Tongue Tied

  

   They served us tongue on Tuesdays. Maybe not every Tuesday, all year, but for long enough to expect it in the same way I dreaded fish on Friday. I remember this for its alliterative quality, a slick device generally frowned upon by our English teachers within our own compositions, yet lauded in the works of the likes of Coleridge and Poe. Just as there was Fish on Friday, then, there would be Tongue on Tuesday. Should any of us have forgotten the weekly special, the fetid stench of simmering lingula wafting through the building would have most of us in an adenoidal rictus, mouths agape, nostrils firmly plugged, long before we were summoned at noon to proceed in silent, single file down the stairs to the basement dining room. And although this aroma couldn't hold a candle to the four hour onslaught produced by fish-sticks or cod-balls – which effectively put me of fish altogether for a lifetime – the smell, together with the unpleasant imagery running through every boy's mind, was enough to give a touch of green about the gills by mid morning. Not surprisingly, I have little memory of any other luncheon offering save for Hot Cross Buns, served once a year on Shrove Tuesday, which required endless picking over in order to remove the frightening bits of polychrome Bakelite and which, alongside sliced tongue, made for one deeply dismal meal.

   If you were born any time between VJ Day and the Kennedy assassination, you were probably exposed to a platter of cow tongue at some point in your youth. Millions of well-meaning moms were seized by this fad in the early Sixties as if by mass hysteria and perhaps our school was bullied into it by the PTA. There must have been a pundit, Adelle Davis, maybe, or an article in Readers' Digest extolling the benefits of tongue on children. Indeed, given the muscle in question is by all accounts quite fatty and nutritious and the memories of rickets and Depression-era malnutrition not so far behind us at the time, it must have seemed a logical choice. Save for the part about it being a tongue, for goodness' sake, and one was serving it to children! We had heard about frogs' legs and tripe and sweetbreads, but no one ever served them up for school lunch. Tongue, like brisket and shanks, might have once been inexpensive, too, until everyone's mom suddenly began demanding some tongue from her butcher.

   In any event, this papillated organ showed up at our house around the same time it did at school, though I don't recall Mom trotting it out more than once or twice. It is probably the case that I spent those nights alone at the table long after everyone else had been excused, meditating on the plight of starving children in Africa or India and awaiting an opportunity to spit my nasty cud into a napkin and slip it into the drawer of the side-table. This gambit worked well enough with liver and bacon, kidneys with sour cream and peas in any form. Perhaps my mother's years in France accustomed her to organ meats and the lesser muscles, although she mercifully drew the line at horse and escargot. I'm sure she intended to broaden our palates in much the way she thought our language arts might be enhanced by the presence of the French babysitter.

   But when that poor girl offered us a dish she referred to as maïs one night – pronouncing the French word for corn, mice - we bolted out the door and ran screaming down the street, begging aid from strangers