Time lessens bad taste of childhood's dinnertime trauma

"A spoon does not know the taste of soup."

- Welsh proverb

I was having lunch last week with the folks at University Health System's Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation section when Willie Allen leaned over and told me he usually doesn't like pumpkin pie.

"But I like this," he said, taking a bite of dessert.

"Must be the whipped cream," I said between my own bites, but I knew what he meant.

Today, I can't think of Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie, but for years that was not so. In fact, the thought of making pie out of a pumpkin sent shivers up my back.

I blame Mrs. Brand. She lived across the road from us on a rural route when I was 9 or 10. A tough old countrywoman, she and her husband ran the farm that surrounded us. Sometimes their sons Shorty and Red would drop by to help them out, but usually it was just them.

Their house had originally been a log cabin, but as the 20th century progressed, they framed it out, added rooms and put siding on the outside. It had a huge kitchen, the house's biggest add-on room.

It looked no more like a kitchen than Mrs. Brand looked like Aunt Bea. It looked like a hardware store, full of shelves and jars and canning equipment and lots of large utensils. Mrs. Brand preserved a lot of what they grew, and they grew a lot.

I can only remember once when we actually went over to the Brands' to eat. Mama cleaned us all up, and we marched down the drive and across the road and eventually filed into the Brands' kitchen/dining room. The meal was uneventful, and after it, Mrs. Brand said, "I hope you'll have some of my pumpkin pie."

It was quickly served, and just as quickly our eyes got as big as dessert saucers. Mrs. Brand's pumpkin pie was not the dark tan tang of your usual fall feast.

It was raw. And it was not the spongy part of the pumpkin, either, but the other stuff - the goop you throw away when carving jack-o-lanterns.

Oh, and the seeds were still in it, too.

We all looked at Mama and then at Daddy, and they looked back at us, took a breath and began to take big bites of the pie. That was our signal, and we all tried to follow their lead as best we could.

The stuff was terrible.

Bites became nibbles, and nibbles became furtive attempts to hide the pie elsewhere on the plate. After several minutes of polite effort, my mother saved us, explaining we had to get back for homework. But when we got home, all we could talk about was that pie.

One of my sisters suggested Mrs. Brand had gotten so old that she had forgotten to cook the pie. The other sister suggested Mrs. Brand probably cooked without the benefit of Betty Crocker's help and just figured you would fix a pumpkin pie the way you would fix a cherry pie.

Regardless, I went years without eating pumpkin pie again. Only recently have I begun to make up for lost time.

Eventually, we all seem to outgrow childish dreads. Eventually, we all develop more adult tastes. And after awhile, we often forget what we once couldn't stomach.

And whipped cream helps, too.