Try a Little Seaweed Soup

A friend complained recently that he was suffering from a severe chest cold and before I realized what I was saying, I said, “Try a mustard plaster.”

He was lying on a couch. His eyes were red and watery, his skin was pale, his hair was mussed and he needed a shave. In short, he looked like hell.

“What’s a mustard plaster?” he whined, half sitting up.

I wasn’t sure. In fact, I hadn’t even intended to say that. The words flew from my mouth like birds suddenly scattered into flight. It was a Pavlovian response rooted in my childhood.

“My mother used to apply them,” I said. “I remember they were hot. But don’t worry about it. Just take aspirin and rub the bottom of your feet with VapoRub.”

I left him no better for my visit. His eyes were still red, his skin pale, his hair mussed and his face bearded. And it got me to thinking about my mother’s miracle cures.

We live in an age of medical wonders. Machines that diagnose and define, drugs with the curative power of Lourdes, computers that probe the molecular building blocks of life. Medical journals glow with brave new discoveries.

But none of them will ever match my mother’s cures. She was the perfect practitioner of folk medicine.

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I mention this today because of my friend’s illness, because I’m writing on a holiday and do not feel profound and because the memory of the mustard plaster has come rushing back.

What it was supposed to be is a paste made with powdered mustard spread on a cloth and applied warm to the skin for just about anything my mother felt it would cure.

The problem was, she had no powdered mustard so, as she used to say, she “made do.” In this instance, she made do with regular mustard, which she spread directly on my bare chest.

I was about 7 and had a cold. “This will do it,” she said, laying the mustard on me with a wooden spoon from the jar. My sister Emily walked through and said, “You look like a hot dog.” “Turn over,” my mother said, and she rubbed it on my back too.

Generous use of VapoRub constituted another of her miracle cures. She fought everything from the common cold to ear infections with Vic’s VapoRub. She slathered it on my chest, my nose, my back, my temples and on the bottoms of my feet.

“What’s my feet got to do with it?” I asked when I was old enough to wonder. “It’s the Chinese cure,” she replied in a mystic tone. “What’s it do?” “That’s not for you to know,” she said. “Lie still and drink your seaweed.”

Her sister Zulema suggested the seaweed, crushed and mixed in broth and served in a glass. I will drink almost anything, but I will not drink seaweed. “Lousy boy,” my mother said. “Go ahead and stay sick then!”

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I came home from school one day with an upset stomach. Through cross-examination designed to determine my every move during the previous hours, she discovered I had eaten a mixture of cherries and milk. There were cherry trees everywhere in East Oakland. And milk was available to steal from porches where it was left by milkmen who delivered door to door.

My mother knew that a combination of cherries and milk meant certain death. I doubt that even then there was a medical foundation for her belief, but she was sure that c+m=d. The open grave awaited. So she hurried to the store for rhubarb.

Zulema had told her that eating large amounts of rhubarb would cleanse the system of the poison left by cherries and milk. So she stuffed me with rhubarb. I don’t like rhubarb any more than I like seaweed. I threw up. “Good boy,” my mother said.

She had another warning: Pinch a pimple on your nose and you die. “It’s a sad story of little Sonny what’s-his-name down the street,” she said in explaining the danger. “He pinched a pimple on his nose and”--a snap of the fingers--”two hours later he was gone.”

“He had a hole in his heart,” I said. I was 13 then and knew everything. “He died because his heart failed”--a snap of the fingers--”like that.” “Don’t sass me,” she said, whacking me aside the head.

She also fought colds by not feeding me and fevers by stuffing me with food. She was a lousy cook and it was a painful experience. “Starve me instead,” I begged. “You don’t starve a fever,” she said. “Tomorrow, it’s a mustard plaster.” “Return of the hot dog boy,” my sister said.

When she was old and our first daughter was an infant, my mother found a cat curled up in the girl’s crib. “Take the beast off,” she ordered, “it’ll suck the breath from the baby’s mouth!”

What the hell. I put the cat out. It was the least I could do for a woman who had tended me all those years with mustard on my chest and VapoRub on my feet.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.