preview

Ecstasy-Original Writing

Decent Essays
Open Document

We’re in Paris, eating dinner in a nice restaurant, and my father is telling a story. “So,” he says, “I found this brown something-or-other in my suitcase, and I started chewing on it, thinking that maybe it was part of a cookie.”
“Had you packed any cookies?” my friend Maja asks.
My father considers this an irrelevant question and brushes it off, saying, “Not that I know of, but that’s not the point.”
“So you found this thing in your suitcase, and your first instinct was to put it in your mouth?”
“Well, yes,” he says. “Sure I did. But the thing is….”
He continues his story, but, aside from my sisters and me, his audience is snagged on what would strike any sane adult as a considerable stumbling block. Why would a full-grown man place a foreign object into his mouth, especially if it was brown and discovered in a rarely used suitcase? It is a reasonable question, partially answered when the coffee arrives and my father slips a fistful of sugar into the pocket of his sport coat. Had my friends seen the blackened banana lying on my bed, they might have understood my father’s story and enjoyed it on its own merit. As it stood, however, an explanation was in order.

For as long as I can remember, my father has saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble …show more content…

Without that orange tag, an item was virtually invisible to him. The problem was that he never associated “quick sale” with “immediate consumption.” Upon returning from the store, he would put the meat into the freezer, hide his favorite fruits in the bathroom cabinet, and stuff everything else into the crisper. It was, of course, too late for crisp, but he took the refrigerator drawer at its word, insisting it was capable of reviving the dead and returning them, hale and vibrant, to the prime of their lives. Subjected to a few days in his beloved crisper, a carrot would become as pale and soft as a flaccid

Get Access
Related
Get Access