My best friend in college
locked horns with me
the day we met

I grew up eating Dover sole
they told me
was tuna fish
in a different shape
because I loved tuna fish
and hated that stuff on my plate.

Or thought I did.

I hated many things
I didn't know I loved
before I learned to love them:
dogs and Los Angeles,
acting and marketing,
books without pictures,
cheese with irregularities

Even poetry.

Sometimes
it's a matter of ramping up
with trickery
or adulteration,
like cream in your coffee
or jazz in MGM musicals.

Other times
you have to walk through what you hate
to find the thing you love.

The stuff that comes easy
is like popcorn:
neither here nor there

The stuff that is challenging
is like sushi:
weird and chewy,
foreign and opaque,
off-putting
scary
indifferent
or, in the case of wasabi,
openly hostile.

Nothing wrong with popcorn
but the lesson
and the love
and the growth
and the magic
and the poetry
is in the sushi.

xxx
c

Image by adactio via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.