Hard to Swallow

Got to talking about how, when we were in school, Nathan and I used to eat lunch together. He would eat a sandwich or something with maybe chips or a piece of fruit. Sometimes I guess he’d have a cookie or a cupcake. It used to drive me nuts because he didn’t drink while he ate. He would eat all sorts of foods and take no fluids for the whole hour. I would remark on it pretty much every day.

"How come you never drink anything?" I’d ask.

"I don’t need it" he’d reply.

I thought that was just bizarre. I used to bring people around to watch him eat things without drinking anything: Bags of peanut butter; chocolate bars; sawdust on dry toast.

My mom once told me how, when she was a girl, her parents used to take her over to have dinner at some friend’s house once in a while and no one was allowed to drink at the table in their house. They’d sit there, the whole family, eating chicken or something, and no one was allowed to have a drink.

There weren’t even glasses on the table.

I imagined it as just this long, wheezy, coughy, sticky-mouthed torture hour. I asked my mom why they weren’t allowed to drink and my mom said she thought it had something to do with the parent’s thinking the kids would fill up on liquids and then not eat their dinner.

I’ve never heard of that in people, but once I read how dolphins, because they don’t drink and get all their moisture from the food they eat, can’t distinguish between the sensations of thirst and hunger. So, sometimes, in captivity, they’ll spray a hose into the dolphin’s mouth and it won’t eat for a day or two because it thinks it is full. But I understand the dolphin’s point of view.

Hose water just tastes better.