RC Cola and Oysters

by Sam Tallent

I am a fat man and I was a fat child and I’ll likely be a fat corpse until the worms take their tribute. I amassed most of my girth in Colorado, gorging during boyhood on the traditional foods indigenous to the high plains: Sonic cheesy tots, assorted McDonalds dollar menu menagerie, footlong Safeway party subs assembled as a hail mary to sell all that was about to go bad.

Food was always important to me, but our relationship was perverted by the emphasis my grandfather put on bounty. Ova Tallent was a good man, probably the best man I’ve ever known, but his love language was gluttony and he loved me a lot. Grandpa spent his orphaned childhood escaping Dust Bowl Kansas on eastbound trains, hopping freighters to and from the textile mills in Philadelphia where he worked to support his younger brothers. While romanticized in popular culture, believe it or not, the actual life of a child hobo was rough. Deprivation defined his existence, and though he became a successful adult, he never rose beyond his itinerant tastes. As the old adage goes, you can take the lil’ drifter out of the boxcar, but you’ll have to take the can of Vienna sausages from his cold, dead, nitrate-bloated hands.