Boiled French Fries

My father, as I've mentioned before, is from a weird little country called Estonia. Sometimes kids whose ethnic backgrounds are different are a little ashamed or embarrassed to talk about it. I grew up in a neighborhood of New York City that was/is 80% Italian and everyone there was extremely proud of their heritage. They proudly went about their days wearing T-shirts with the Italian flag on them, driving cars with the red devil horn/chili pepper hanging from the rear-view, speaking that strangely American working-class Italian-English dialect whenever they ordered lunch meat. I was actually traumatized as a small child by the guys who worked in the deli across the street. My parents and/or grandmother used to send me there on a daily basis to buy things like American Cheese, salami, ham and bologna - those things were fine to order; but there were days when the menu of the house called for exotic things like "mozzarella" and "capacolla". If I pronounced the former the American way, as "MOTTS-A-RELLA" they guys in the deli would point at my five-year-old face and laugh at me.
"Ha! What do you want, kid? MOTTS-A-RELLA? Is that some kind of apple sauce?"
I would stand there humiliated while the other patrons looked at my little blond head and laughed in unison with the guys behind the deli counter.
I knew full well that I could go in there and say I wanted the cheese the way they wanted me to say it, which was/is - MUTS-A-DELL. If I had the personality I have now, then, I would have asked them, "what's that? A broken computer?" Of course, Dell didn't exist at that time, but it's just a supposition. I probably wouldn't even do it now anyway.
I always returned from the deli defeated. It got to a point where I could only order mozerella by brand name and the brand that I was able to pronounce tasted like window caulking - or what I would imagine caulk to taste like.
Capacolla was another issue. Thankfully, this was a rare order in my house but it was virtually impossible to pronounce the way they wanted me to in the deli. I think those goombas used to call it "Gabba-Gool" and I just refused to order this after a few humiliations in the deli. Much later in life, after I had been to Italy a couple of times, I realized how stupid all of these people were and got over my past traumas. These things take time sometimes. I no longer feel intimidated for the gumbas, just sorry. The cool thing is that they don't care. That's the good thing about goombas.

So, back to my weird Estonian heritage. I can't say that there's anything that's so different about my father's ways. I can only say that everything is almost completely different. He does everything his own way. There have been virtually no developments in his repetoir since he crossed the Atlantic through a hurricane in 1948.

As a child, I remember him laughig riotously at every joke he told - none of which made the least bit of sense when he translated them from standard English to his own version of English. He'd listen to jokes in the bar he hung out in after work and come back and tell my mother the thing - usually something highly inappropriate for family listening. The thing was it didn't matter because the joke was so mangled that it was no longer really dirty. We could tell that it was supposed to be a dirty joke but that my father had misunderstood it so completely that he lost the filth somewhere in there yet it still seemed to him to be a riot. My mother usually stopped listening after the part where "a naked woman walks up to a priest" and started planning her next pair of shoes in her head. "Oh, that was a good one, Elm", she'd say.

Well, that's dad. He was always surprising us with something.
Since mom hated to cook, he often gave it a whirl but it was almost always a waste of food. My brothers and sisters were older so they could just flat-out refuse to eat but I, as a small child, had to eat or at least pretend to eat whatever he put out on the table. I dreaded the days when he was in the mood to cook. I remember the fried steak that was cooked for about forty-five seconds, the canned string-beans that were cooked for forty-five minutes to the point of tastelessness, or the boiled french fries.
I remember the first time I saw the french fries sitting in a pool of tepid water.
"What's this?", I asked?
"French fries."
"What happened to them?"
"Just eat them. They're good."
"They look sick. Why are they in water?"
"I boiled them."
"Why?"
"We had no oil. Just sit and eat."
I passed on the fries.

Being a non-Italian was hard. Being half Estonian was harder at times. Life is not always so easy but really, why should your ethnic background be such a pain the the ass? At least growing up relieves some of the ass pain.