Posted on April 8, 2008 - by Hubba

I Don’t Like Onions!

We are in the process of retooling our podcast configuration, so in the meantime I’m trying to keep my fans (Can I call you that?  Can I call you Baby?) entertained with these trivial observations of mine.  It’s proving to be quite fun.

So here’s another; I don’t like onions, as the headline says.  About the only kind of onion I like is an onion ring, and if they made just the ring without an onion in it, that would be fine with me.

Onions are like the jock of foods- they onion up everything around them.  Put a diced onion in your refrigerator, and within a half hour, everything from the milk to the ranch dressing will taste like onions.

The problem is that the qualities of an onion that onion haters like me dislike about them are the same qualities that onion admirers love about them.  The whole entire rest of my family (that would be thirteen other people) love onions.  They can’t make anything without throwing an onion in it.  Eggs, casserole, steak, soup, apple pie, it’s like an obsession with them.

Which, now that I think about it, reminds me of a story.  I will try to keep this short, because the setup could get messy, but here goes-

My parents decided to homeschool their children the year I entered the third grade.  Mom, after careful study of the curriculae (?) available, chose the most draconian program of study that she could find, which I’m sure was endorsed by Josef Stalin, Mao Tse Dong, a host of nuns with wooden rulers in their hands, and some one-armed guy chopping rocks in Siberia.  The math course in particular, which I kid you not was called Rod and Staff Mathematics, had seventy-five homework equations every day.

The upshot to all this is that I failed third grade math.  But never fear, I was sent to my mother’s mother Grandma Gladys’ residence in Pierre for two weeks the next summer, so that she could help me pass third grade math.

Grandma Gladys was a saintly woman who had grown up during the Depression, eventually earned a Doctorate degree in some sort of science, and spent most of her life as a high school teacher.  She was a genius, and a quietly proud woman.  She was also a practical, no-nonsense person whose compassion was shown in her actions.  I think what I’m trying to say is that looking back, we should have been nicer to her.

Back to the story- I rode a Greyhound bus to Pierre, South Dakota, where she lived and she and a friend of hers who had a car were waiting to pick me up.  Grandma Gladys must have been in her late seventies, and she had resigned herself to the fact that she should not drive several years before this.

We got to her apartment, and I spent the afternoon, I don’t know, probably watching TV.  It came time for supper, and Grandma Gladys got up and began getting things out.  “I know how much you guys like these, so I got you one,” she said.  And she produced the biggest, purplest onion I had ever seen.  She and her walker had gone over two miles in the blazing hot summer sun (I got to accompany her a few days later) to get me an onion just because she knew “we” liked them.

I felt so bad I almost ate the damn thing…