My Child Is a Mutant

Last night Lauren brought us an unusually bountiful haul of day-old goods from the bakery, including a half loaf of brioche bread. "This makes the best french toast," she said, pulling it out of her huge paper bag and laying it reverently on the counter. What with me having to leave for work at 8 am and Josie not waking up until well past noon, we weren't able to pull off a sit-down family breakfast this morning, but I did manage to confirm that the refrigerator contained a half-carton of eggs and a nearly-full bottle of maple syrup. And now, arriving home from work at six, I have made an extremely popular executive decision: we're having french toast for supper. To mollify the nutrition police, I have mentally recategorized fresh peaches and Rainier cherries as vegetables.

We sing the supper song, and the kids start gleefully pouring syrup over their plates. There's not enough brioche bread for three, so my own plate is piled with take-out leftovers. There's some arroz con pollo from El Sombrero -- just enough for one -- and a paper carton of string beans from Seven Stars Pepper, a  Szechuan restaurant on Jackson. Seven Stars is actually an understatement: the beans are so encrusted with hot pepper paste that at the restaurant I wasn't able to eat them. Now I've rinsed off about half the sauce, and scraped the biggest chunks of pepper flakes into a pile on the edge of my plate. The beans are still super spicy, but I'm enjoying them.

Simon reaches for the last piece of french toast. The two slices of peach I put on his plate are still there, untouched. "Have some of those peaches, Simon," I say. He wrinkles his nose.

"Seriously, dude? You're wrinkling your nose at this?" I grab his fork, stab a hunk of peach, and hold it up to him. It's like a perfect mouthful of August, soft and golden, sweet juice dripping onto the tablecloth...

He mock-gags.

Josie and I look at each other in disbelief. "What are you, some kind of mutant child?" I ask. He shrugs.

"Okay, fine. No peach. But you have to eat some kind of fruit or vegetable. All right, Simon, here's your choice." I wiggle the peach in front of his face. "You can eat this juicy, sweet bite of yummy summery peach, or" -- I load the oily blob of ground up pepper flakes onto my fork and wave it at him as menacingly as possible -- "you can eat this."

As I watch Simon's eyes swivel back and forth from one fork to the other, it slowly dawns on me that the boy genuinely can't decide.

And I can't either. Even after he has asked to sample the pepper flakes and guzzled a pint of milk to sooth his blistered tongue, he still balks at the peach. Should I insist that he force this delicious morsel down his throat and trust that the evidence of his taste buds will outweigh whatever psychological resistance I seem to have created? Should I back off, assuming he'll be willing to try a ripe juicy peach some other time, outside the context of this silly dinner table power struggle? Or is it possible that I'm wasting this precious treat on someone who honestly, truly, doesn't like peaches?