This is your brain on waffles

I was listening to this guy on NPR talking about the brain and how it prioritizes our memories. Basically, whether you are aware of it or not, you remember things that are important either to your body or your mind.

Your mind, I thought? What the heck that does that mean? I can understand the body thing because we all have this amazing array of interactive senses aiding our survival, so you only touch a glowing burner on a stove once. (Unless you’re my first son, who had to do it twice before he learned, but that’s another story.) 

But there’s no pain or sensory system in brain, otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with input and become non-functional with self paralysis. So this got me thinking - is the mind actually aware of itself?  I immediately thought of one of my favorite jokes by Emo Philips: “I used to think the brain was the most important organ and then I thought, sure, look who’s telling me that!”

Anyway, what the speaker was referring to was we remember things that happen so as we will alter our behaviors to act in accordance with whatever image we have our ourselves. The example he used was how we tend to forget, or at least downplay, positive things that happened to us, while we usually have no trouble recalling the negative things. Especially if we were the cause of them, like embarrassing ourselves. And as soon as he said that, one incident that I have never forgotten came back to mind, which is to really say it came to the front of my mind.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was, probably like 8 or 9, but suffice to say I was immature enough not to know how to respond to some really stupid comments and unfair accusations from my friends and their mother about - brace yourself - my eating a truck waffle. Yes, you read that right, a truck waffle!

See, when I was a kid on Regent Road in Cleveland there was a guy who had a waffle truck. He would slowly drive by, banging a bell with a metal ladle, stopping to sell these delicious Belgian waffles made right there on the spot for a nickel.  Now that was a lot of money for a waffle (at least that’s what my Mom always told me) so it was a real treat to have one of those, and like everyone else who did, I savored every bite whenever I was lucky enough to have one.

One beautiful, sunny, summer morning, found me just so fortunate, but Lenny and Kenny, the kids about my age that lived across the street from me, and their much older cousin were not. (The cousin's real name is forever lost in some unconnected neurons, but probably was Kathy. In my neighborhood, 8 out of 10 girls were named Kathy, with the other two spelling it C-A-T-H-Y). They also asked their moms, but were told they couldn’t have one as it was ‘too close to lunch”. It was clearly one of those BS mom answers, and we all knew it. I seem to recall I sold my mom on me getting a waffle primarily by pointing out it was only like 10:00 AM and promising to eat all my lunch.  

Now,  the big rules in our neighborhood were the “gee, that’s tough” and "just out of luck" rules - i.e., if everyone but you was going to the movies, or down to the corner store to buy a bag of chips and a bottle of pop, or doing anything that you couldn’t for whatever reason, well, gee, that was tough and you were just out of luck. But you never committed the social faux pax of asking, or worse begging, to be included. Protocol was once you said you didn’t have the money, if the gang wanted to treat you, one or more would bring it up by inviting you along anyway with the clear understanding as to under what limits. Yes, we’ll pay your way in the movie, but no snacks, and you have to pay us back. Or Eddy will share his chips, but not his pop. Cyril will give you a couple of sips of his, no chugs and no "lipping". ("Lipping" was to completely encircle the bottle neck with your entire mouth as if it your were sucking on a  popsicle. Proper manners dictated you could only place the bottle to your lips like you were about to play a trumpet.) 


If you were asked and more importantly willing to subjugate yourself to the clearly defined lower status, that was OK. But you never dared to ask yourself. You could make any number of desperate “monkey faces” clearly indicating your desires, but vocalize it outright? Never.

So cousin Kathy not being from “The Hood” but from some farm in Pennsylvania, which was weird enough on it own right, violated these rules by coming right out and asking me to share my waffle.  After recovering from the shock of even being asked in the first place, I quickly realized that if I was to share, I would have to share equally with all three of them, leaving me with only one corner section. Now this was just a standard size Belgian waffle, nothing special about it other than how good it was. Sharing it would mean paying a nickel to have just a few measly bites. That made no economic sense, and being local kids, Lenny and Kenny knew it.  So I did what any normal kid in the same situation would do - I pretended not to hear and stuffed it all in my face, just about choking to death.  Once I regained my breath and composure, viola! Problem solved. Now there was nothing to share. Then in order to get rid of any evidence whatsoever that I even had a waffle in the first place, I wadded up the thin tissue paper wrapper it came in and stuffed that down “the sewer”, which was really just a big storm drain in the center of the brick street with a perforated manhole cover.

Wiping my hands across my powdered sugar encrusted mouth, I tried grinning innocently, but with my full mouth still chewing causing my black horn-rimmed glasses to bounce up and down (think Buddy Holly, but not as cool - yet), I probably looked just like the geek I felt. Now I can’t exactly remember how it happened, but I'm pretty certain cousin Kathy being older and a "foreigner" felt enabled to express her anger at me by starting some pretty mean teasing and taunting, calling me a hog-faced piggy. Lenny and Kenny, probably just as mad because I didn’t go along with the sharing suggestion and feeling more loyalty to their cousin, joined right in. They must have been loud because soon after it started Lenny and Kenny’s mom, Mrs. P, came outside to see what was going on.

“He didn’t share any of his waffle”, they all said.

Big deal, I thought. I expected Mrs. P to indirectly support/validate me by sushing them up to mind their own business.  You see, the Golden Rule for Regent Road moms was not “Do Unto Others”, but “Mind Your Own Business”. And that went double for their kids. Triple for neighbors and husbands.

“Well, he’s just selfish”, she replied much to my horror, almost as much because not only did she violate the Golden Rule, but she was damn straight. I was totally selfish. It was a truck waffle for Pete's sakes, I thought of saying, but instead I just cast my gaze down as my I felt my face slowly redden.

“And he’s a litterbug. He threw his garbage down the sewer”, said a piercing girl's voice. At that moment, I hated cousin Kathy like I hated no one else.  What the hell is she doing up here from Pennsylvania in the first place? 

“Well, he shouldn’t have done that. What if he causes the sewer to back up and flood the street?”, Mrs P offered in some strain of ridiculous mom logic that some how made sense to them, but only confused us kids.  As much as that rebuke stung as it was just piling on encouraging Lenny, Kenny and cousin Kathy to chime up and humiliate me even more, I didn’t hate Mrs. P like I hated cousin Kathy. She was just doing her job as a mother I figured, which was to exaggerate the consequences of any unwanted act any kid ever did so if we couldn't understand it, at least we didn't forget it.  I can remember looking at the sewer with my already downcast eyes and thinking to myself, that frigging sewer is wide enough for a guy to go down it for crying out loud. How's my little wad of tissue paper going to plug it up? 

But being a kid growing up on Regent Road, any such courage to speak up was beaten out of me long before, so I just stood there and took it, totally unaware the neurons in my brain were permanently mapping themselves so I would never, ever forget how a sunny, summer morning that started out so wonderful suddenly turned out to be one of the most miserable in my short existence. 

Really. I never felt so ashamed or humiliated. Or confused. All I did was eat a waffle and yet they made me feel like I was the scum my discarded wad of tissue paper was resting on in the sewer. 


Oh well. One the bright side, at least because of that incident, my neurons mapped themselves so I’ll also never forget the taste of those truck waffles!