Growing up in the 1950s in New Jersey in a family ruled by the Episcopal Church and the dictums of the Archbishop of Canterbury, certainly had its ups and downs, especially for me.
Even though we weren’t Catholic, my father said we had to eat seafood every Friday, like our Catholic friends.
That’s why I hated Fridays in those years.
And he always hit his stride on Holy Thursdays with his stock public announcement.
“Tomorrow is Good Friday, and not even a dog would eat meat that day,” he’d say.
My brother and I heard this call to arms year after year.
The only hope on Fridays — especially not Good Friday — for me was that a non-Catholic friend would invite me over for dinner where I could look forward to indulging in a juicy hamburger, hot dog and baked beans, or a plate of spaghetti redolent in a pungent tomato sauce.
Anything but damned fish.
My mother would set off early Friday mornings for the Somerset Fish Market in Plainfield where an enormous red lobster on the roof over the door with its name entangled in its claws and flippers welcomed shoppers.
I never accompanied her into the market, if I was off from school.
I couldn’t stand the smell of the place plus the floors were always wet with chips of ice which could send you into a whoopsie-doodle if you weren’t careful where you walked.
She’d return home with salmon, cod, halibut, tuna or flounder or what we call rockfish in Maryland — “stripers” in Jersey — wrapped in pale pink paper that was tied with a string by the fishmonger, while puffing away on a huge cigar the size of a railroad flare.
When the transaction was concluded, he’d tip his straw hat — worn year round no matter the season — to my mother.
Now, because there is no obvious fishy taste with the last two, I could stomach them, but they made irregular appearances at the table.
What my brother and I really wanted were fish sticks — that golden brown French-fry-looking 1950s invention — produced by Gorton’s of Gloucester.
But our parents were against prepared foods of that type and they never made an appearance in our house.
I must confess, I like shellfish, but it was expensive, and didn’t always show up on our table very often.
We’d have crab cakes, oyster stew, shrimp cocktail and Long Island Sound scallops which were sweet tiny bite-size morsels that resembled chicken nuggets.
And they bore no resemblance to their Atlantic Ocean cousins which were large slippery vanilla-colored pieces of what looked like vulcanized rubber to me and tasted about the same.
When it was time for dinner, the fish placed on my plate may well have been the size of Moby Dick.
As I poked at it and washed small bitefulls down with milk until there was no more milk or the remote chance of a refill, my father would remonstrate with, “Fred, eat your dinner.”
My parents had endured and survived the Great Depression where food was valued and you cleaned your plate no matter what was put down before you.
Parents in the 1950s, also had compendiums of convenient aphorisms suitable for every occasion and situation known to humankind.
“Fred, eat you dinner. There are starving children in China” or the variation on a theme, “There are starving children in Armenia,” my father would say.
In a bold preadolescent strike back at independence before a declaration of war when you hit your teen years, I had had enough of this preposterous urging and replied: “Name two.”
My father quickly dragged a linen napkin up to cover his mouth and disguise a laugh with a fake cough, amused I suppose at my inquiry, creativity and above all, insolence.
He couldn’t answer my inquiry and that expression soon vanished from his collection of domestic phrases.
I alluded to tuna earlier.
I still loathe tuna in any form, especially the ghastly mayonnaise gooey laden tuna salad, a staple of all my Catholic friends, and this is why you had to be very careful when participating in the daily New Market Elementary School.
It was the school’s lunchroom blackmarket where everyone swapped lunches, and I knew when I entered the stakes, somehow, somewhere, someplace a dreaded tuna sandwich was lurking, just waiting for a sucker like me to claim it.
I also discovered, kids weren’t exactly so forthcoming about what they actually had in their bag and then — caveat emptor — you were stuck once the deal was consummated.
Hope there’s a banana in here, you’d say to yourself, as some sort of consolation prize.
First off, parents in those days insisted you brown-bagged or schlepped a lunch in a lunchbox, made with leftovers or the coin of the realm, peanut butter and jelly.
Again, all I wanted to do was go to the cafeteria and lunch on one of those perfectly gorgeous hours’ long steamed-gray hamburgers, that had turned the color of a U.S. Navy destroyer, or a bowl of spaghetti drenched in a snowy mountain of parmesan cheese, but that was simply out of the question.
My parents refused to fork over 50 cents for a cafeteria lunch.
“Why would we do that?” my mother would say, “when we have a perfectly leftover pork roast or meatloaf for your lunch, plus it’s better for you.”
Fast forward to the 1990s, and it’s Good Friday in Baltimore, and I’m having lunch with two friends, one who happens to be the Rev. Michael Roach, a jolly Catholic priest.
The server comes over and they order a lunch that is respectful of Good Friday, while I ask for a turkey club on white toast.
I look up from the menu and there are Roach’s eyes burning in my direction like two acetylene torches.
“Meat on Good Friday?” he seriously asks, like he was cross examining Martin Luther.
“Well, I really don’t like seafood and don’t want a salad,” I explained.
“Do you know who you are?” Roach said. “I’ll tell you who you are. You’re a low-country churchman.”
“I guess I am,” I said. “Guilty as charged.”
And I still avoid fish of any kind on Good Friday.
You have my sympathy. My family wasn’t Catholic (or even Christian, for that matter), but I hated my mother’s fish. It was always flounder, and always tasteless. As an adult, I discovered the wide world of fish and now love most of it–but still leave the flounder to others. (P.S. Great to see your byline again!)