process while Becky began to prepare the meal. She had elected to cook Swiss steak, a meal
which she had never cooked before. Our comedy of errata began when Becky pulled out the recipe and noticed that the
meal which she had thought took
twenty minutes to prepare in reality took an hour and twenty. Not
dismayed in the least, she began the meal process. First, however, she made the best of the ammoni-ish stench by making a batch of liquid potpourri and
putting it on the stove.
I,
for one, offered Sheldon a seat at the breakfast slash lunch slash dinner table
and began the hospitality process.
Odor #2: Cinnamon
While
a sweet cinnamony odor wafted throughout our
apartment, Becky turned to preparing the Swiss steak. For the uninitiated, you prepare Swiss steak
by pounding the meat. In Becky’s case,
it was a severe beating; before long, bloody meat particles speckled the
counter and floor.
Meanwhile,
I was entertaining Sheldon with stories, jokes, and Monty Python “Flying
Circus” DVDs. We had received a 14-disc
box set for our wedding, and it killed time wonderfully.
It
was after the first set of sketches that I first noticed the “haze of glory.” Light filtered across the living-room floor,
and I wrinkled my nose as I said, “Ummm, Becky?”
Unattended,
the potpourri, livid in its cinnamonious glory, had
turned into a black, bubbling, lava-like mass.
Odor #3: Burnt Potpourri
Becky
yanked it off the stove, stuffed it in the sink, and moved to rolling the Swiss
steak in the flour mixture. By now, it
was nearly
By
now, I was trying to pretend that all was normal: “Want to watch another Monty
Python, Sheldon?”
Before
long, however, I was desiring to avoid my Dad’s
mistakes, so I went over to Becky and gave her a hug. “Don’t sweat it, B,” I said. “Is it okay if I officially give my
disclaimer to Sheldon?” I did, and Sheldon
was cool with it.
Becky,
having pounded the meat and tossed the flour, threw them into two greased
saucepans on the stove, lavishing them – and the range – with tomato sauce. With that, she turned her attention to the broccoli
and cauliflower salad.
By
now, it was nearly
Odor #4: Scorched Meat
Smoke
swirled in the air from a roiling mass of Swiss steak as Becky, her fragile
calm dissolving, yanked it from the stove.
One pan, showing an alarming lack of restraint, had gone past merely cooking the meat and had scorched it all
the way to a blackened mess.
Ultimately,
I need to give Becky credit for pulling off a very visually appealing gastronomic
feast. The other pan of Swiss steak,
though not as tender as Becky had envisioned, was still thoroughly edible. The meal looked great on the plate, and
despite Becky’s repeated apologies for the meat’s toughness, it really tasted
quite good.
So
the meal commenced, and, Murphy’s Law having run its course, I enjoyed the
sumptuous fare while thinking to myself, “Well, it really
couldn’t have gone much worse than this.”
How
wrong a man can be.
I
was in the middle of telling some story, as I am wont to do, and Sheldon was
listening politely, as a person who is hungrily consuming food is wont to do,
when suddenly his face took on a funny expression.
“That’s
funny indeed,” I thought to myself. “I
don’t recall saying anything terribly humorous.”
Now,
a storyteller should be prepared for any sort of response to a tale, including
complete boredom, or even a snide “was that supposed to be funny?”
I
was surprised, then, by the gastric liquid that spurted from Sheldon’s mouth
and nose.
I
was further astonished as he leapt enthusiastically to his feet, for the story
wasn’t that well told, nor had I
even reached the punch line. But sure
enough, there he stood, arms and fingers extended, flailing himself slightly
with a look of desperation. And then he
spoke:
“I
can’t breathe!” he gasped, pulling in his neck as he did in an impressive
display of muscular control.
Speaking
of reactions, I’ve been party to a few emergencies in my day, and I’ve seen the
ways people react to such situations.
Some panic. Some get choked up. Some, the natural born leader types, take quick
and decisive action.
Becky,
by way of complete contrast, started laughing. Hysterically.
So
there I stood, my friend in danger in front of me, my wife in stitches beside
me, and my story absolutely ruined.
Thinking clearly, I said, “Sheldon, if you need the Heimlich, nod your
head.” I could hear the pained gasping,
and I could see the panic in his eyes, but I also knew that giving the Heimlich
prematurely is a terrific way to turn “partly choking” into “probable cause:
asphyxiation.” And it was in this quandary
that I stood, trying to determine the best course of action, waiting for so
much as a head bob from Sheldon to drive me into action, when Nature, that
clever paramedic, took matters into her own hands.
Odor #5: Bile
Covering
his mouth, Sheldon divulged everything.
Dinner was everywhere; it was
on his shirt, it was on his pants, it was on the carpet. And Sheldon looked like a dog who’d been hilariously thrown into a swimming pool by a pair
of naughty, taunting digestive tracts.
We wiped what we could off of him and the floor, got Sheldon a clean
shirt, and retired to the living room.
Sheldon sat on the couch and sipped water cautiously from a glass.
When
he finally left, Becky collapsed into my arms, laughing. “What a night,” she said.
“I
never thought we’d top my parents’ story,” I said.
“Me
neither,” she said.
We
turned and looked at our house. There
were wet, fetid spots on the carpet by the table. The table itself was frozen in time,
Sheldon’s half-eaten Swiss steak bearing witness to the beginning of the
end. The kitchen was a disaster
area. There was tomato sauce all over
the stove, flour all over the counter by the espresso machine, and bloody meat
chunks on the floor and by the sink. In
the sink itself, the remains of the day were a bloody meat mallet and two
charred, blackened pans. We took photos
and went to bed; some of life’s messes are more amicably faced after a good
night’s sleep.
I
never got all the black out of those pans.