imremembering:

Smurf Pasta 

Source: Flickr 

There was a year of our lives when the only thing my brother would eat was Smurf Chef Boyardee. This was before he started elementary school and widened his tastes to such culinary delights as Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal and Ecto-Coolers. (It’s okay for me to make fun of my brother’s old diet because he is currently a sleek beast who eats solely for fuel, whereas I tend to eat for joy, despair, lethargy, curiosity, and as a good way to kill ten minutes.)

The Brown family’s Smurf Year wasn’t so bad for my parents, initially. It made grocery shopping a lot easier, and while I’m sure my mother felt guilt for not providing her child with a more wholesome source of protein, it was either the Smurfs or starvation, so she rolled with it. I imagine it was awesome for my brother, disgusting little animal that he was, because what’s more delicious than cartoon-shaped pasta in a tin can, every meal, every day?

Stephen’s Smurf Year sucked for me though, because he didn’t just consume this crap for nourishment; he used it as a stealth defense mechanism. You see, my brother didn’t chew the Smurf Chef Boyardee; he swallowed them whole. And most of the time this wasn’t an issue. But every single time my parents went out and left us with a babysitter, within minutes of the garage door closing, my brother would regurgitate his unchewed Smurf pasta on command, all over the carpet and sometimes the babysitter. We never had the same babysitter more than twice. The Smurfs looked exactly the same after twenty minutes in his stomach as they had when you first opened the can.

Due to the wide age difference between my brother and me (he was three or four, I was nine or ten), our babysitters all leaned heavily on me to help them out, or remind them of my mom’s directions, or show them where the good food was hidden. I was mostly fine with this arrangement because it meant when they went upstairs to begin the hour-long rodeo of attempting to put my brother to bed, I could sneak chapters of whatever V.C. Andrews novel was waiting in their purse.

But the Smurf Year changed all of that. My brother hated the sitters as much as he loved his Boyardee. And like the majestic fulmar, his only protection was vomit. So the door would shut, the babysitter would turn to us with a wary smile, and HOOOOOUUUUUUUCCCCKKKK, semi-digested but unchewed Smurfs all over the place.  Every babysitter reacted to this the same way: they’d scream, Stephen would make his escape, the babysitter would seize on me and keen, “HELP ME!” and I would turn around, run upstairs, and lock myself in the bathroom. Not out of spite or malice, but just because I’ve never been able to handle puke. So our evening would unfold into this sort of calm, domestic scene until my parents came home or the babysitter called her own mother to come over and help her. They all called their own mothers to come over to help them.

This is the year my parents’ social life finally died.