FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Yesterday when I was maneuvering my car through the ice and snow at the ALCO parking lot, I noticed a funny bumper plate in front of me: "I'm a mean old German. That's why I'm called a sauerkraut." I chuckled aloud and thought back to the sourest Kraut I ever knew, my Granny Graham, who I will identify by name because she died in 1988 at age 96 and is no longer around to sue me for defamation of character.

Granny Graham's parents were German immigrants who "came over on the boat" in the 1800s. Life wasn't easy for her. During the depression she raised five sons, 4/5 of them hooligans in my mind, and she outlived two husbands. She ran a restuarant in Fredonia when I was a kid, and after she retired she inflicted Sunday dinners upon relatives.

"You're getting chubby!" she would announce to everyone as my older brother and sister and I came shuffling inside her house. She'd then proceed to heap on our dinner plates enough fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and gravy to feed the Western world, and she'd stand over us piling on seconds and thirds. Once we'd consumed about 10,000 calories, we were free to go. Our only salvation was that she had not forced German liver sausage on us.

Granny Graham's cold liver sausage was her "piece of resistance." The sight and smell of it was enough to drop an entire army. I always had a good excuse prepared for not eating it, as did my siblings, but she'd still wrap loaves of it up in aluminum foil to send it home, like a party favor. It was never eaten. Our dirty little secret.

There was one concoction she made, however, that I truly loved and that was her sugar popcorn. When I'd go over to her house on an occasional Saturday night to watch wrestling matches on TV with her, a boatload of popcorn topped with Karo white syrup was mandatory.

Now even at age eight I knew those wrestling matches were choreographies of fake violence, but Granny Graham was convinced that it was all real. She would cheer her favorite wrestlers and yell expletives at the bad guys, sometimes in English, sometimes in German. The latter intrigued me, and I insisted upon knowing the translations. She was only too willing to be the teacher. Before long, I was the only 3rd grader at my school who was fluent in German cuss words.

Decades later, these lessons became quite handy when I was the high school English teacher to a German exchange student. Early on in the school year, upon receiving back an assignment, the boy looked at his grade and unhappily blurted out what I recognized as an expletive in German.

"We'll have no more of that, young man," I said sternly to him.

He immediately turned red in the face, knowing he'd been had. "How did you know what I said?" he asked.

"I had a German granny who taught me every swear word in the book," I exaggerated.

The other students were quite impressed. "What'd he say? What'd he say?"

"None of your business," I responded.

"What'd you say?" one asked the exchange student.

I glared at him. "Nein," he said.

That was the first and last time he used his German profanity in my class--at least within earshot.

It helps to be a sauerkraut.