The worst Christmas gift of all

T
hey say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but along the way are diners that serve nothing but Van Camp’s Pork and Beans and Campbell’s Spaghettios. These two abominations are right up there with oysters, tied for the worst food ever imagined. Now you might take exception to this truth. You may think these are delicious. Well, I’ve got some news for you. You are wrong!
How did I come to this conclusion? First of all, I’ve never liked oysters. Those little snotballs of the sea won’t even go down. My wife, Connie, loves fried oysters, but she’s wrong too. There is nothing you can do to an oyster that makes it worthwhile. If you feed them to your dog, you can’t even let them around you for a month because they smell like, well, like oysters. No matter how I try, I can’t swallow them. I flail about and gag, holding my throat in a death lock because even my hands know those gritty, slimy glue blobs are not supposed to be taken internally. A signal from my brain flies through my arms, which cooperate with my hands, and immediately they choke me, thus preventing any offending oyster from sliding down my throat. 
And Spaghettios are another thing I’ve never liked. I used to think you couldn’t ruin tomato sauce. But Campbell’s has found a way to do so. All you have to do is surround little rings of overcooked pasta with it and, Voila! You’ve turned one of the most versatile substances into a sickly sweet gloop of slop! If I were in charge, I would make sure that even prisons never served that stuff. It would be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
I used to like pork and beans. But that was before I graduated to the age of 14, when I found out that I knew everything and adults were idiots. And really, as a little kid, what’s not to like. They use tomato sauce, and that’s a plus right off the bat. They also have sugar, salt, garlic powder, and if mom feels creative, she adds brown sugar and half a can of frozen orange juice concentrate – all the things that make food taste yummy.
Best of all, for a little kid who wants to make mom yell out, “My Lord! What is that smell?!” they are made with white beans. An hour after I ate pork and beans, mom was hurrying me out the door to play. This meant I Got Out of Housework. So the point is that I should still love pork and beans. Right?
Wrong!
I have to take you back to the summer of 1976. While I should have been building the next masterpiece of engineering with my erector sets and bopping to “Play That Funky Music” by Wild Cherry, my parents packed me off to summer camp. I don’t know how it is in Wyoming, but in California, back in the ’70s, churches would ship their kids off to camp to make sure their parents tithed more out of sheer relief. I can plainly hear the pastor’s sermon: “With this week that peace has finally come back to your house, there’s only one way to worship and express your gratitude toward God,” and then every father in the congregation reached into their back pockets for their wallets. 
The camp was in the high Sierras past Mi Wuk village – a very remote location of pines and cedars, the occasional sequoia, and only one dirt road that branched off of Highway 120 for about 10 miles. There was a bridge, only one bridge that crossed the north fork of the Stanislaus River. The cabins were basic. They had lights, lockers and bunks in which you unrolled your sleeping bag. What a joy it was to try to get some sleep while being smothered by a giant canvas jockstrap. There were also boys and girls bathrooms and showers that had no doors, so the wind could whip in as you were showering and make anything that was supposed to stick out crawl up inside of you and those things that were supposed to be flat stick out a mile. There was also the kitchen area, where you lined up with metal trays and had some workers plop food on them, and after grabbing your silverware, you sat on rugged wood picnic benches to eat. On purpose, they left the benches rough to keep the kids from wiggling around and getting splinters in their behinds. 
Now, this was the very first time this facility was used. You’d think that hosting about 30 or 40 teenagers would inspire you to stockpile some items before those bell-bottomed, platform-shoe-wearing creeps got there. The first thing you wanted on hand was plenty of toilet paper. The next thing was the food – edible food and lots of it.
This was not the case. It had started raining a couple of days before we took off to camp. Now the bus carrying us up there had no trouble getting in. But the food truck, that supply of corn dogs and hamburgers and buns and Coke and root beer, was a couple of hours behind us. Big mistake.
About an hour after we arrived, the ground became so saturated that there was a big mudslide upstream of the bridge. Tons of mud and towering trees thundered down the gorge and took that bridge out.
Now I must admit that I told a lie here. The camp staff did have food and lots of it. Unfortunately, it is not what I call edible. The only thing they had were cases of Van Camp’s Pork and Beans and Campbell’s Spaghettios. They also had powdered milk. That may be another column because there are all kinds of bad things everyone can say about powdered milk. But we will leave that dragon lactation alone for the moment.
But for this story, I need to focus on the so-called food. Breakfast, lunch and dinner consisted of nothing but pork and beans and Spaghettios. To make matters worse, it took them, whoever them is, almost two weeks to fix the bridge. So we weren’t at camp for only one week. We were there for an extra one as well, eating nothing but pork and beans and Spaghettios. I have to give the adults that ran the place one moment of kudos here. They did have plenty of toilet paper on hand.
When we finally made it back to the church parking lot, my father was there to pick me up and take me home. My mother was an excellent cook. And I was looking forward to putting something, ANYTHING, in my mouth. While we occasionally ate pork and beans at home, we never did have Spaghettios, thank
God! But for whatever reason, my mom did not
cook one of her regular
meals of deliciousness. 
I blame Bob and Veigh, my brother and sister. I’m sure they somehow found out about the culinary debacle I had suffered for those two weeks and made mom’s life a living hell during the day I got home. The result, she just opened up a can of whatever they handed her and heated it. And guess what she served me: Van Camp’s Pork and Beans.
Since I told the story about camping to the family, it has been a sort of running joke ever since. I get it. It’s kind of funny, from a sick and twisted frame of mind. But …
We come to the present. This Christmas, Bob and Veigh sent a package for Connie and me. Among the items in the package were some jewelry that mom owned and loved. Connie was blessed by those. I received some cuff links and tie tacks that belonged to my dad. But they also sent an additional package for me. I’ll bet you will never guess what was in that box. That’s right! A can of pork and beans and a can of Spaghettios. I’m impressed. You were paying attention. When I called them, I talked to Veigh, who immediately went into gales of laughter. 
I’m checking into federal laws about the trafficking of dangerous substances because I think I might be able to exact my revenge on them that way. If I can get my siblings sent to prison, I’ll also reconsider my ban on feeding those malignant masses of mushy mash to prisoners, because they have earned it. It has to work better than my first attempt at revenge. You see, I have hired Wile E. Coyote to help me get back at them, but the last I heard, he’s had some sort of mishap. I can’t imagine what that was, but I don’t expect successful results from him.