‘Love It or Leave It’

I figured it was grass soup. Grass soup is exactly what it sounds like. It's a recipe for food-of-last-resort that my father apparently has squirreled away somewhere. I have never actually seen this recipe, but it was referred to fairly often when I was a child. Should everything else go to hell, we could always derive sustenance from nutritious grass soup! At heart, it's an anxious, romantic fantasy that disaster and total financial ruin lurk just around the corner, but when they do come, they will have all the stark beauty and domestic fine feeling of a Dickens novel. Young Tiny Tim's palsied hand lifting a spoon to his rosebud mouth. "What delicious grass soup. I must be getting better after all," he will say, putting on a good show of it just as he expires, the tin utensil clattering to the rough wood table.

A grass soup situation, then, is a self-dramatizing one based on such a poorly-imagined and improbable premise as to render it beneath consideration. Just from what I've seen on the news, by the time you're reduced to using the lawn for food, any grass that isn't already gone--either parched to death or napalmed into oblivion--is probably best eaten on the run.

All by way of saying, that if there ever came a time when the government of my new homeland was actually calling up the 40-plus asking-and-telling homosexuals with hypoactive thyroids to take up arms, something very calamitous indeed will have to have happened.

Copyright © 2005 by David Rakoff. From the book by David Rakoff, published by Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

© 2008