Musings on Green Sausages

One summer vacation, we were driving to the airport and Mommy was filling out our immigration cards only to realize that both my passport and my brother’s passport had expired. We spun around and headed back into town to a photographer to take passport pictures, to a Justice of the Peace to get them signed, and then to the passport office to get express passports issued. Suffice it to say, nobody left the country that day, and we had put ourselves on standby for outgoing flights. It’s not a simple task to get seven standby tickets on one plane, but two days later, the rest of my family flew overseas and left my brother and I to join them the day after, which was also the day that our passports would be ready.

Photo by Ross Parmly on Unsplash

We flew straight to Annapolis and stayed with my sister’s friend as we waited on my family to drive up from Fort Lauderdale. The strangest sight greeted us when my family drove up in Brewster (our family’s white Dodge van). Daddy was lying down with his head in Mommy’s lap, stretched across the first passenger row, and my oldest sister, Priscilla was driving. You may ask, why on earth was he lying down?

Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash

Well, on the drive up from Florida, they had made a pit stop at a shady gas station in the middle of nowhere and Daddy, spying a glass jar of floating green sausages, decided that it would be a great idea to buy three of these sausages. Yes, the liquid and sausages were green, and this should have been a giant red flag to anybody. But you see, my Daddy has a ride-or-die motto, “Anything anyone can eat and like, you can eat and like it too.”

My indomitable father only made it through one and a half of the sausages, and when he offered some to my siblings, they wisely declined. He gave up on eating them after that and Mommy gladly discarded the rest.

The result can be easily guessed. He became so sick that he could not consume anything for almost a week. The very scent of food nauseated him. We drove from Annapolis to Rhode Island with him in a prostrate position. Five days into the recovery from the sausage escapade, we went swimming in the lake and Daddy found an oyster. I had spent many days recovering from the shock of seeing my father, who heretofore could eat anyone under a table, come so undone that he could not bear the sight of food; and he was about to open a random oyster and eat it. I made a valiant attempt to stop him, but he ate it anyway and promptly got sick again.

I’ve been musing on these things, and I wonder: would I have been strong like my siblings, and not eaten the green sausages when he offered them? Back then, I worshiped Daddy so completely, that I believed everything he said. I might have followed him blindly off the cliff into food poisoning, and I doubt my immune system could bounce back like his does. But thank God, that consideration will only remain a musing.