Did the woman who murdered my mother know what she was doing?
Well…there is an element of ambiguity there. Luella was, after all, stupid as a post, a perfect match for her less-than-brilliant spouse.
But Jeez! How hard is it to understand “You must clean all produce thoroughly AND sanitize it, lest you come down with amoebic dysentery, which will put you in the hospital and may even kill you”?
Really, how hard IS that? Especially if you’re sat down in a classroom and made to WATCH the process, step by step, for sanitizing contaminated produce?
Back in the 1950s, American wives who were sent out to Saudi Arabia to accompany their spouses, on contract with Aramco, were required to take classes in how to prepare food safely and how to keep their families well. One point of those classes was to convince you to clean your food thoroughly before cooking it or putting it (raw, as in the case of salad greens) on the table.
There was nothing difficult about these lessons:
*Germs
*Germs make you sick
*Germs make your kids sick
*Germs can even kill you and your kids.
*So you must wash all your food thoroughly to get rid of the germs.
*This especially applies to things you eat raw, such as salad greens.
Does this seem hard to you?
Seemed pretty self-evident to the ten-year-old me. But I do remember my parents’ idiot friend, Luella, standing in the kitchen and preparing a cabbage salad…without ever so much as rinsing off the leaves. And I remember her handing me pieces of raw, unwashed cabbage greens to munch on, as she puttered about the kitchen.
This treat did nothing to me. Not unduly surprising, since I arrived in Saudi Arabia as a two-year-old and, during the time we spent there, was exposed to every Middle Eastern germ known to personkind.
But…that yummy salad made my mother very, VERY sick. Desperately sick.
The company sent her back to New York, where she was hospitalized for weeks and dosed with every treatment known and imagined to beat back the microbes.
She spent a good two or three weeks in the Ras Tanura hospital before the company doctors felt it was safe to fly her back to New York, where she spent the better part of another month in in treatment – drastic treatment.
That STUPID, evil woman apparently poisoned my mother on purpose.
What did she think it would do to her? Probably nothing. She was so stupid she didn’t understand difficult concepts like the germ theory. But she had been told about it. And told about it. And told about it again and again. If she’d had a synapse between her ears, she would have understood that unwashed produce grown in fields fertilized by human feces was likely to make you good and sick. How hard IS that to understand?
To this day, I remain convinced that Luella quite deliberately sickened my mother by quite deliberately neglecting to sanitize the dinner produce. What…A…Witch!
At any rate, my mother did survive, though she was never fully well again. Eventually she did die of a gastric cancer – to what extent it was related to the parasitic infection and the ferocious treatment, I do not know. But…I do remain convinced, to this day, that Luella killed my mother.*
I don’t get unconvinced easily, y’know…
*Actually, while Luella had a lot to do with it, the tobacco manufacturers went a long way toward killing my mother. She was addicted to nicotine, and so, thanks to that habit, she smoked herself into the grave.