This morning when I sat down with my coffee and newspapers I decided to also have some toast and jam to enhance the start of a new day. A loaf of fresh raisin bread was waiting to be opened. I bought it yesterday with the anticipation of how good it would taste this morning. Right beside it, however, was a wrapper holding only the two crusts from a loaf of whole wheat bread that I have been eating on this past week. This loaf of bread had passed its sell-by date on Mahatma Gandhi's birthday (October 2). What to do? Give in to my hedonistic nature, or remember the words of my late mother: "Waste not, want not. Clean your plate. Children are starving in Ethiopia and China."
In conversations with friends and strangers over the past twenty years since I turned 50 I have been amazed to hear played back to me some of the same admonitions and bromides that were pounded into my head by my mother. (My father took French leave when I was a small child.) I wonder if my grandparents pounded these things into my mother's head? Worst, did me and my wife do the same thing to our children? The burden of it all. Some of these things hack at you more than the Ten Commandments. Everyone breaks one or two of those occasionally but you can tell God you're sorry, do a little penance and get back in His good graces. But the starving children in Ethiopia are always with us. When I was a youngster I could not understand how children could be starving in Ethiopia, a country that whipped Mussolini when he was at the height of his power. But here this morning in the early days of the 21st Century those starving children haunt me still. As a child I wouldn't dare tell my mother (unless I was already on a plane and it was airborne) "send them this food." But I'll be damned if today I wasn't still in the clutches of those anonymous starving urchins.
