Salad Days

This morning, reading Kate Atkinson's brilliant novel Life after Life (2013), I came across an expression--"salad days"--that we can trace right back to the Bard: Antony and Cleopatra (1606-07)--

Cleopatra: My salad days,

When I was green in judgment ... (1.5).

It got me thinking--not so much about Cleopatra and Atkinson but about my own salad days, the literal not the metaphorical ones.

I've never really liked salad. Greens. You know. (Joyce, on the other hand, must have some rabbit blood in her, for she could live on salad--eats it like ... well, like Peter Rabbit.)

I never order salad with my restaurant meals (some places--like Dontino's in North Akron--let me substitute applesauce, a boyhood favorite that has lingered into my dotage). I virtually never have it at home. It's enough to see the mound of greens on Joyce's plate at lunch, at supper. To hear her munching with leporine ferocity.

It's not that I hate lettuce--though eating it seems a bit like eating grass. But I do hate tomatoes (I can not eat one) and some of the other ill-named "goodies" you find on salads. I like shredded carrots. Croutons are ... possible. Can eat sliced beets--though, like Melville's Bartleby, "I would prefer not to."* Can't stand mushrooms, olives (black or green). (Link to "Bartleby, the Scrivener.")

Okay, when I'm trying to lose weight (as I have throughout my adult years), I'll order a salad with sliced chicken. No dressing. (I don't like dressing, either.) One dire diet cycle I made and ate at home a chicken salad every night. It was grim. But the pounds slowly disappeared--well, not disappeared. They went into hiding somewhere in our house and returned with a vengeance (and with some relatives) when I returned to, oh, Snickers bars, crunchy peanut butter, and popcorn at the movies.

So ... I know that salad could be/should be my friend. The health and weight benefits, etc.

But I just can't do it. Instead, I'll just enjoy the vicarious** thrill (!?!) of watching Joyce munch away.  While I'm eating a hunk of homemade sourdough bread. Peanut butter goes great with it!

*BTW 1: I have a T-shirt I bought at the museum shop at Arrowhead (Melville's former farm in Pittsfield, Mass., where he wrote that white-whale book); the shirt says "I would prefer not to." About once a week I wear it when I'm working out because it expresses so perfectly how I feel about working out.

**BTW 2: I learned the word vicarious from Joyce in the summer of 1969, when we met: She used it while answering a question in our Kent State grad class--"American Transcendentalism. Turned me on. (Yeah, I'm word-weird.)