Cabbage Soup Cleaning Party (in 3-D?)
The cabbage soup diet is billed as a diet ready-made to shed pounds quickly, efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately for people like my mother, it is not a seven-day stint of slurping a bland mixture of stock and veggies but rather a way of life–as if she may be preparing for nuclear war. I found the official Cabbage Soup Diet site on the Internet and was taken aback by the list of pros and cons. Case in point:
* You’ll lose weight fast
* The diet should not be adhered to for more than seven days
* The soup is bland
* People have reported feeling light headed, weak and have suffered from decreased concentration
*It provides a kick start to a moderate diet
Which is all precisely why my mother brews the soup on a bi-weekly basis and stock piles it in plastic tubs in the freezer. The eating is ritualistic. Soup has been a staple of her kitchen well before I came back to Chicago via Milwaukee. My girlfriend Tracy, before she moved to New York, used to amuse my mother by coming over and eating the cabbage soup, which I at first thought was equally amusing, but later found out that she actually liked the soup, with all of its nonexistent flavors and textures. Imagine.
More freezer burn.
The other day I found six tubs of it stacked amid an array of cleaning products including Pledge, Windex, some orange colored spray with Mr. Clean on the front, and a bottle of Simple Green. The juxtaposition struck me as both odd and obsessive. I immediately wondered if the two notions of “antiseptic” had aligned themselves in a blast of cosmic perfection. Did my mother spray the living room coffee table with waxy wood shine while juggling a bowl of soup in one hand and a rag in the other? My mother’s penchant for cleansing the system with cabbage can work congruently with such notions of cleaning the cabinets with Lysol. Then I began to wondering, “She has been doing this for so many years, hasn’t her life become as flat as the soup itself?”
Need salt?
I’ve tried the soup. It’s not bad after you shake about 30 hits of salt into it, some hot sauce and fresh ground pepper. Fresh slices of zucchini, carrots, onions and, ehem, cabbage all float their way around a flavorless broth. And while its freshness certainly stands on its own, I question the routine that she grinds herself in — cabbage and cleaning products alike. Is this a two or three-dimensional life? Sometimes I wonder. But then I think there has to be more to her private life than the demands of rigorous routines. After examining the soup, I went into the living room and started examining her self-styled DVD collection (which she is slowly upgrading to Blu-Ray). What I found was a laundry list of movies with dark undercurrents entrenched in sex, drugs, murder–hardly two-dimensional and bland at all. Among the head turners: Bright Lights, Big City (“There’s something I just connected with when I watched that movie,” she told me once while babysitting The Guys in Oak Park). Sure. Piles of coke, Keifer Sutherland, vodka martinis on lunch, 6 a.m. nightclub stints–very cabbage-centric, I see. Jagged Edge, The Door in the Floor, Against all Odds, Fatal Attraction–all of these titles are far exploratory cries away from the blandness of frozen soup or sponges.
So, what’s really going on underneath? Perhaps they are reminders of places I’ll never really see. Perhaps they are preludes to places she really wanted to go. But under the constraints of cabbage and cleaning and ticking time, I doubt either of us will ever see any of it fully realized. My mom’s been collecting cabbage soup for seven years–not seven days–too long to change now. Were there places she really wanted to go, ideas she wanted to explore? I only hope to never live with those same regrets. I’m working on it.
