There's A Price To Pay If You Don't Pay Attention

"Even the clocks held their breath."




"Near as I recollect, Chet and Buddy didn’t start out slow eaters. I trained them that way. It got to be too much, baking a devil’s-food cake from scratch and watching Chet and Buddy wolf it down in three bites. Two of them hurrying to choke down one slice, then another, until the cake was nothing left but the dirty plate. Even while they’re inhaling my food, they’re talking plans about something next, or reading out of a catalogue, or hearing the news on the radio. Always living months into the future. Miles down the road.
The only exception was any food the two of them put on the table. Anytime Chet shot a goose, we sat there, everyone talking up how good it tasted. Or if Buddy caught a string of trout, again, the family spent all night eating it. ’Course, there’s bones in a trout. In a goose, you figure to look out for steel shot. There’s a price to pay if you don’t pay attention to the food you’re chewing. You get a fish bone in your throat and choke to death, or a sharp bone stabbed through the roof of your mouth. Or you split a back tooth, biting down on bird shot.


Scripture in the Casey household decrees, “The secret ingredient to anything tasty is something that’s going to hurt.”
It’s not as if she intended to hurt people. Irene only booby-trapped food because she cared too much. If she didn’t give a damn, she’d serve them frozen dinners and call the matter settled.


Don’t you forget. The most I saw the Caseys was over church. Seeing them on Sundays at service and after, at the potluck suppers over by the grange hall.
The secret ingredient that made folks really taste Irene’s peach cobbler was sneaking in some cherry pits. Could about break your jawbone by accident. The secret of her apple brown Betty was mixing in plenty of sharp slivers of walnut shell.
When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn’t talk or flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts. A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better. Could be other ladies were better cooks, but you’d never notice.

The way I figure, as long as food tastes better than it hurts, you’re going to keep eating. As long as you’re more enjoying than you are suffering."