Running Away From Soup

I recently shared this story with some work friends. Re-telling it after all these years made me laugh so hard I thought it was worth blogging about. So when I was about 6 or so, I went to a friend's house for a playdate. She lived about a mile away. Incidental info: they had a two story house with an olive green elevator in the middle of the house. So we're playing and her Mom offers us lunch. We agree to lunch, and while we're waiting we're playing in the kids' play room. The play room has a couple of those old school desks - the kind with the chair attached and you lift the 'desk' part to reveal storage underneath. So lunch arrives. It's soup. It's olive green, lumpy, and smells positively horrid. I take one look at this soup and think, "NO WAY am I eating that." However, politeness dictates that I at least try it. I take one slurp and discover these kinda....squishy...nuts in there. Yes, we're talking about barley. Something I'd never tried before and which I thought tasted, frankly, like small bits of gristle from some unsuspecting small animal. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't eat that soup. It was just...well, pea green lumpy smelly soup. I sat there, in 6 year old stressed silence, wondering HOW to get out of this mess. I couldn't very well say, "Can you please remove this bowl of spew from my sight?" As I sat there, stressed out, my friend left the room for some reason (I can't remember now why.) I did the only course of action I could think of. I lifted the lid of the desk, and I put the soup in there (bowl and all, I didn't pour it out.)

Then I ran. All the way home. I didn't look back.

My Mom was a little surprised to see me, all tears and upset, mumbling about some damn green soup with wet nuts in it. She called the other Mom to tell her I was okay. Needless to say, my friendship with that girl never really went anywhere after that. I don't know when and if they ever found my bowl of soup, hiding in that desk. As an adult now, I think...imagine what the girl must have thought, to have come back and see NO friend and NO soup there. These days, I'm no great barley fan.