The Great Food Strike of 2000

In the summer of 2000 when I was sixteen, several circumstances conspired against my father and step mom such that all four of their offspring - my brother, my step brother, my step sister, and I - were under their roof for a continuous number of months. My brother and I usually enjoyed one of the standard joint custody arrangements: every Wednesday and every other weekend we spent with our father; the rest of the week we spent with our mom. I never quite understood the schedule my step siblings had with their parents, but it seemed to be derived from some sort of family court algorithm, dependent on the tides and the waning of the moon and the number of car horns beeped in any given six day period. But that particular summer, their dad was incapacitated with knee surgery at the same time that my mom was mid-move into a house that had yet to be affixed with doors, or lighting fixtures, or even some sort of flooring, and so, for the first time, all six of us lived together under one roof for two consecutive months.

At first I think my dad and Shelley saw this as an opportunity -- a chance to bring the family together, a chance to bond and grow, without the intrusion of exes and school schedules and the constant back and forth lifestyle to which we'd become accustomed. But all too quickly the Brady Bunch utopia they'd envisioned faded away, leaving behind nothing but four growing teenagers, who were all very hungry.

Four mouths to feed was something our parents were not used to, and they didn't take the added expense all that well. If you met my dad and step mom, you would immediately conclude that they are both kindhearted, responsible, caring people. You would be right. Yet, somehow something short-circuited in their collective brains that summer. For whatever reason, their answer to the growing grocery bill was to just stop buying groceries.

It began somewhat gradually. The two of them would go out for dinner and tell the four of us to "fend for ourselves." The first time, they left us a twenty, and we ordered pizza. The second time, they forgot, so we pooled our money and ordered pizza. The third time, we simply consulted the fridge. Fairly soon, certain food items began to disappear. Deli meat, sandwich bread, and fresh fruit and vegetables would fail to be replaced upon the fine, white, ever-emptier shelves of our refrigerator. I admit, I was guilty of gobbling up some of the luxury item produce: I've never been able to resist a crisp green cucumber or a ripe, red, beefsteak tomato. Some parents would wish to be so lucky. Mine panicked. I recall quite vividly the day I looked upon the kitchen counter to discover a beautiful tomato wearing a post-it note that said "Do not eat."

About this time, I was fortunate enough to have a job waiting tables in a restaurant. Working a double shift guaranteed me the delight of an expertly-cooked, ample meal around 4 pm and scrapes and scraps of bread and cheesecake until midnight. At the end of the night, I would take home the extra slices of bread bound for the garbage. Leftover rice would get piled into empty mozzarella containers. Anything both transportable and edible was sneaked away to feed my brothers and sister. I should clarify that our parents hadn't left us to starve; there was always Smart Start and cottage cheese in the fridge. Not counting the heisted carbohydrates from Nata's Restaurant, cereal and cottage cheese was the bulk of our sustenance for two solid months.

I'm now coming to the point in the story where a lesson kicks in. This is the appropriate place to recount how I suddenly overheard that my dad had fallen on hard times while eavesdropping on a telephone conversation. Shelley and he used "dinner out" as code for "work a night shift as a telemarketer slash industrial laborer from six to eight pm." The night shift was at the local cereal company, which happened to produce Smart Start and, inexplicably, cottage cheese. All the puzzle pieces were coming together, and what was clearest of all was that they had, as parents aught, a plan, the grander scheme, the larger picture in mind.

The real truth was that my dad had grown up on a farm. He was the child of immigrants. He learned to speak Hungarian well before English, and he was forced to eat chicken fat sandwiches every single Thursday of his childhood. I'm not sure how these particular facts figure in, but they seem to be the type of idiosyncratic background information that explains idiosyncratic adulthood. If it does in this case, feel free to explain to me how so.

Theorize though I may, I'm pretty sure my dad and Shelley simply got lazy and decided they could stop being parents for a while. This wasn't a hindsight discovery; as the summer dragged on, my siblings and I began referring to the situation as the Great Food Strike. We were aware of the insanity in real time. It was one of the shining moments in the history of my childhood when I realized my parents, in actuality, had no greater plan than making it through the day. When my mother was little, her mother - my dear dear grandmother - once tied her to a tree for several hours as punishment for something so negligible I've forgotten the crime. On another occasion, my grandmother made my mom wear a sign that said "Don't Feed" because she periodically came home from various friends' houses with little appetite for dinner. Parents are too often enlarged versions of children, making it up as they go along or simply refusing to act, erratically subject to whims of selfishness, still wielding the battle cry of "I don't wanna." Parents, as most people find out in their twenties, are human. Perhaps my parents' problem was that they forgot to keep that secret under wraps.

In my current job, some days I'm a genius and some days I can't tell the difference between "know" "no" "now" and "shellfish." What if my "job" was caring for another human being? It's a scary thought that my days of ineptitude might affect whether a child is fed or flossed or tucked in tightly. If I am wise, but still inept, all of my grander mistakes will happen well before my child turns sixteen and knows better. Then again, while I have doubts about my parenting abilities, should having them become necessary, I'm confident that when the going gets tough and the grocery bill gets high, I might make a bad call or two, but I would never call it quits.

I'm lucky that my parents did enough right to right the wrongs -- and, what's more, I get to turn all their transgressions into anecdotal justification of my own adulthood inanity. Everything comes back around. Case in point: my poor father got sacked with a daughter who wants to be a writer of quirky family comedies. Talk about karma. It's not all bad - the stories, the memories, the fatherly example he set - but in the cosmic, karmic nature of things, all the stories worth sharing stir the dirt, point their grubby fingers, and lay the bittersweet, retroactive blame.

The most memorable part of the Great Food Strike, which ended as the fall began, was observing that post-it note tomato as it sat on the counter. I watched it go from plump and red, to slightly squishy, with wrinkled skin, to soft, discolored, and undesirable, to downright rotten and covered in mold. And still the yellow post-it read, "Do not eat." If there is a lesson in this parable - and frankly, there might not be - perhaps it's that a penny saved is sometimes a penny wasted. Perhaps it's that restaurant jobs can have timely, unexpected perks. Perhaps it's that all things must end -- food strikes, summer breaks, and - thank God - childhood.