Zucchini

While walking in Jersey City, I came across a strange and disturbing act of violence. Behold, zucchini tossed on a dirty snow bank.

The zucchini had been stomped, and I wondered, who would commit such a heinous act?

I imagined that it was a man who had become frustrated by his wife’s constant cooking of zucchini. I pictured her, coming home one day, so proud, with a bushel of zucchini.

“Honey,” she said. “Look at what I found at the farmer’s market. I got such a deal!”

And so, she baked zucchini bread. He enjoyed it (she is quite the cook). She shredded zucchini, sautéing it, and serving it with a red sauce (“It’s healthy!” she exclaimed.)

“Great!” he said, slightly less enthusiastically.

She baked a stuffed zucchini casserole. He pushed it around his plate, and claimed, “I don’t have much of an appetite tonight. She fried zucchini fritters, he didn’t touch them.

She made a steaming pot of zucchini soup, and he started an argument so that he could get out of eating it. (He ate at Marco and Pepe that night.)

The zucchini then showed up in quesadillas and even cookies. She served zucchini with every meal for two weeks. 20 meals total. 25 zucchini.

And then, on the fifteenth day, she left home for work, leaving him alone with the zucchini(I imagine him, a writer who works from home). She couldn’t possibly know that her precious bounty was in danger. How could she have known?!

For hours he stared at the zucchini, bundled carefully in a basket. The zucchini taunted him. It prevented him from working. He couldn’t get a damn thing done; not with that zucchini in the house!

And so around noon, he did the un-thinkable. He took the basket of zucchini out of the kitchen, flung the door open (not even stopping to put on a coat), and he tossed it off of his porch, heaving it out in the snow. Seeing that the zucchini was still intact, he stomped on it, closed the door, and wiped his hands clean.

His wife would see the zucchini discarded in the snow when she got home. “What is wrong with you?” she would ask. “Why didn’t you just say that you were tired of eating zucchini?!” She didn’t realize that it would be a bad thing to cook the same ingredient over and over again, even in different incarnations. The damage was done. Years later, they would both remark that it was the zucchini that led to the demise of their relationship.

This is, of course, what I imagined when I walked past the zucchini massacre, chuckling to myself. I thought briefly about sending a photo of the dastardly deed to Sean (much, much more on Sean later) since he loathes zucchini (As a child he said to his mother that it should be “made illegal.”), but I became nervous about taking a photo (Sean is quite an amazing photographer). I got as far as the end of the block but then doubled back. This must be shared I thought, and snapped the photo using my very bad camera phone. I sent it with the following message:

“Seen in Jersey City, during a walk. Apparently someone hates zucchini more than you do.”