Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Tomato Soup Redux (or, What the Fuck is V-8 Anyway?)

V-8 ... this variation of tomato soup with some other vegetables ground into it meant to be taken cold is another stomach-turning thing that I was ordered to buy yesterday.

It wasn't my grandmother who forced me to drink something like this ... my grandmother would never do that. My grandmother on my mother's side enjoyed scrubbing and cleaning my scraped knee when I would report to her place on the way home after baseball practice. She had not only peroxide and iodine for the occasion, but something else without a label that burned like hell ... and she would sing while she was working on my knee and then laugh when I was making noises, trying to choke back the tears. She enjoyed that. Then she'd bring out the reason I stopped by ... fresh-baked bread or hot, right-out-of-the-oven apple, cherry, or peach pie (from the fruit my grandfather grew with his green Croatian thumb) or her famous banana cake with the butter frosting, sliced bananas and frosting between the layers, and a glass of cold Cotton Club Less-Sweet Ginger Ale (with a picture of Big Ginger on the neck of the 32-ounce green glass, returnable bottle) or icy-cold milk.

No, it wasn't my grandmother who made me gag. It was her sister, my great aunt, the religious fanatic who went off somewhere in the western wilderness to start a religious fanatic encampment, she was the one who was an all-natural, all-the-time, vegetarian, who made her own V-8 juice in her juicing machine, before anyone ever heard of a juicer, which she probably made herself.

And one afternoon, when I was a captive there at my great aunt's house, sitting in front of the 8-foot-tall statue of the blue-and-white-robed Blessed Virgin Mary, whose ceramic arms were outstretched with one hand partially amputated, and who was surrounded by a circular bed of flowers, she brought out a fucking huge glass of reddish-greenish-brownish liquid that she claimed, oh-so-sweetly, was good for me and good for my soul.

One sip ... that was it ... the gag reflex kicked in ... I dropped the glass as I tried not to throw up, the home-made V-8 soaking into the grass, which began to wither before my eyes. She wanted to know what was wrong; and I lied to her, a religious fanatic, before it was fashionable, in a time when God really did listen to them and do their bidding, risking that I would be stricken deaf and mute because that's what God would do back in the day for religious fanatics like her, and said that I hadn't been feeling well, all the time silently cursing my mother for having dropped me off for a visit because my great aunt on my mother's side was lonely ....

And that's why I won't drink V-8.

Posted by Bill at February 3, 2006 02:41 PM