Beets and Coltrane

by Bill Harley

My whole childhood I was told that I should be open-minded about food. My father’s line when I refused food because of its appearance or texture, or taste was “You don’t know what you’re missing”. Of course I did know what I was missing - I’d been forced to try it and I was only missing something I didn’t like. I realized my intolerance was a character defect on my part. In my eyes, my all-knowing parents had tried every kind of food - they served them all, they ate them all. This was also true of music - if we didn’t have it at home -it wasn’t worth listening to. The Rascals were not music, and I knew it. What I later discovered was that I never saw or heard the things my father didn’t like. A beet had never appeared on our table. Nor a turnip. Nor a green pepper. Nor squash. Spaghetti with red sauce only appeared when he was absent. And John Coltrane never graced the turntable.
I never thought about my parents hating food, until I got to college. The second night at the dining hall I looked at the salad bar at these slices of maroon sitting in a serving bowl. What are those?
I asked aloud, and Jeff, a new acquaintance answered, helping himself. “Beets.”
I had heard of beets. I guess I had seen them.
“What do they taste like?”
“They’re good” he said.
I was immediately suspicious. This was a standard line by my parents.
“How come I’ve never seen them?” I wondered. Probably they were exotic - like the bagels I had just learned about, or the green peppers, which were mid-eastern, I guessed. My parents simply didn’t have access to small ethnic food markets.
They looked like they should taste sweet - they looked like spiced apple rings from the elementary school cafeteria. I put one on my plate. It immediately bled all over the macaroni salad. And it didn’t taste red at all. It tasted like dirt. This was a food at odds with itself, and spreading its confusion all over the plate. It was messy and earthy. And I didn’t eat it because I was in college and no one could make me.
After dinner, I went up to Jeff’s room where he showed me his new stereo. Jeff had a huge record collection. He was into jazz. I knew some jazz. My dad listened to Louis Armstrong. I had a Les McAann albumn. But I wasn’t ready for this. A saxaphone screeched and squealed. It ran up and down some kind of scale I would never recognize. Jeff sat back in the old couch and tilted his head back, nodding to the music.
I tried not to sound too stupid.
“Who is this?”
“Coltrane. A Love Supreme. It’s a masterpiece.”
“Oh,” I said. Like the beets, it was earthy and messy and I had no idea what its point was.
It’s out there I said.
“Yeah, he said. We both agreed it was out there. Whether we liked it was another question. It was, to me, a bunch of noise. I was polite. But like the beets I left it on my plate.
I could say I trained myself to overlook the strange color of beets and learned to like them, or I grew in my appreciation of Coltrane that year. I didn’t. There was no one to make me do anything. And I didn’t touch a beet or buy “A Love Supreme”. I learned about some jazz, but if Coltrane was on the album, I stayed away. It was scary.
Last month I was out to dinner and at the salad bar and I saw those same beets there. They’d been sitting there waiting for me for twenty-two years. My wife took some. “You like those?” I said.
“Sure they’re good. I love ‘em.”
I tried them again. I put them on a separate plate so they wouldn’t bleed over my pasta salad. I held my nose. I tasted them. They were okay. They really were. Maybe my taste buds had deadened, or my vision had blurred around the edges and they didn’t have to behave like spiced apple rings anymore
I ate them. All of them.
Later that evening, at a friends house, he put on a compact disc. A piano started playing chords, and then a sax blew up and down a scale, chanting a theme over and over. It was pretty - clear and unattached to where it should have been going - venturing where it wanted to.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
“Coltrane,” my friend answered. “A Love Supreme.”
“Oh yeah, I know that album.” I said. “It’s nice.”
“Yeah, he said, “it’s out there.”
What had I done to develop an appreciation for beets and Coltrane? Apparently nothing. It was a little gift for hanging around the planet for so long.
I went out and bought the album. I brought it home. I got some beets. I was making dinner, putting the beets in a dish with some salad dressing, with Coltrane on the stereo. My son came in. What is that, he asked, his lips, nose, teeth, hair and ears curling in disgust.
They’re beets, I said, they’re good. You don’t know what you’re missing.
No, he said, that noise coming out of the stereo.
“It’s John Coltrane. It’s a masterpiece.”
“Sure Dad.”
“That’s okay, I said. You don’t have to like it.”
My son left the room shaking his head at what he had to put up with, and I thought to myself that perhaps, really, we don’t grow older, but better.

© by Bill Harley All rights reserved. Reprints only with permission.