Unlikely Place for Food Poisoning

Ever been to church?

I don’t often go, since I’m an atheist. I’m married to a Christian, so it does happen on the odd occasion.

Last year, my son was in the Christmas nativity play, as a dude with an Among Us shirt and a tea towel draped over his head. They included an ornate One Direction headband to keep it from flying off. Oh, and he was carrying a candy cane candy container that they wrapped in masking tape to make it look wooden and old. Very chic.

The play itself was cute. The children all said words they didn’t understand, to a big laugh from the adults in the audience who realized it. Cardboard cutout donkeys, sheep, camels and cows…angels standing on chairs. You get the picture.

Afterwards, they had a big potluck.

Sometimes, bring your leftovers to the party is the theme…not necessarily worded that way. But everything is up for interpretation.

10 versions of grandma’s casserole and 9 iterations of pasta fugazi. Along with 8 kinds of brownies, 7 kinds of cookies, 6 bean dips, 5 whatchamacallits, 4 salads, 3 jello pudding concoctions, 2 kinds of powdered fruit juice and a partridge in a pear tree.

Question: How many of each kind of meatball, did Noah take on the ark?

Answer: Enough to kill the unicorns.

I think it was a meatball…I’m pretty sure it was a meatball. I tasted it and said “oh boy, this is not food” if it was, it had stopped being food a few days ago. It had the initial flavour of rich heavy soil and the aftertaste of carrion. Maybe the 2 vultures on the ark could have choked it down…along with the other dying creatures aboard.

I knew I was done for. My burps were less, gas leaving my body, and more, hatred leaving my spirit. A wave of nausea hit my cerebellum like a ton of bricks. When we finally left the smiling, small-talking crowd, I rushed home to my bed and laid there…shaking and wincing in pain. Then came the release of evil…from both ends. Let’s just say, some demons were exorcised that night. Not on the treadmill.

The next day, all was right in the world. The meatball had passed into the great beyond and I was cleansed of its horrid grasp.

Months had passed and this situation had completely escaped my memory. Nothing I wanted to hold onto. Not even for a story like this. Until…

…my mother-in-law asked if we wanted to come to the church for a Spaghetti Dinner Fundraiser. My eyes must have tripled in size because my wife stepped in and said, “Oooh, I think Steve had a bad meatball last time” and in her completely deadpan comedic fashion, she followed that up with: “I think they were trying to poison the heathen!”

“No no no no no no” my mother-in-law gasped in a panic, as she was signalling the cut it out hand gesture under her chin.

We like to tease her a lot with my unbelief.

She’s a good sport.