Festivus Comes Early in the Plague Year

 

Since I’m turning stinking 70 in the Plague Year 2020, and there’s no telling where I might be during the approaching Festivus, I shall start early with the Airing of the Grievances.

I was a Brain in high school. Not in the “in” crowd, not a cheerleader, never on Homecoming Court, never up on the latest fashions and not good at styling my hair. But could I ever ruin a “curve,” especially in English class. When we got test papers back, someone would ask the teacher, “Will you grade this on a curve?” She would answer, “Sorry, there’s no curve. Someone got 100.” And Harold Eastwood would roll his eyes and say, “I wonder who.” (This is not the grievance. I liked Harold, and his teasing was always good-natured.)

The grievance attaches to the NMSQT. Not an identity, it’s the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Standardized tests never scared me, and I filled in those little rectangles with confidence. I did all right.

Then, at the end of the year, there was one of those ordeals they called an assembly. One of the school officials announced the thrilling news that a sophomore had taken the NMSQT and earned an honorable mention. Great news for our school, he intoned. Most sophomores wouldn’t even try the test, but here we had a brilliant, brave young man who not only took the test, but got Honorable Mention, something almost unheard of in the history of NMSQTesting, which is ever so challenging, and we can hardly believe we have such an achievement in our student body, and on and on. He ended with “Wealsohadawinner,DianaHeman.” I didn’t think anybody heard it. So, yeah, it was true, I was chopped liver.

At the end of the day, I was walking to my locker. A teacher stood on the little porch of her “portable” classroom. She was apparently the one person who heard that last sentence. She called out, “Congratulations.” I stared for a moment, thinking, “Yeah, sure,” but didn’t say anything. I regret that I was rude to her. I guess she has a grievance too.

Fugu Fugue, or Blowfish Blues

      No doubt in idle moments of Covid-19 quarantine, your thoughts have turned, as did mine, to this question: Are the blowfish that live in Florida waters the same as the fugu that are eaten with great ceremony in Japan? And now it can be told. Yes. Yes, they are. 

They’re all Tetraodontidae, which means they have four big ol’ teeth that can crunch through shells, and almost all have tetradotoxin, which, according to Cuteness.com (Really. Cuteness.com has lots of info about blowfish.) is more than a thousand times as poisonous as cyanide, and one fish-worth can kill 30 people. And my brothers and I used to eat the meat with some regularity. Well, maybe that’s not the best word. Frequency? Anyway, we ate it, and we lived.

            In Japan, chefs train for three years to be allowed to serve fugu. They learn to trim off the skin and scoop out the innards without puncturing anything. The poisonous bits get their own trash bowl. And people pay hundreds of dollars to eat slices of raw fish so thin they look smeared on the plate, or crispy fried chunks. A character in a novel I read said that eating fugu made the diner feel high, because he had skated so close to death and come through alive. That’s assuming he did come through alive.

          Here in Florida, you can hardly avoid catching blowfish in places like the Banana River on the east coast. The Air Force base where my father was stationed had a boathouse where officers could check out a modest fishing boat for free. Remember that phrase. When we kids were there for summer visits, he’d take us fishing. Fish were free food. We caught from angelfish to zebrafish. (At least that’s what we called them. They weren’t the cute little aquarium fish that turn up on a Web search.) And whiting. I think we had that right. They’re common and OK to eat. And, of course, abundant blowfish.

          As oldest sibling, my brother got the job of cleaning the fish at the kitchen sink. He snipped the tails into zigzag points or little scallops. And he got his fugu training. It didn’t take three years. It was, “Here’s the knife, here are the utility scissors, don’t punch a hole in the liver.” Three seconds maybe? The graduation speech: “Yes, it’s poison, but I think it will be all right.”

          The edible bit of the blowfish is two ovoid shapes on either side of the body, looking like chicken oysters. I had to look up the name, but chicken oysters are the yummy round bits in indentations on the back of the chicken, usually overlooked in carving. You can pop them out with your thumb, and do they ever taste good. The blowfish blobs are pale grayish and have a network of tiny veins on the surface. They taste like… frog legs, maybe. No matter how hard you try, frog legs do not taste like chicken.

          My husband’s family fished at every opportunity. They were probably within a mile of our boat on every outing. His father told them to throw the blowfish back. Then one day they were at the home of an alcoholic cousin who went about preparing for them, with his shaking hands, a nice mess of blowfish. My future father-in-law kept quiet, the boys ate the blowfish, and everybody lived.

          Fugu still kills a few hundred people in Japan each year, supposedly because of uncertified rogue chefs. I guess they charge less. But you wouldn’t eat their fugu any more than my adolescent brother’s or my husband’s alcoholic cousin’s. You wouldn’t, would you? It’s been 60 years since I ate Banana River blowfish, and I feel like running out to get my stomach pumped. The thrill of having avoided death is way overrated. Anyone for a burger?