Murphy's Law and the Guatemalan Worm

Murphy's Law, in so many words, says that anything that can go wrong in any given situation, will.  So true.  But Murphy's Law has been at work in my life with just a twist:  Anything that can go wrong will happen to the one person who can least handle it. 

In our household when I was a kid, dinner was all about my dad.  Were it not for him, I'm pretty sure Mom would have just made food that she knew we kids would like.  If Dad was expected, however, (which was almost always) dinner was a family meal designed to feed the hungry breadwinner.  The rest of us were expected to eat it, whether we liked it or not.  My father had been raised in a very poor home, and so, not surprisingly, he was a carnivore--trying to make up for the things he didn't get when he was a hungry kid.  We didn't talk about it, but I'm pretty sure my mother planned meals around Dad's likes and dislikes.  Even leftovers had a plan.  They'd be reworked into something just as yummy as the original meal.  It stands to reason that she would want Dad to approve.

My father wasn't much on sweets, but he did like cherry pie.  When Mom had access to fresh cherries, she would make one.  And this is where Murphy's Law came into play.  IF there was a stray cherry pit in the pie, it would be in Dad's piece.  Same thing with buckshot in the game he brought home from hunting.  Mom and Dad both would go through the squirrel, rabbit, or pheasant carcass, checking for those little lead balls, but if they happened to miss one, it would be Dad whose teeth crunched down on it while eating.  It almost became family lore:  If there is something that shouldn't be in the food, Dad will get it.  He never complained except for the time or two when he crunched down and it hurt. 

My very first year of teaching, I was employed at Heyworth High School, Heyworth, IL (1969).  The classroom had no air conditioning, of course.  One whole wall of that room consisted of a bank of huge windows (with no screens) that went from about waist-height to the top of the 15-foot ceilings.  In order to have any comfort at all on hot days, those windows had to be open, leaving my students and I vulnerable to wasps, bees, and the truck noise from the highway that ran right in front of the school. 

That year, I had what all teachers have at least one of per year:  The Class from Hell.  My CFH consisted of juniors--almost all boys (of course)--who prided themselves on their reputation as hellions.  (They claimed that they were single-handedly responsible for the firing/resignation of the previous English teacher because they were hanging outside those windows and she couldn't do anything about it.)  There was one kid in that class who got picked on a lot.  He was on the pudgy side and was a buffoon.  Enjoyed his notoriety as the pickee.  If anything could go wrong, it would happen to him.  It was all I could do to protect him from the others, which was a constant task, not always appreciated. 

On one particularly warm day, a hapless sparrow flew into my classroom and fluttered around, trying  to find its way back out.  Naturally, the CFH got a big kick out of that.  My lesson came to a halt while we all tried to figure out how to remove the bird.  Around and around the room it flew.  As Murphy would have it, that little bird pooped as it flew, and the splat landed guess where--(can you see where I'm going with this?)--right on the shoulder of that one kid!  The class hooted with laughter while the boy hopped around, holding the shirt away from his skin with his thumb and forefinger, yelling "Ew!  Ew!  Get it off of me!  How can I get this off of me??"  I sent the boy to the office for them to determine what could be done about his soiled shirt; the bird eventually went back out the window.  All sense of educational decorum was shot for the rest of the period, however.    There would be no American literature lesson that day!

So...who is the pickiest eater in my family?  Who is the one person who is the most germophobic and least likely to be able to pick a bug out of her food and keep eating it?  My daughter.  Thus, Megan is a target for Murphy's Law. 

I'm visiting at her house as I type.  Two days ago, she fixed a pretty good supper for us all:  chicken chunks in a savory sauce, wild rice, and broccoli flowerets from frozen.  Before she had even taken that first bite of broccoli, she noticed a tiny little green worm in it.  It was a dead worm, to be sure, since the frozen broccoli had to be boiled, but it was a worm, nonetheless.  (If you've ever grown broccoli in a home garden, you know that broccoli attracts little green worms that resemble the plant so much that it is hard to spot them.  Fresh broccoli has to be soaked in salt water before it can be processed for the freezer or the table, to get rid of the worms.)  Well!  That was the end of the broccoli for her!  Had the worm been in my portion, I would have removed him and continued eating.  I mean, he had been blanched before he could have been frozen...then boiled before he could be served.  I imagine there are starving people in the world who would have been happy to eat the broccoli, worm and all.  Unfortunately, that argument just doesn't fly with well-fed Americans.  Meg checked the bag that the broccoli had come in:  Product of Guatemala.  A well-traveled dead worm that Murphy put in that bag with Megan Shchepetov's name on it for good measure!

I'm not suggesting that my daughter should have eaten the rest of her broccoli--only that I didn't stop eating it just because one lowly little Guatemalan worm had been found in it.  I'm just not sure how long it will be before she'll trust frozen broccoli again.   Only Murphy knows for sure!