Magical Madison #6

I have a confession to make. I eat food off the floor.

I've done it for just about as long as I can remember. I think it started when I was a kid and my sisters (Kate and Sarah) and I would drop food on the floor and then all lunge for it, screaming "10 second rule!"

We had a competition to see who would eat the grossest thing that had fallen on the floor. I was the oldest of the three of us and always had to outdo my little sisters.

I remember one time I dropped a slice of pepperoni pizza, face down, out in the backyard and I yelled “10 second rule!” and my sisters looked at me in awe when I picked it up and actually ate it, pieces of grass sticking to the cheese and all.

We took it even further than that when we changed it to “10 second rule…from when I saw it!” and began eating food off the floor that we didn’t know when it had been dropped! When that one started out, at least it was usually at home, and we knew it had been dropped by one of us, even if we didn’t know when.

But then it moved beyond that. I once ate a pretzel poolside at our grandmother’s community pool in Florida that had been sitting on the ground for god knows how long. We had no idea who dropped it and my sisters never expected me to eat it. It was a little damp and stale, but I wasn’t sorry I ate it. Each time I did something crazy like that, I earned the respect of my little sisters.

Anyhow, in my family, with our French Socialist roots, it was always “waste not, want not.” We weren’t allowed to leave the dinner table until we finished our dinner and if we didn’t finish it, we were served it the next morning for breakfast and if we didn't eat it then, we got it for lunch, and so on. So we all knew to finish our meals when they were served to us and not to waste a drop.

Even though we grew up poor, my French mother, though she was a Socialist, always told us one day we could have as much money as we wanted. We could work hard and achieve whatever we wanted. She called it the “American dream” and said we could be anything we wanted to, including President of the United States. I thought that was bullshit.

It was no surprise that after my sisters and I all moved away and went off to college and then work, we started out by keeping in touch over things like the “10 second rule.” I would eat something particularly gross in places where no one could see me and then call my little sisters on conference call to tell them about it.

My sisters and I had been extremely close growing up. We had so much more than just the “10 second rule” game. That was just one of the many games we played with together. But in later years, we drifted. We rarely talked.

In fact, one of my sisters had moved to New York City, where I was living, and things had gotten so bad between us that when I saw her on the street one day, I pulled out my cell phone and pretended to be talking on it and walked right past her (a habit I had gotten into whenever I saw people I knew on the street who I didn’t want to talk to). I don’t think she even saw me, or maybe she was doing the same thing I was.

So this one day, when I was at work in the handicap bathroom stall (I always use the handicap stall), I saw a yellow skittle sitting there on the floor. And even though I estranged from my sisters, I had an extremely strong urge to lean over, pick it up and eat it, and then call my sisters to tell them what I’d done.

I didn’t. That was pretty disgusting, even for me. So life went on. And the skittle remained.

A month or so passed and I got engaged to my long-time boyfriend and so badly wanted to call my sisters to tell them, and to ask them to be in the wedding.

So I ate the skittle. I called them, “Kate, Sar, you guys will not believe what I ate today!”