Skulls of Wisdom, by Kris Barnard
There are many points that mark the road to maturity. The first threshold is societally acknowledged as your 18th birthday. The next is perhaps your first legal pint. I am here to tell you about a slightly more obscure point on the road to maturity: I, Kris Barnard, ate a cooked prawn -- served with its eyeballs still attached.
Fried with the puppy dog, pleading look of, “throw me back in the ocean, mon! I’m beggin’ ya!” the silver scalloped bowl of crustaceans stared through their cajun-seasoned crust as if hoping for resurrection.
I stared back in distaste.
How exactly did I think a bowl of prawns would be presented? I’m not sure, but if there is a midscale-culinary-cuisine hell, I was now in it.
My kind host for the evening, Jim, seemed to find nothing wrong with this presentation. We sat comfortably with glasses of rosé in hand and discussed career opportunities. The prawns listened, unblinkingly engaged.
Earlier in the day, while finalizing the details of our meeting, I used Google Maps to locate the restaurant -- 14 minutes of walking looked so easy as a dotted blue line on the virtual map. Unfortunately I had misinterpreted the map; the blue dots were not guiding me on a path towards our meeting place, but were points marking the obstacles I would face along the way. Dot one: a sudden gust of wind; dot two: the realization you wore the wrong outfit for a blustery day; dot 3: a large crowd of tourists looking for the H&M; dot 4: commuter traffic; dot 5: a gaggle of homeless men selling Street Sheets, and so on. Damn those dots.
The prawns gave me sympathetic looks of agreement; they understood how quickly a normal day could boil down to something quite different.
Jim ate 3 of my compadrés. “The rest is yours,” he said generously.
Oh good.
With furrowed brow and tight lips I hesitantly took my understanding friend in hand, and with a heavy blink said goodbye, snapping his boiled body into thirds and dipping him in a tasty side sauce.
His eyes and tail lay discarded on my plate, still staring at me as if to say, “you did what you had to, mon. No hard feelin’s.”
No hard feelings indeed, a key life lesson imparted to me from an interaction with anthropomorphized prawns (with incorrectly assumed Jamaican origins). My pan seared partners reminded me that sometimes life is going to be blustery; you may misinterpret the menu items; you may read the map wrong; or you may be told something you weren’t expecting over appetizers, from a prawn or otherwise.
The key is to not take it personally, as feelings are not involved, and remember it could be worse; you could’ve been boiled alive and left dismembered on a small appetizer plate.
