This may seem a little more offbeat than our usual stories, but over the weekend I was dining with a friend in an upscale restaurant when he asked the waiter for a plate of pickles as an appetizer. I didn’t think anything about it at first, and just giggled and munched a pickle with him when they arrived. When the waiter came to refill my water glass, I asked him for a slice of lemon. My friend, however, asked for a couple of thick slices of pickle for the rim of his glass, and a small bit of pickle juice on the side. Again, I laughed, but this time I thought he was putting me on. I asked him once the waiter had left to fulfill our requests, “Are you really going to do that?”
“Do what?”
“You know, put a pickle slice in your water, on the edge of your glass? And what about the juice?”
He sort of frowned and made no reply, and I instantly realized I had overstepped some invisible line in our relationship. This was something more than a bit of fun with the waiter, something worse. It was, perhaps, an addiction.
People are addicted to all kinds of things: illicit drugs, pornography, food, running, the Internet — you name it, and someone, somewhere, has an inordinate attraction to it, one that they either can’t, or won’t overcome on their own. And now I was sitting across the table from a man I knew to be a pickle addict. And there seemed little I could do to help him. In silence, the moments ticked by too slowly while we waited through the remainder of our meal. I tried not to look as he downed more and more pickles and pickle related products like relish, pickle juice, “sour salsa,” and other abnormal condiments for a perfectly ordinary prime rib.
Pickle addiction is real. There is no organization for it yet, or I would refer you. In the meantime, we should simply try to be patient with our friends who suffer from this, and not assume it is all just a laughing matter.
