Velveeta ~ hmmm. My Mom had some real prejudices. She wouldn't buy Velveeta. I'd never tasted it. I think she probably said, something like, "It isn't cheese." She never knew, I mean never, what she was talking about. Altho she might have been right there; I don't know. 'Course, that would bring up the whole question, what is cheese.
ANYWAY, I was about seven and had a fishing pole and was fishing near the old dam that fed the cool canals, the Venetian-woods-like canals, at the Old Big Sur Campground. People usually had jars of fluorescent pink salmon eggs. They always kind of blew my mind. Pink, pink things do, but pink round things really get me sidetracked. There'd be some on the bottom. Which either meant the fish could care less, or had clean table habits, and didn't want any mud on their wet fluorescent salmon eggs. Like there were fluorescent salmon in the Sur River. Yuh-huh. "It's so they can see them." "Yah, like everything else they eat."
SEE?
ANYWAY,
now I'm lost.
Oh. Velveeta. Kind of a cool name. Cheesy. Smooooth. Or gross, if you could see the personal-pain grimace my mother would make. (Wow! I just remembered that later that same day, I got my first fishhook caught in my ear. The year before, a guy had gotten one IN HIS EYEBALL.) I wore hooded sweatshirts, but the sun was out and the hood was down. "Lift the hood" I'd always hear my father say.
I don't know what I had for bait. I usually forgot it, and my mother would give me something really lame like bacon. Bits. Real bits. Uncooked, and all fatty and gross and making a real ugly mess on a hook. Yuk. So there were some other people on the side of the dam over there, and they were using Velveeta. Everyone at Sur, Everyone, used salmon eggs or Velveeta. [How do you dye a salmon egg fluorescent pink?]
People swore by Velveeta. They would squeeze GOBS of it on their hooks. Bigger gobs than the mouth of any fish I'd ever seen come out of the creek. About quarter-size. "They nibble." I mosied over and the guy says "Try some", and points to the rock over there, where a loaf of Velveeta is lying in the sun, unwrapped, with big gobs pinched off.
It looked funny. [I should have carefully packed it up to take home and show Mom.] I tried a gob on the hook, kerplop, gotta squeeze it on there hard, get another gob, moosh it on. I tired that for a while, and got bored, and decided to taste it. I tasted the Velveeta. Off the block. Warm, sunny, plasticine, slippery Velveeta.
It wasn't bad. Actually, I liked it.
I think I did it because of complex familial psychologic issues. Maybe because my mother would disapprove, even without the gobber finger digs, and dirt and melty slumping happening there. But I think something deeper than that. A nascent suspicion. A suspicion that my mother, didn't seem to know what she was talking about. Most of the time. Hardly ever. |
