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Burp and be free
It’s not crude; it’s a blow against puritanical repression

BY KRIS FRIESWICK

I was hard at work the other day after a large, late lunch, concentrating fully on my computer screen. Suddenly, without even realizing I was doing it, I burped. It wasn’t extremely loud, or particularly juicy. But unfortunately, two male co-workers were standing nearby, so it turned out to be quite a showstopper. “What the hell was that?” bellowed Richard in mock horror. “Oh, excuse me!” I exclaimed. But it was hard work to come off as genuinely embarrassed. That’s because I was raised in a family that considered burping not so much a bodily function as a treasured form of communication.

For instance, say the family was gathered together for a night of television-viewing, and my sister started flipping through the stations. (Back before the days of remote control, she did this while kneeling next to the TV, manually turning the plastic channel dial.) Say she stopped on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which my brother David hated. Before she could even say “How about this?”, David would burp loudly, thus indicating that my sister should just keep on turning that plastic dial until something more acceptable appeared.

In my home, burping was not just used to express displeasure. It was also used to express happiness, as after a good meal. And it was a form of competition between me and my sister and brother. One of our favorite games was to see who could burp the entire alphabet. (David once made it to N.) It was our way of establishing and reinforcing those strange bonds that constitute family. It was our own little language. Most importantly, it was the one sure way to make my mother laugh if she was mad at us.

My mother, you see, came from an upper-middle-class, puritanical New England family. The Howe family did not believe in bodily functions. To my knowledge, Grandma and Grampa Howe did not even have bodily functions. (The roll of toilet paper in their bathroom gathered dust between our visits.) Burping out loud during a family gathering with the Howes was only slightly more acceptable than performing a human sacrifice at the dinner table. Flatulence could get you disinherited. (I know this through personal experience.) An auditory display of any private bodily function would send my grandmother into one of her hissy fits. One did everything in one’s power to avoid my grandmother’s hissy fits. One would have preferred to be the victim of a human sacrifice at the dinner table.

I’ll never forget one Christmas dinner at the Howes’ place that nearly ended that way. We had all just finished a gigantic meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, and green peas with mint jelly, all served on fine china, sterling silver, and lead crystal. My father, whose family tended toward the other end of the uptight spectrum, had stuffed himself fuller than a tick and, quite unconsciously, burped. It was demure by Frieswick standards, but it sent a shock wave of fear and accusation around the table. My sister, brother, and I erupted into spasmodic giggling, which did not help the situation. The blood drained from my mother’s face as Grandma grew red with indignation. Grampa excused himself from the table with uncharacteristic gruffness, ostensibly to “check on dessert.” My father had no idea what the problem was. Things were never really the same between Dad and the Howes after that.

SO IT is not at all surprising that once Mom moved out of her parents’ world and created her own, burping would evolve into a symbol — a symbol of all the things that she hadn’t been allowed to do as a child, a symbol of all the judgments and rules and expectations that she refused to impose on her own kids. Sure, when we burped she felt obliged to frown parentally, warning us that we would never be accepted into polite society if we didn’t learn to be more discreet and pointing out that we sounded like piglets. (Hearing the analogy, we would stop burping, only to crawl around the house on all fours making squealing and snorting sounds.) But no matter how harshly she scolded us, she always had this little gleam in her eye that betrayed the giggle just below the surface.

Sadly, despite her best efforts, Mom was never able to work up a burp worthy of the Frieswick name. I couldn’t figure out whether she was influenced by all those years of psychological repression or simply had an underdeveloped burp muscle, which, unless trained at an early age, never works properly.

Today, nine years after her death from cancer, my mother still makes a guest appearance every once in a while to let me know that she hasn’t stopped working on the burping thing. The other day, I was at my sister’s house, baby-sitting for my three-year-old niece, Natalie. We had just finished eating lunch. Natalie turned to me, and in her eye was a very familiar gleam. Then she let out a burp that would put my brother to shame.

“You’ll never be accepted into polite society if you keep that up,” I said with a grin as we high-fived.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.






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