Stroke by Ricky Monahan Brown

Author:Ricky Monahan Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912240456
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2018-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

12

The Magic Rutabaga

It was after not being allowed solid foods, and then being appalled by puréed bread and most of the other soft slop that had been served to me at mealtimes, that I had lost that 35lb.

Back when I was at Methodist, one of the doctors had taken Beth aside in the corridor.

‘Go and find something he likes,’ he had said. ‘It doesn’t matter what it is. As long as he eats something.’

‘He does enjoy those chocolate and vanilla puddings that sometimes come with his dinner.’

‘Perfect. Go down to the cafeteria, and get a bunch of them.’

We took this direction seriously. Supplies from the cafeteria supplemented the lunchtime and dinnertime nutritional puddings I was already being served, and to the extent I couldn’t finish them, they were hoarded in the bedside cabinet for later. Now, Beth would also pop into the Barnes & Noble bookstore on her way to HJD, to pick up a cup of tea for herself, and a cream puff for me. The cream puffs tasted like they had been baked in small batches by a Brooklyn fairy godmother from flour, butter, eggs, salt and heavy cream, and then covered in smooth, intense chocolate.

However, a Scotsman with a stroke cannot live on cream puffs and puddings alone. As my activities in therapy stepped up, Beth would sit by my beside each evening, ticking boxes on a menu as I declared my preferences for the next day’s meals. She did this partly to be, and feel, helpful, and partly because she was concerned I would forget that I’m a vegetarian, only to remember with horror when I realised what I had been eating.

One night, I opted for an impossibly exotic side dish. Dinner arrived the following evening, and I tucked in.

‘What is this stuff?’ I asked.

Its appearance offered no clue, so Beth took a tentative taste. ‘That’s your pureed rutabaga,’ she declared.

‘Oh! So that’s pureed rutabaga? I don’t like it.’

I didn’t like the taste of it at all, but I loved the word ‘rutabaga’. A rutabaga may look like a neep on steroids, but I subsequently learned that it’s a cross between a turnip and cabbage, with all the exciting flavour explosions that would suggest. Still, the word took root in the surprisingly fertile soil of my re-wiring brain. An ‘eggplant’ may not hold a candle to the romance of the ‘aubergine’, but a ‘rutabaga’ suggested heights of exoticism that a ‘swede’ could not touch.

By the end of the day, I had sketched my imaginary new friend, The Magic Rutabaga, on a napkin. Tottering on wispy legs, two thick leaves parted above his giant head, and he looked bloody furious. His eyes squeezed shut in disgust at the gods who had condemned him to bland flavourlessness, his uvula swung as he yelled, ‘AAARGH!’

Our pal Paul took a look at the tortured countenance of Rudy the Magic Rutabaga and noted, ‘Once a year, in early February, he rises from the basement and feels bad about not being The Great Pumpkin.

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