Like Ice Cream to a Frog

I remember vividly one of my first books as a child. It contained no words and was printed on cloth, so the story in it was told through a series of very simple pictures. It went something like this:

Little Green Frog.

Little Green Frog comes across a huge ice cream cone and eats it.

Little green frog starts to blow up like a balloon.

Little Green Frog gets bigger and bigger and starts to float away like a balloon.

Eventually, Little Green Frog bursts.

Little Green Frog ends up as a green blob.

This story always puzzled and irked me, perhaps explaining why this childhood storybook is so vivid in my memory to this day. Even as a child I was a very rational creature -- what did this story mean? What lessons did it contain? Were frogs allergic to ice cream?

Today what remains from that story is a bizarre association I make between it and mixing mangos with milk.

For much as that poor frog probably loved ice cream, what child does not love mangos? Those succulent fruits, rich and ripe in the hot summer sun, heavy with thick yellow juice, hanging like honeycombs from the laden branches of the big mango trees, so ideal for climbing. There was undeniably some added pleasure in gorging oneself on the fruit as the sticky juice dribbled down ones chin, down ones hands and arms and onto clean clothes, to the terror of all mothers.

I could never help thinking as a child that there was some kind of sinful pleasure to enjoying something so thoroughly. That would explain why our devoutly Catholic nannies and grandmothers set out so determinedly to stop us. The mango, despite its unquestionable deliciousness, seemed to me as somewhat vilified in the Brazilian imagination, particularly in the tales told to us by grannies and nannies.

I was taught as a child that to eat mangos with my hands was very dangerous, potentially fatal, even. I might lose grasp of the slippery mango and get the pit caught in my throat. If that happened I would surely choke to death -- once lodged in a child's throat the pit is nearly impossible to extract. Countless children are said to have died in this manner.

It was also extremely dangerous to mix mangos with milk, or any other type of dairy for that matter. Images of the milk and mango mixture reacting violently inside us, churning curdling and causing the most violent of stomach pains and constipation often kept us away from mangos on days when we had had milk a few hours before at breakfast.

Last but not least is the "cão chupando manga" -- a Brazilian expression that translates directly to "dog sucking on a mango". In the Brazilian Catholic tradition, wrought with influences stemming from African religious practices, the "cão chupando manga" is a manifestation of the devil itself, one of the many evil forms it may take when visiting the earth (as a dog, to enjoy the sweet sinful taste of a ripe mango)!

The pleasures of the mango are thus vilified.

I don't know when or why the mango, milk and frog stories got entwined somewhere in my neural fibers. Somehow the frog is the mango in my mind, the milk and ice cream interchangeable. And the fear and distress I felt when trying to puzzle out the frog story somehow comparable to my fear of mixing milk and mangos.