The Flavor of Steel
Sunday’s roast was the first bite. I’d been waiting for it, just like I always did. My wife had prepared it the way she always had. I inserted my fork. Pennies and cardboard came back at me from the place where the fork had entered.
I chewed. I swallowed. I stared at my plate as if it had betrayed me. I looked at her, smiled, and said nothing.
No one ever told us about this. Not the oncologist. Not the pharmacy. None of those stacks of pamphlets in the waiting room. Losing my ability to taste was a minor loss, or so it seemed, and no one warned me about it. You also learn, slowly, how much of what we call “living” happens at the dining table.
This is what I have on record. First, coffee. For thirty years, it had been part of my morning routine, and it turned to dust within a week. Bread became texture without flavor, a sponge with a crust. Oranges tasted like their peels. Chocolate tasted like plastic. Cheese was salt, but nothing existed behind it.
Then came water. Even water started tasting like the pipes it had passed through. A flat, metallic taste made me put the glass down and stare at it.
I’m not writing this so that anyone will pity me. I’m writing because it happened, and the next person deserves the list I never received.
I didn’t realize how much flavor carried until it was gone. Flavor was never simply flavor. It carried Sunday roasts and arguments over who made the better gravy. It carried the coffee-and-newspaper routine. It carried the reason people met at all.
Once flavor disappeared, I realized how much of my life rested upon it, like a house resting on a foundation I had never once inspected.
Several months into treatment, there was a dinner. A long table. Family. A birthday.
I smiled throughout the meal. I picked up my fork. I acknowledged the compliments given to the cook. I tasted nothing. Not the meat. Not the cake. Not the wine I raised for the toast.
I ate as an actor eats in a performance, and I played the part well enough that no one noticed. That was probably the loneliest feeling of my entire treatment. I was surrounded by everyone, but I couldn’t participate.
Oddly, some things returned differently. I discovered a tolerance for spicy food that I had never had before. Hot sauce, once my adversary, became the only thing that helped me get past the metal. I grew to love it.
I also developed a fondness for sour foods. Pickles, especially. I had pushed them to the edge of my plate for sixty years.
My body wasn’t restoring itself. It was rebuilding itself. Destroyed? No. Diminished? No. Just changed.
And then there was the strawberry.
The treatment cycle had ended. In late spring, I took a bite of one without thinking or hoping for anything, simply out of habit.
Sweetness.
Genuine sweetness, with a subtle hint of green from the stem.
I stood in front of the kitchen counter for nearly a minute. I savored that strawberry as if I were experiencing it for the first time in my life.
That is what tasting again feels like. Evidence. Proof that my body is still keeping its end of the deal, attempting to reach what it lost.
That is what I plan to eat for this meal. The same roast as always. Coffee before eating, as usual, actual coffee with the newspaper. Bread I can taste.
I intend to take each bite slowly. I intend to appreciate each morsel while I still can, because now I understand what it costs to sit at a table and experience absolutely nothing while eating.
Both fear and gratitude will sit at that table together.
Okay, fine. There is plenty of space for both.
Each bite, while I still can.
