Divisions between us

This morning I was thinking about the things that divide us. I'd woken up to NPR and a report on the House and Senate races, and I was feeling good about being a Democrat, being on the offensive and not backpedaling from the issues anymore. When I got to the kitchen, I saw an unopened bottle of ketchup that I'd forgotten to put away, and it reminded me of another division I used to see in the world: into mayo lovers and mustard lovers.

Growing up, I thought mayo was the king of condiments, one of three things that defined a sandwich, the other two being white bread and cold cuts. At lunch in elementary school I'd look at the kids slathering mustard on their burgers and wonder with pity and curiosity: What made them like the yellow stuff? In my head I tried to piece together what they had in common. Whatever it was, hopefully it was genetic. Then I'd be safe knowing my kids would be good mayo-loving people too.

People who used ketchup were always okay with me. After all, what else would you put on French fries? (I'd no knowledge of the British, Dutch, and Canadians back then and what they did to their fries.) But if people who used mustard were harmless oddities to me, another group evoked my outright disgust: people who mixed ketchup and mustard at the same time. I'd see these select individuals squirting one condiment and then the other on top of their burgers and then swirling the two together using a fry or -- worse yet -- a finger, as if they were making a spiral galaxy in red and yellow right there on top of chopped meat. I could barely hold my lunch down.

Sometime during my sophomore year in high school, I started dating a girl who I later found out was a mustard person. Obviously some pretty intense soul-searching followed. There were several different possibilities, but they all fell into two categories: either I'd changed or mustard people had changed. Neither was pleasant to think about, so I called a truce in my head and let the matter go.

After college but during my stint as a teacher, two things happened that broke the uneasy mayo-mustard truce. First, being away from home and my mom's cooking had allowed me to indulge in food big-time. Big like three- and four-chalupa dinners big. Big like 215 pounds big. (That's me on the right ca. 1999.) My health was starting to suffer, and when a dental assistant finally told me that my blood pressure might be too high for the oral surgeon to use anesthetics before he took out my wisdom teeth, I thought, "That's it! Ridiculous!" Changes would have to be made: mayo was out, mustard was in.

The second thing that happened was that I saw Undercover Brother which might be the movie I look back on as saving my life. I won't go into details except to say that mayo comes off looking (and sounding) very badly.

Other dietary changes followed, as did regular exercise. That was over five years and sixty pounds ago. To this day I still get all my sandwiches with mustard, hold the mayo. I guess sometimes you just can't be bipartisan.