My Dog is Chelsea

I’ve never mentioned this to you before, but once a week I tutor a refugee from an Eastern European country. We work on things like English conversation, grammar and vocabulary. It’s very fun and rewarding and all that good stuff, but there’s this one little problem I’m having trouble dealing with.

Nearly every week, I arrive at 10:30 am to a full spread of all kinds of dishes: barbecued pork, tomato and cucumber salad, liver smothered with deviled eggs, raw onions mixed with raw fish, Jell-O with pink Miracle Whip, etc. I have tried to explain that I don’t like to eat meat, but I’ve come to learn that “I’m a vegetarian—I don’t eat meat” translates loosely into “I like to eat lots of vegetables as a side dish to meat.”

I don’t want to be rude, and after all, it is quite generous of my student to share so much of her food with me. So I’ve learned to just bite the bullet and eat what I can. My tactic is to focus on the vegetable dishes and then slowly pick at the meat items until I feel queasy. It’s not like I’m a strict vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination, but I do try to reduce my meat intake as much as possible to avoid the intense stomach pain that accompanies it. Moreover, the less I’ve begun to eat meat, the more it skeeves me.

“Eat more liver, da?” my student urged. For reasons of confidentiality, we’ll call her Sofiya, but that isn’t her real name.

I had been trying to pick at the liver as efficiently as possible, but let’s face it, even when I was a voracious meat eater I cringed at the thought of liver.

“I’m trying, Sofiya,” I said. “I just don’t generally eat very much meat,” I said.

“Liver no is meat,” she countered.

True, it’s not muscle, but it’s still disgusting.

Then there was the raw fish/onion dish. It contained more sodium than the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of pretzels, but overall, it wasn’t bad, and I kept on eating. But then I hit a bone. And another one. And yet another. It was like the entire fish’s skeleton ended up on my plate, because the rest of the family was munching away without a problem. So there I am, trying to act as if I think it’s delicious while simultaneously removing fish ribs—as politely as possible—from my back molars.

Unperturbed by my reaction to the fish, Sofiya plopped a sausage down on my plate. Now fish is one thing; sausage is a little more difficult. I live next door to a pig, after all. So I cut it up into little bites and tried to think happy thoughts to avoid dealing with the slaughterhouse inside my mouth. It was all well and good and I was even starting to enjoy the flavor until—BAM!—my teeth crunched down on something all too solid to be sausage.

“Ouch!” I said. I couldn’t help it, it really hurt. I removed the unidentified hard object and inspected it: it was white, round and tooth-like but definitively not a tooth.

“Oh, no problem,” she assured me, “It’s just bone.”

She placed a tall glass of lukewarm Coca-Cola in front of me. Nothing like pig skeleton and a cup of soda to jumpstart your morning.

* * *

I have a big packet of worksheets to use with my student. Most of them are quite helpful, and provide us with hours of good exercises and practice. Others are just kind of funny (keep in mind that this isn’t supposed to be one of those ‘what’s wrong with this picture’ things):

What, dare I ask, is a family saloon? A bar with a funhouse in the back? One of those playpens with a million little colorful balls? Kids drink Shirley Temples while the parents get drunk? Sofiya thought this one was quite hilarious.