Earliest Recollections

          Earliest Recollections

    I got here too quick. I was born a premature baby. At birth I weighed less than five pounds. After I got here I planed to stay skinny because I did not like eating, it took time away from playing and being mischievous. To me this was more important than eating green stuff that tasted awful.

    My mother and my mammy would secure me in my highchair each day, three times a day. One would stand over me with a flyswatter and the other with a spoon containing smashed Brussel spots. When I would cry, my mouth would open and in went a spoonful of Brussel sprouts. 

   When I wouldn’t open my mouth they would play the old airplane and choo-choo train trick. These high intellectual tricks consisted of putting mashed Brussels sprouts in a spoon, dancing around the kitchen, heading toward my mouth singing, “Here come the train, open your mouth.” 

   This trick worked once, the second time with the airplane flying into the hanger I got wise and refused to open my mouth.

   With the tricks not working they resorted to bribery.

  “Honey pie, would you like to go to the zoo and see the monkeys? Just eat one spoonful and I will take you,” my mother would say.

  I shock my head, watching these two running around the kitchen was funnier than the monkeys.

  In 1933 the League of Nations established stature BS99XZ which clearly states that force feeding Brussels sprouts to any human being is crime against humanity, with a. mandatory sentence of twenty years incarceration. Rutabagas drew fifty years with no parole.

   Then one day my mother and Julia came up with a new plan of attack. At the time I considered it to be underhanded but there was nothing I could do. They brought in my father. He would smash wasps with the palm of his hand if any dare come in and land on his car’s inside windshield. 

   He looked down at me and said, “You eat, I have plans for you.” 

   My mother would put me in my fancy carriage and stroll me to the park, where we would meet other mothers with their babies, big fat happy babies with red cheeks saying goo, goo, goo.

    I began to feel sorry for my mother. The other mothers looked into my carriage, at this speck under three blankets and say to my mother, “Who is your pediatrician?”

   Other mothers would shake their heads and start rattling off high calorie diets that might make me look like a real baby. When my mother could not take these insults any longer she wood come home, go into her bedroom and cry. After that, my mammy Julia would take me to the park to get my fresh air and sunshine. The other mothers would not say anything derogatory to Julia, because they did not want to get slugged. Julia was a brown skin lady, six feet tall, and weighed two hundred seventy-five pounds. You better not say anything bad about little Bo.

   “Mind your own damn business,” Julia would say.

   Then one day I began to eat and eat. I became a fat roily polio. Strange as it seems I developed a strong affinity for banana putting, breaded veal outlet, sweet potatoes, and fried chicken.

  In high school I went out for the football team. I was big and fat enough, but I was too slow. It was imperative that I earn a high school letter, to impress the girls, so I became the tennis team manager.

  Oh, before I forget, things went accounting to my father's plans. I became a partner in his business. He told people behind my back that he had made a race horse out of a jack ass.