Season To Taste

"Let me clear about this," I told him for what must've been the thousandth time, "I have no personal grudge against pepper. I just don't like it."
"What's happened to your spirit of adventure?" he asked jokingly.
"My spirit of adventure is just fine," I said a little more sharply than I"d intended, "Just please don't put pepper on my steak."

The agument that followed was, of course, not entirely about pepper, although pepper had almost come to symbolize the growing distance between us. He liked it and refused to care that I didn't. I felt dismissed, waved off as you might a pesky insect or a bothersome child. My likes and dislikes were unimportant to him and he would make no concessions. I felt that we were not in sync - he liked to tell me that he knew best, that there was something wrong with me if I didn't like something he did and the sheer arrogance of his tone had become a gnawing at my nerves. In passing, he had once mentioned having voted for George Wallace and I'd been stunned into a dead, dazed silence. Originally, I had thought that we were on the same road - with a shared love of animals and music, that we had similiar ambitions, values, and dreams, but as the years passed and his drinking worsened, our closeness evaporated. We were endlessly on each others nerves and would often go for days without a word passing between us. The silence was dreary, heavy with guilt and seething with unvoiced rage. I hated it even more than the fighting and always thought it was far more damaging. It was from exactly such a silence that the end of the marriage would eventually come.

Meanwhile there was the matter of the pepper. With a defiant gesture, he roughly set a plate in front of me, saying "I"ve improved it." I looked at the steak, black with pepper and pushed the plate away. "You've ruined it," I said evenly, "Give it to the dogs." And the argument flared again until in defeat and frustration, I left the table and went to bed.

There is a time for seasonings and a time to pass them by.