She's So the One by Belle Rose

It looks as though Anonymous #1 is traveling, so we'll have to wait on the recipe blog. In the meantime, Anonymous #2 never reported on a former life, that is, what she did before she contributed to our book.

     This is excellent timing, Belle, because only this morning, I read an essay, "Repercussions," in The New York Times Magazine by Teddy Wayne, author of "The Love Song of Johnny Valentine."  

     It wasn't just that he was an indifferent student in high school; he was, as he put it, "an ambitious slacker" who aggressively squandered his potential. There must be thousands of readers who might identify with his feelings. I am one.

     Very early in my life, I decided that I wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to see how things worked inside the body. Lacking a cadaver, I went to work on a mole that my father had trapped in our yard. I borrowed, which is to say, I took, my mother's manicure scissors, and set off with my mole into the woods.

     It occurred to me, as I placed him belly up on a log, and began cutting into him from end to end, that he had been dead for a while. He was more than a little stiff. When I was about half way down his body, the rings of the scissors making deep gauges in my fingers, I noticed his teeth. They were like tiny white bits of rice, ringed in red. I stared at these teeth, in their small, even row within the dark, down turned mouth and imagined that he was crying. 
     
    Feeling suddenly shaky, I shot up from my perch on the log, grabbed the mole and hurled it deeper in the woods. That should have ended my medical aspirations forever. It should have; but it didn't, not quite.

     Years later, "studying"--using the word in its loosest possible terms-- experimental psychology, I ordered a dozen hamsters for the psychology lab. The plan was to determine the effects of drugs on the socialization of hamsters. I don't remember the names of the drugs or where they came from. What I do remember is that I received a notice in my mailbox that the hamsters had arrived. Would I please come to the lab and begin conducting the experiment?

     It was January. The ground was covered in ice and snow. I put off traversing the frozen tundra to meet my hamsters. I put off meeting them for quite some time until, actually, there were very few of them left. And those that were still there were enormous. No one had mentioned that hamsters were cannibalistic. I, of course, had not bothered to find out.

     Fudging piles of fake statistical data on a dozen rodents, two-thirds of which were non-existent, was a lot of work in one night, and could be construed as punishment enough. And perhaps it was, because, after all, I've never forgotten it. 

     I've never forgotten any of it. Even the mole still lives within me, as well as the nail scissors, which my mother found inexplicably sticky. What kind of surgeon doesn't boil her instruments? 

     Indeed. What kind? So that door closed on me forever--and fortunately for future patients.