The Case Of The Negligent Child

I moved around a lot as a child. My parents are New Yorkers—I was born in Long Island, but when I was about two we moved to Michigan. Then, when I was about six (or seven, maybe) we moved to a little suburb just outside of Minneapolis. I didn’t live there for long, but these were formative years for me. In many ways I stayed Minnesotan much longer than I should have. I still pronounce the word “tour” as two syllables, an affectation that greatly amused my Philadelphia friends when they discovered it, taking it as further evidence that I am stupid. I don’t fault them—that’s a puzzle they’ve been working out for years, and at the time that legitimately looked like a corner piece.

But this isn’t a memoir about my childhood wanderings, or my thin veneer of competence—that’s just me establishing constants.

This is a mystery tale—one that takes place deep in the heart of Minneapolis, Minnesota, on a little chunk of land called Nicollet Island. Back when I was six (or seven, maybe), my family went there for Mother’s Day Brunch, and it was there, on the petrichor shores of the Mississip’, that I was murdered.

Okay, okay… not really.

But honestly, if you’re going to barge in here and read my secret diary, I’m allowed a little something called SHOWMANSHIP.

The Island Of Lost Breakfast

So, back to the story… my Dad had the kind of job where he traveled frequently. For long stretches of my childhood, he was only home on the weekends. But if he was sent to an area long enough, we’d all move out there so the family could be together. Two months earlier was the move to Minnesota. So this brunch was very important to my Dad—a special gift for my Mom, who had just packed up her whole family (again) and moved another time zone away (again). He got a table, by the window, overlooking the river. And remember, this is Mother’s day—we’re all dressed up in our Sunday best, cowlicks matted down, tiny little ties and jackets, which was probably a battle in itself. And after all that, we arrive, follow the host to a table reserved months in advance, sit down, and before the menus even pop open, I shove my tiny little hands in my armpits and declared:

“I want to leave.”

Now, my Mom is the type of Mom who—when the school had each kid make carnations for Mother’s Day—wore all three of these gaudy tissue paper monstrosities. They are goodly people, my parents. Their bones are steeped in a powerful Catholicism. And as the cross-stitch in the kitchen so beseeched, God hath granted them the patience to endure their blessings. “Why, oh middle child,” they endured, “must we leave?”

“I don’t like this food.” I replied.

"There’s different food at the buffet downstairs,” said the waitress, a goodly person as well, “Can we move you down there?"

And so my family abandoned their coffees and teas, their tiny glasses of freshly-squeezed juice, gathered their belongings, and migrated to the bottom floor of the inn. A humbler principality, where Mother’s Day was still observed, but not celebrated, not really. Starving mothers still toiled for their sustenance, trudging back and forth from the brunch table, plates laden with melon rind and community bacon. But despite such adversity, my family persevered. They gathered a great feast, even for the most ungrateful among them—the difficult child known as Kevin. And lo, when pancakes, soaked with syrup and stained a rich, deep blue were laid before him, Kevin took one quick look and said:

“I want to leave.”

And then they killed him.

Metaphorically.

The truth of my baffling behavior was never revealed that day. But I shall reveal it to you now. That day wasn’t about the food. The reason for my obstinate behavior was much stranger, much more unexplainable. The reason I wanted to leave, was because there was a floral print on the plate¹.

Of Flowers, and The Woes They’ve Wrought

It’s funny how a little tiny quirk can dictate your whole life. We all have bugaboos, peccadilloes—little mental roadblocks. Some of us have ones so potent that we strive to avoid them at all costs. But we don’t always know their origin. They just exist, and you live around them, like ants in the summer. Mine is flowers. Not every instance of flowers, mind you. I can hold a rose, or smell a peony. Only specific permutations trigger me. Floral tableware, as we’ve established. A floral centerpiece can do it—if I go to a restaurant, first thing I do is move that vase as far away as I can. Garnishing meals with a beautiful fresh flower feels particularly spiteful to me. Even food just made to look like a flower is problematic—radish rosettes, or a fruit bouquet, or especially, ESPECIALLY the buttercream flowers on a wedding cake. I almost never eat wedding cake. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even eat my own.

The kind of floral patterns that trigger me tend to come from a particular era of human existence. Let’s say… 1500 to maybe… 1900. A time before photography, when artists relentlessly pursued realism. That realism is my undoing—the more naturalistic, the more ‘fancy’, as it were, the rendering, the more visceral my reaction. Having gone to art school, I’d run into this sort of thing all the time. Renaissance paintings, Baroque sculpture, anything Rococo. I’d see these things in my textbooks, or in a museum, and think to myself “Ooh — I couldn’t eat near THAT.”

This reaction—a shortening of breath, a quickening of the pulse, an overwhelming urge to retch—isn’t just triggered by flowers. The age of a thing, too, stirs my madness. I remember, as a kid, being in a huge basilica of a building. A restaurant, I think. There was music—french horns—and a crumbling frescoe on the ceiling: angelic little putti, blowing trumpets, fluttering amongst the flowers. Cue disgust. Also, cue putti now making me feel nauseous every time I see them. Stupid brain.

I remember, eight or so years back, visiting a shabby museum in North Philadelphia with my friend Sequoia. The former home of some old Victorian philanthropist, full of trinkets and trophies of natural philosophy. Naval maps. Butterflies skewered with pins. Old taxidermy, with cloudy eyeballs and dusty fur, and a subtle, mildewy stink.

I’m getting nauseous just writing this.

Perhaps you are too.

But let us both take a deep breath, and prepare ourselves for the crucible. We depart the mud-smeared shores of the Mississippi, the shabby stale humidity of North Philadelphia, and soar to the cool crispness of the Bavarian countryside, an hour outside Munich. See there, in your mind’s eye, a small group of five friends waiting in line to tour the luxuriant splendor of Mad King Ludwig’s Linderhof Palace.

Narrow Escape From A Narrow World

If you know nothing of Ludwig II, know this—he loved castles. And fairytales. And isolation. He buried himself in splendorous things, and used the vast treasury at his disposal to carve the unreal into reality. Linderhof Palace was his true home—where he spent most of his days. It is a nightmare of rococo excess, modeled on Versailles itself, a coffin of gilding and swirls and putti that I swear to GOD multiplies, like mussels on a hull, when you turn your back. The room is perpetually shrinking around you, burying you in silver and pearl, gold and candlewax. And fabric. Velvety curtains and rugs and beds and cushions soaked with the dead skin and fetid secretions of a man utterly lost in his dreams. I didn’t realize that going in. I thought I was going to see some cool doorknobs. Instead, I entered a swirling nightmare hellscape designed specifically for me.

There was this one room… the dining room… where Ludwig would sit at this big table and feast. The table was designed to lower down into the kitchens, so that he didn’t have to see any other humans. The mechanism was apparently a bit faulty, and moved at a snail’s pace, so Ludwig would have to sit there, in all that steamy opulence, wine-drunk, beads of sweat running down his back—as an altar of roasted meats and sweating fruits and congealed fat and warm shellfish sloshing about in its own liquor slowly rose…. like the panic in my brain…. as I realized that if I didn’t get out of this room RIGHT NOW I was going to throw up all over the tour guide, causing them to vomit, causing the others to vomit, until twenty Germans and five Americans drowned to death in over one-hundred million euros worth of damaged state property.

Shortly after, the tour moved on.

Great Unravelings

Cut to six months later, half a globe away—the kitchen in my home. Kim and I, prepping our meals for the week. I am safe here, from my phobia. There are no flowers on the plates, no putti on ceiling. We’re chatting, as married people do, about nothing and everything. Places we want to go, places we’ve been. About that trip we went on to Germany, to Linderhof Palace. And something in me clicks. A cog, in my brain, finally rolls into place, and a memory slips out—a book from my childhood in Minnesota—an abridged-for-children retelling of the Charles Dickens classic, Great Expectations. And I suddenly realize… oh my god. That’s the key. That’s the key to my WHOLE DEAL.

There is a character in Great Expectations named Miss Havisham, a woman who, when jilted on her wedding day, says to herself “Nuts to this, turds!” and freezes her life in place. For the next twenty years she just mopes about that fancy banquet hall, farting in her wedding gown, and watching her big expensive feast rot to pieces. I don’t quite remember how Dickens describes the scene. I could look it up I guess, but he’s so beyond me as a writer² that I frankly don’t want to invite the comparison—I’ve handed out too many corner pieces already, thank you very much. So, I’ll just say this: there’s this one part where he vividly describes the neglected table, and I can still see it in my head—fancy china covered in dust, rotten floral centerpieces, and an old wedding cake, black with mold, spiders running in and out, dusty cobwebs draped over wilted, feculent buttercream florettes. That scene disturbed me so greatly as a kid, I don’t think I ever revisited it. I don’t think I even finished the book! Even abridged, that Dickens is a powerful writer! Too powerful, I’d argue!

I decided my parents deserved an apology, and an explanation.

Unfortunately, it turns out Charles Dickens is long dead, and his estate refused to answer my numerous phone calls and letters. So it was left to me to call my parents, and apologize on my own.

“Hi Mom!” I said, “Journey with me, in your mind, to the mud-smeared shores of the Mississipp’…”

When You’re A Jet

It’s not often I get to solve a mystery. It’s a strange feeling. I don’t know any actual detectives, but I see them on TV and movies, and after they solve a crime they all seem to stay pretty miserable. Which makes sense. Real mysteries aren’t like murder mystery parties. The dead don’t just suddenly come back to life, kiss the host goodnight, and head back home to feed their cats. I know the origin of my phobia, but I don’t feel any less aversion to eating off floral plates. I’m certainly not going back to Linderhof Palace anytime soon. No, solving a mystery doesn’t actually put anything back where it should be. But it does bring perspective. Miss Havisham was left at the altar, and her grief turned into a poison. Ludwig II lived in an age when kings weren’t human, or at least weren’t allowed to be—and they certainly weren’t allowed to be gay. He could gild his surroundings until the cows came home, but the despair, the haunting despair, that this man lived in, was still palpable. Being denied love… denied the opportunity to love… that’s my real fear. Anyone’s real fear. Or at least it should be. I think my kid brain couldn’t handle that. So it made me afraid of flowers³.

Stupid brain.

After I explained what happened, all those years ago, to my Mom, she just laughed. “It’s okay,” she crackled. She’s eighty now—her voice breaks and sputters when she talks, and there’s long pauses as she finds her words. “You were just you being you… and these sorts of things happen to kids. We love you anyway, all of us. It upset me because Dad was so devastated, but… you know, kids do that. They just do that.”

1. Strangely, my little kid brain did not realize that the upstairs would have the same plates as the downstairs. Also, to this day, I have no idea why I blamed the menu instead of just saying the plate had flowers. I suppose because I knew it was unlikely we’d move if that’s what I said. Wow — that’s a pretty clever trick, little Kev!

2. I doubt he EVER resorted to using the word ‘turds’ when he told a story.

3. This is my theory, at least. Obviously I’m not a professional psychologist, so who knows what’s really going on in the ol’ coconut.