As my glee that "fiasco" rhymes with "tabasco" subsides, I feel a twinge of guilt.
Sure, the poem I've written to roast ... er ... honor my brother's 50th birthday is funny.
But what's with the tabasco sauce?
Why, after 40 years, do I still bring up this "cruel...fiasco" every time I can?
* * * * *
In my hazy memory, I am four; my brother, eleven.
"Hey Cheri! Do you want some cherry juice?"
"Sure!"
I take a huge gulp.
And swallow fire. Gasp fire. Hear fire. Weep fire.
* * * * *
I get more mileage out of this incident than anything else in my childhood. It's been memorialized in poems, elaborated in narrative essays, and inserted into almost every talk I've ever given.
The audience always laughs.
But what, exactly, am I illustrating?
What's with the tabasco sauce?
What does...or did...it mean?
The answer, I find, is in the closing lines of a poem I wrote last summer, describing my aversion to risk:
"I avoid even a sip of cherry juice so certain am I that it will, once again, turn out to be tabasco sauce."
What's with the tabasco sauce?
It's a 40-year-old metaphor, a concrete symbol of an abstract concept:
TRUST.
For four decades, tabasco sauce has represented my first experience with betrayal.
Then, I was four.
But I'm not any more.