Spaghetti Sauce And Honesty

OK, so you're no doubt wondering what spaghetti sauce has to do with honesty. Well, I'll tell ya.

Today's lesson in Church was about honesty. I'm not the sort of guy who limits himself to what I call "Sunday School" answers. If we're going to have a discussion about honesty, let's have an honest discussion.

Naturally, we started out with the usual old stand-bys: don't cheat on your taxes, don't lie about where you've been, to shave your golf score. Blah, blah, blah.

Then the weird guy on the back row (moi) jumps into the fray. First up was a quote from Mark Twain: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything". From there, we moved on to how people don't allow each other to be honest. ("Honey, do these pants make me look fat?" Yeah, only an idiot would answer that one.)

Many times, we encourage deception -- if not blatant lying -- simply by not accepting a person's honest answer to a question. Remember the first time you told an adult you no longer believed in Santa Claus? Yeah, that was fun, wasn't it? Always nice for other people to tell you what you believe in.

Worse than that is when Aunt Ethel comes to visit and demands that little Johnny come give her a hug. Never mind that the average adult looks like a monster to the average child. Try sitting on the floor sometime at a casual adult function and see the world thru a kid's eyes. Poor little Johnny is terrified of this behemoth -- who he really doesn't even know -- and the parents don't even have the commons sense to tell Aunt Ethel to back the hell off. Johnny's hiding under the sofa, praying for lightning to strike. Or anything, just to be rescued from this intolerable situation. Next thing you know, little Johnny's out in the yard, pulling wings off of flies because the bone-headed adults weren't smart enough to let him deal honestly with his true feelings, insisting instead that he fake it.

One of the nicest compliments I've ever received came from my dear friend Wonder Woman*, who once said: "You know what I always appreciated about you? Everything was right on the surface -- no hidden agenda." How could I not be friends with someone who allows me to be completely honest? (And she never once asked me if her clothes made her look fat. Which they didn't.)

Now, what does all this have to do with spaghetti sauce? My step-father made what was undoubtedly The Worst Spaghetti Sauce In The History Of The World. Seriously, if Moses had tasted his spaghetti sauce, there'd've been another commandment. But were we kids allowed to say we didn't like it? Ha! For ten years, we had to endure that stuff. And all because we weren't allowed to be honest.

I wonder how Wonder Woman's spaghetti sauce is?



(*name changed to protect the guilty)