Dill Overkill

When I was twelve or so and living in Wisconsin, on occasion I would make a visit to the pantry storeroom which occupied the southwest corner of our basement. You opened the storeroom door and, for some light on the subject, pulled a drawstring. There they all were: Jars of peaches. Jars of plums. Jars of stewed tomatoes. Jars of tomato sauce. Jars of  beets. Jars of jam. And the pickles! The pickles alone took two full shelves, a culinary country all on their own. It was a pleasure to take a census. Pickled carrots. Pickled beets. Pickled cauliflower. Pickled watermelon rind. Pickled baby corn. Bread and butter pickles. And dills, dills, dills.

The dills were home-made, as was everything else in the pantry of course. My mother made them. She put them up at intervals during the summer, continuing to do so as long as cucumber season held out. She brought cucumbers home from the farmers' market in lumpy bags, cut them in long quarter-wedges, brined them, and then pickled and canned them in Mason quart-jars transparently amenable to a tasty view. She always shelved the dills on the highest shelf of the pantry, and that seemed appropriate to me. To me they were the crown jewel of all her canning kingdom.

Now as we all know, adolescents have a tendency to take preferences to an extreme. You like a rock band, suddenly that's the only band for you. You like the fourth amendment, suddenly that's the whole constitution. Well so on the cusp of my own adolescence, following this law of behavior when it came to my mother's pickles I eschewed all variety on her magnificently outfitted shelves--all in favor of the dills. I was a dill obsessionist. A dill-daffy Romeo, and Juliet was my dill. Rosalind Gherkin? Who was she? 

All until....well, until that fateful day. Call it the Wausau dill disaster. Or, dill overkill. Or just, my fill of dill. 

I was alone in the house. Don't know how this happened; there were six in my family, so it seemed as though I was never alone, but that day really I was, and to take advantage of this fact I was going to eat some pickles, specifically dills. And so there I was, down in the pantry, looking up and lustily eyeing a jar thereof. There! There on the top shelf, that one. I tipped it greedily down. I took it  (cradled in my right arm like a football) up up the stairs into the kitchen, where I sat down at the table with the jar in front of me. And now I unscrewed the ring. Unscrew unscrew. And now my fingernails pried off the lid. Pry. There was a sucking sound, then a pop. Mmm. Smell that vinegar. Smell the dill. 

This whole scheme was totally illegal by the way, what I was doing--totally illegal, domestically speaking. After all, I was not the only one in the house who relished pickles, and so for me to appropriate a full quart-jar of dills for my own personal consumption was a clear breach not only of decorum but of Bjornstad family food morality. In allegorical miniature I was Britain and France and Belgium taking whatever wasn't bolted down from Africa. Or I was Custer waving around his pistol for purposes of ripping off the Cheyenne and the Sioux. But nothing was going to stop me, not that afternoon and not with such a sweet chance for solitary gluttony as this. No, I would consume and consume and consume until every last pickle was gone and the jar was empty but for the vinegar water and a soggy pathetic little umbrella of a dill sprig or two. I was determined. The thing was determined.

So that's what happened. That's what I did. Within fifteen minutes I had eaten those pickles god bless them every one.  A full quart jar of dills. Believe me it's possible. Oddly enough though, now that I had eaten them all, I was feeling a bit queasy. A bit green around the gills. What should I do about this? Moving slowly and methodically, so as to keep the digestive sloshing to a minimum, I cleaned out the jar at the sink, then stashed it away downstairs in the basement below the stairs. Other empty jars gathered dust there, awaiting the resurrection of the canning season to follow. I went outside and mounted my trusty Schwinn ten speed which was really technically a semi-trusty Schwinn five speed because one of the shifters didn't work, and I rode down to the Tasty Freeze on Third Avenue to buy a soft-serve ice cream cone. I figured that would settle my stomach down a bit. Hey if you've just gone a little heavy on the dill pickles, why not just top it off with a little blanket of a vanilla soft-serve? Makes sense, doesn't it?

So that's what I did. I ordered (at the Tasty Freeze shop window) a soft-serve cone in the flavor or maybe non-flavor of vanilla, then went out back by the dumpster, to lick at it like sick dog trying to eat the grass. It was late April by the way. There was still snow on the ground, at least where the snow plows had shoved it up in piles to clear the parking lot. The Tasty Freeze had just opened up that week or so. Good thing it had. Otherwise what would I have done, I mean how would I deal with these sloshy fulminations of my stomach? I proceeded to lick. 

I didn't get very far though. With the licking I mean. And certainly not with any semblance of swallowing. Instead out there by the dumpster something made me bend over and something made some stuff came up out of my mouth. A great deal of it in fact. A great deal that was green and seedy and non functional as food anymore came up. Blechhhh. Blechhh. Blechhh. Oh yuck. All over one of these beautiful parking spaces for cars. I kicked a couple of boulders of dirty wet snow on top of the general mess of vomit and stomped it all flat and then smoothed it over with my shoe as though my shoe was a butterknife and the snow was the butter. There. All gone. Though there was still the faint smell of dill rising through the snow. Now for my ice cream cone. It was still in my hand. I still had part of the cone. Oddly enough though it didn't look that appetizing anymore. In fact it never really had. So I threw it in the dumpster. 

And so that was that: my idiotic misadventure in the land of dill gluttony. And it changed me. I do still eat dills, but sadly no longer feel the passion for them that I had in the days of yester-yore; and to tell the truth I miss that uncontrollable passion for a pickle. Odd how, in order to maintain the pleasure of an obsession, it may sometimes be necessary to control yourself in the excercise of it! Over the next few months when, at the dinner table, dill wedges appeared in front of me pickle tray, I admit that they even made me feel a wee bit ill. But I also had to command myself to eat the pickles anyway, since my love for them was an accepted fact in the household, and certainly I didn't want to raise suspicions. All of this was poetic justice, a bitter self correction for my gluttony and my thieving.

In almost every way my kidnapping and solitary consumption of that quart of dills was so amazingly dumb that I hesitate to dignify it by attempting to extract wise conclusions from the experience. Still, here are a few thoughts: 

1. With regard to dills and many other frills and minor thrills in life: Some features of existence are so to speak side dishes and appetizers. Don't treat them as the main course.
2. With regard to soft-serve at the Tasty Freeze: Don't make one mistake worse by piling another mistake on top of it. Although if you do, perhaps you can take comfort in the following proverb by William Blake: "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough."
3. With regard to stealing what's not yours when others are away:  if you forfeit a pleasure while pursuing it at others' expense, serves you right.
4. With regard to the vomit: Be aware that non-functional waste streams have a way of coming up unbidden and unexpectedly. Consider the little leaks at Fukishima. Or consider Deepwater Horizon. Or consider all the fracking going on in North Dakota and Pennsylvania.
5. With regard to sampling the beauty of diversity (so well illustrated by my mother's shelves of pickles): cultivating a healthy enjoyment of variety may just be the perfect means of cultivating a deeper enjoyment of our favorites. 
6. With regard to stashing away the jar: You may hide the evidence from others, but often your memory holds onto it by the sticky handle of guilt. 
7. With regard to the comedy in what might seem a comic tale: Just how comic is human over-consumption? Especially when multiplied say by 7.5 billion or thereabouts? 

HB