Last
night I passed the “biggest balls in the family” torch to my 6
year old son. I did so with a beaming sense of pride, but it was
accompanied by that tinge of fear you get when you know you are
about to be served. It's similar to the feeling I got when I went
back to school at 33 and realized I still had a VHS and records, and
these kids were talking into little ear robots between classes. Or
the feeling a momma monkey gets the first time she sees her little
monkey boy nestled up in the lap of another monkey girl, eating the
mites out of each others' back hair. proud because that is one hot,
bug-laden monkey girl, but sad because her baby is growing up, and
she is getting left in the dirts of time.
One
of our favorite things to do as a family is to visit the huge saigon
asian market and shop for new adventures in dinner. We have 2
rules: we have to try a new drink and drink it all (yes, even if it
has those nasty jelly grass things in it that taste like squid eyes),
and we have to try something new that is definitely going to suck. we
found curries and sauces and veggies and spices that made our mouths
water with anticipation. We picked out our drinks like champs and
choked down the nastiness that seems to be squiggling in all of them
(what is up with the JELLY fascination?!) We made plans to return to
buy the shiny, red, plasticine looking smoked duck that was staring
down at us from his lofty meat hook, and then we decided to try the
preserved and salted duck eggs. The ingredient listed “eggs and
salt”. How bad could it be? I put a six pack of them in the cart,
beautifully wrapped in red and gold foils, and we set off back home
to create our masterpiece.
Let
me preface this next part by saying that I will eat ANYTHING once.
Chittlins at a chicago thanksgiving...done. Pig's feet at a friends
mom's house for dinner...choked it down. Alligator and rattlesnake
are child's play, and I dream of eating guinea pig in paraguay. That
being said, these eggs were just on another level. I can only
describe the taste as “imagine you were on dauphin island in
august, and a hard boiled egg washed up on shore, which you then dug
out of the pile of sun baked seaweed and sand, and popped it in your
mouth. No rinsing allowed.” I immediately blew my chunk in the
trashcan and dry heaved, temporarily hating all things asian. (I soon
got over that, but not the unnatural affection for all things
gelatinous OR brightly painted honda lowriders. You can't make me.)
Seeing agony and anguish on my face has always brought euphoria inducing joy to the hearts of my children, and at the same time
brings out zane's uncanny need to one up me. Without even asking me
if that was blood I was puking up, he popped the very large remainder
of the algae colored egg in his mouth, and went to masticating...
BALLS... There were tears, and a few moments when his frantically
darting eyes told me I might need to break out the mop momentarily,
but, out of sheer competitive glory, he made that golf ball sized,
rancid, salty, jelly-bag-of-an-egg his bitch, and I have no doubt of
his ability to roll with all of life's punches from here on out. (I
still have 5 left, if anyone wants to contend for the “balls”
torch.)