Tuesday, January 6, 2009

When I was young and dumb

I was cruising the internet recently and came across this web site that was featuring various styles of salt cellars.

I was instantly transported back to an episode from my past that is so hilarious I will share it with you. (Enough time has gone by that I am no longer totally humiliated by the thought of it.)

When I was in college, I was visiting the parents of a boyfriend. (They lived out of state.)

I was extremely nervous and trying my best to make a good impression.

His parents were kind of fancy schmancy.

His father was a colonel in the army and his mother was the daughter of a three-star general.

Their son (my boyfriend) had shoulder-length hair and was a major hippie (i.e., not the pride of the Colonel).

[I'm just setting the stage here..so you can imagine the, uh, overall aura of it all.]

At the breakfast table the first morning, the four of us sat there in stiff, fancy schmancy awkwardness.

Everyone was kind of dressed up and the table was all decked out with china and silver and linen and all. [Note: no Cornflakes boxes in sight.]

There was a sterling silver salt cellar on the table.

I had never seen a salt cellar in my life.

I never even knew salt cellars existed.

I mean, who in the world would put salt in a little silver bowl, for criminey's sake?

I thought it was sugar.

Heh...

But, come on....I was just a little hillbilly girl (pretending to be a fancy schmancy girl).

So I put the "sugar" in my coffee.

Um, imagine my surprise when I took my first big gulp of that coffee.

OMG.

But I couldn't tell those proper folks what I had done. (I'm assuming they didn't see me do it....surely they would have told me, right?)

So I had to fake it.

I drank that entire cup of coffee, by golly.

I do not recommend drinking salted coffee.

4 comments:

❀ Stacy DeKeyser said...

Barbara, I think we're living on the same wavelength...sort of.

When we visited England two summers ago, there was a salt cellar on the breakfast table at the bed-and-breakfast (which, in England, is someone's home). My husband thought it was a tiny sugar bowl, and put some in his coffee.

HOWEVER, he said, "Excuse me, but I've just put salt in my coffee by mistake."

(BTW, he also got a remote control toy helicopter for Xmas...)

Barbara O'Connor said...

Oh, your husband is so much cooler than me. Why didn't I think of that civilized comment.

Re: the helicopter - that's amazing. I thought we were the only weird ones. :-)

Anonymous said...

Barbara - In the process of writng an article about your recent visit to Burr, and looking for some Barbara "fun facts" on your site, I came across your 1/6 entry. I had to share my salt cellar story. I was staying with friends of friends in California several years ago. Mistook their salt cellar for sugar and put a teaspoon on my granola - which I prefer sweetened. Ack! Ate it all. Too embarrassed to do otherwise.

Barbara O'Connor said...

Ha! It's so nice to know I'm not the only salt cellar dummie in the world. Thanks for sharing.