CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, THE THIRD ONE

The third, but much more interesting, encounter happened in New Orleans in 1978, on one of the the most enjoyable long weekends of my life.   Lots of fun activities and sumptuous dining to the finale:   HAVING OUR PORTRAITS DONE by an artist in his studio around Jackson Square.  Sis and I were sitting in a little plaza with our portraits in great cloth covers leaned against the bench, enjoying ice cream cones and the passing parade of strolling folks until her husband arrived from work to take us home.

Far away, we saw her approach---a smaller woman in a ground-sweeping skirt of pale gray, her high-piled white hair glistening in the sun. She walked as if onstage, using a posture more related to a catwalk than cobblestones, or a Ziegfeld showgirl on a high stage stairway---one white-gloved hand on a hip, the other extended gracefully forward, as if for a courtier’s kiss. She swayed the forward hand side-to-side with each calculated step, clearing her path and garnering an assemblage of onlookers who parted before her and remained in her wake like the Red Sea, staring at her strange progress down the cobbles.

She was so beautiful, with that shining hair and her pearly costume and the grace of her bearing, and not until she was right in front of us did we realize her gender. On closer look, she was wearing a delicately-lacy white blouse, with a skirt-matching shawl, and she was truly the ideal of every Grandmother Norman Rockwell ever drew---simply stunning in her perfection, but for the almost-imperceptible cheek shadows.

We watched her go her way, and went home ourselves, for we had to get dressed for a Dinner Theater evening. We drove twenty miles out into the suburbs to Sis’ house, and then possibly twenty more in another direction to the theater. We were sitting at our table during cocktails, telling DBIL of our afternoon’s outing, and were just describing the beautiful “lady” we had observed, when I happened to glance two-tables-over, same level, and THERE SHE WAS.   ( cue Rod Serling music here).

Right there so many miles from where we first "met."   With a very tall, high-chignoned young woman in a pink pants-suit, sandal-heels higher than her hair,  French manicure, Liza lashes and not quite enough Max Factor to hide the beard shadow. They were with two gentlemen who were enjoying their company immensely, and seemed to have a wonderful evening together.

Just the coincidence of that odd, interesting moment in the Square and seeing the same unmistakable person at such a remove, the same evening, transported into our presence again---that was a strange thing, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Nor how beautiful she looked in the afternoon sun, swaying her way through the admiring crowd.

Moire non, of the other wonders of that weekend.

AIR PAIR

 

May I preface this post by admitting that I have this pesky thing to my reading---I can read upside down and backwards, or both (VERY helpful for reading stories from a book clasped open on my front so the kids can see the pictures).   I used to spend a lot of my time gazing at the ceilings of banks and doctors' offices and such, so as to not get too familiar with the information on desks and teller-windows which was none of my business.  

When my Sis graduated from High School, she asked for a trip with me to see my young SIL, who had just been married a few months, and was WAY homesick at the Air Base in Colorado.   Sil was begging us to come, so we went---we flew out of Memphis that June day  in the 1970s, with a connection from Denver to Colorado Springs.   

(Remember I have this thing about reading stuff without thinking).    So when we approached the high counter to get our tickets, the attendant scanned a typewritten list on a page before him.   I was doing my thing I guess, and unthinkingly reached and put my finger on Sis's name down on the list.  Now, Sis has a rather unusual name (only one she had at the time---she chose for herself way after she married and had children), and our Maiden name is quite unusual in the South, as well.     Agent checked off her name and mine, and so we got our boarding passes, etc., and went to the proper gate to wait.   After perhaps fifteen minutes, we saw a little crowd of three hurrying down the concourse toward our spot--two security guards in uniform and the ticket agent from before, and they came straight to US, very seriously zeroing in on SIS.

"WHAT'S YOUR NAME?" said the agent, and "Show us your ID," from one guard with his hand out, and other hand on his sidearm.   We sort of shakily did--I and my teen charge-for-the-trip, getting a bit nervous from the voices and all those eyes on us, and other folks gathering in the long concourse to take in the show.  My mind was knitting faster than an electrified loom, with "Mother and Daddy are still in the car going home, and no phone and they'll have to drive all the way back and what if. . ."   that kind of quick but useless thinking.  

 We obliged with every credential we had, and all the officials conferred, then ushered us back to the original counter, where stood a red-haired woman we certainly had never seen, a bit irritated and conveying a hand-on-her-hip frown toward us two miscreants-of-whatever-was-happening.   And ONLY THEN did they scan on down the list to find the other EXACT NAME on their manifest.

We've always said we're glad it didn't happen NOW---TSA would have had us cuffed and out the door before we knew what was happening.   Maybe my putting my finger on that upside down list made them suspicious.   

We sat with the formerly irate lady and uncovered a cousin of our Dad's, on his Daddy's side---Grandpa had died when I was so young that we seldom went back to the homeplace, and thus lost track of the generations.  

Any more oddities anyone wants to recount?  There's one more strange happening for this week that defies all odds for both silly and coincidence.  It happened on one of the most interesting, luxurious, fruitful and memorable-in-more-than-one-way trips of my life, also with Sis. 

LITTLE CHILLS OF WONDER

 

Did you ever travel hundreds of miles, only to run into a high-school friend from home in line at Six Flags?    Or find yourself in those pre-GPS years in a city you'd never visited, but heard of as the home of childhood friends who visited their MEEmaw next door to your Mammaw every Summer?    One Teenage Summer on our way to Rock City, we found ourselves in the much-storied city of Maryville, TN, home of the two "City Girls" who brought their more stylish clothes and shorter shorts and cooler high-school CHEERS, and their more discriminating taste in books and movies and music to the back fence every Summer.    I mentioned them, and my parents decided to stop for a map, for I knew the address from our Pen-Pal days so long ago, and I suppose our small-town manners account for the possible barge-in unannounced.   

We pulled into the Fifties' version of a 7-11, and all got out to go in for a cold drink and restroom stop.   As Daddy held the door, who should emerge in a snappy  shorts set holding a big bag of ice cradled like a baby, but Ruth, the younger of my childhood friends, whose sister came out right behind her, both taller and tanner than I'd ever seen them.   Now WHO, in the Time/Space continuum and the geographical layout of that big city, could EVER predict that moment when such a convergence occurred---it was so mythically magical that it's engraved in memory all my life since.

We followed them to their house for a short while, just long enough to say Hello to the parents and baby brother---he of the baggy diaper wardrobe whose efforts to climb up to our tree-house had been thwarted by both Sisters for two Summers.   (He DID, however, go on to Nashville for a lovely career with a band-you'd-recognize, until his death WAY too young). 

But the logistics of that meeting---How many of those little pitstop stores along the highways and streets, how perfect their need for the ice, for parking RIGHT THERE, for our whim to find a map and restroom just at the moment when . . .     We could have walked right in and not seen either of them in the aisles of the store, but for that little flick of TIME---astounding and chill-making in its eerie synchronicity.   

Any strange convocations or coincidences in anyone's life that you cannot explain?   There are two more that come to mind, and the realness of them still boggles.

I CAN, I CAN!

My voice has always been of the South, in the old days and old ways, with visits to older kinfolks, one with his own still, another who ran a gristmill and supplied several counties with meal and grits. Years of Church suppers and small town showers and gatherings and preacher poundings and weddings and funeral feasts and looking after the new mothers by supplying their families with three meals a day til they were "back on their feet" have sealed my voice into a time and place that is mostly memory, mostly centered around kitchen and table, and all about Family. I'm the Peas and Cornbread voice, mostly, upholding the plain and the simple, because that's who I am and what I know.

My roots are firmly planted in that good black Mississippi gumbo; the old homeplace is still there, with the pear trees from which I 'd love to be boiling up some preserves this cool July day, the pecan orchard planted by my boys with Papa, their Great-Grandfather, when they were young, lining up the checker-board of trees, still heart-touchingly visible on GOOGLE MAPS as precise figures, measured and cornered with string so long ago in modern mimic of their generations-ago ancestors plotting the surrounding fields.

Southern Cooking IS what it IS, a rich parade of homemade, homegrown, home-canned, home-tested fare, with great steps out into the storebought world in the last few decades. Rattly blue boxes of Lipton soup and cans of Campbell 's Cream-a stand side-by-side with blue ribbon chow-chows and jars of Grandma's spiced canned peaches on the storeroom shelves. Recipes are gleaned from Southern Living, Taste of Home, The Food Network,   from little church booklets, word of mouth, and under the hairdryer and prepared with the fervor of a priest offering a sacrifice. Recipes have NAMES---Sock-It-To-Me, Sawdust Salad, Nevvah-Fail Poundcake, Miz Prysock's Dressing and Aint Maggie’s Lane Cake written right on the card and proudly passed on to the numerous cookbook committees churning out those little spiral-bound tomes. Ladies who whisper the title, Better than Sex Cake hesitate not at all to write it as the caption on their contribution to the latest edition.

Cookbook and even contest entries are sometimes as simple as, “Squirrel Dumplings: Make like chicken, but use squirrel.” All and sundry are printed up as gracefully and with the same welcome given to the long-sought and finally-parted-with recipe for Mrs. Pund's Peach Brandy, handed over grudgingly and with a blush for the impropriety AND the honor.

And with the life-instilled regard for the tender feelings of their friends and neighbors, editors of those little books often print recipes verbatim, errors and all, whether by oversight or ignorance of times, temperatures, and spelling. One that always comes to mind is a recipe for an old New Orleans favourite, submitted by a wealthy older woman, whose cook had been in her kitchen for all of her married life---she wrote out the recipe in her own lovely script as Birdie Mae dictated, and it was sent to the publisher “as is”---Greeyards and Grits. I’ve always wondered if the editors just didn’t know, or if they were just afraid to contradict her.

There are memories of turkey frying, squirrels I have known, abysmal cooks and absolutely wonderful ones who could bake a cake with the dust from a flourbag, an egg, and the paper off a Parkay stick. There are wedding repasts, kitchen paraphernalia passed down through the years, how I learned to cook several things, and from whom. I'm sure there's an endless flood of other kitchen and food-related stories in there somewhere, but it needs a nudge now and then.

And if this seems all about FOOD, it’s because this has been my venue for such a long time, writing about recipes and cooking and parties and gatherings, because I’ve done so much of it for so long. The places and the people that I write for and of are stove and kitchen and restaurant and home and family-table-centered, and thus much of my writing is of that subject, in all its definitions, uses and meanings.

I can make confit; I can roast and sear and preserve and make tapenade. There’s hardly a wild game I haven’t put on the table at one time or another---venison, squirrel, mallards in every form from gumbo to meatballs to old–fashioned duck ‘n’ dressin’, with the heavy dark meat richening both the color and flavor of the dish. We’ve been given elk and moose roasts by friends who trekked the northwoods. Friends who yearly drove the endless gravelly miles of the Al-Can, with ONE broken windshield a lucky minimum, brought us back shining silver tins of just-caught salmon, sealed safe in a pay-as-you-go cannery within sound of the rushing water they were caught in.

We’ve taken food from seed to table for more years than I can remember, working in that hot Delta sun to hoe the rows, keep the plants safe from predator, bug and errant livestock; we squatted, the children and I, in the beanrows with the heat beating down, picking for as long as the stories of knights and fairies and ogres held out. Hot Summer nights of sitting with busy, shelling hands, the pea-rattle into pan echoing beetle-thump against screen. Then the washing and steam-blanching and cooling, the final reward of filled freezer boxes and bags lined up on the counter in the wee hours of another morning, as the sun waited to blast another day beneath our eyelids.

Canning and preserving and freezing were as much a part of my life as breathing, the steamy kitchen redolent of spicy pickling brine or the rich, fruity aroma of bubbling jam, the tunck of jarlids sounding the ching of money-in-the-bank as our efforts filled the pantry, boxes, all the space beneath beds, the attic stairs. I couldn’t figure how ANYONE could cook straight out of the grocery store.

Our four-acre garden is a thing of the past; we are semi-cityfolks now, our tillage shrunk to the twenty-five-foot circle on which once rested a swimming pool, and that only yielding basil and marjoram and dill, and the determined mint bed which gives off Doublemint fumes with every sandal step.

Leah and I have been  members of quite a few of the online  food/recipe/restaurant/book review sites for some years now, and most of my writing in the wee hours has been in that venue: the day’s occupation around the stove, the shopping excursions for greens and seasonings and the things that we never dreamt of raising in that good black Delta gumbo. So my writings have been centered on the kitchen and table, since that’s the subject of the sites---lots of opinions and anecdotes and memories.

I seem to be the loudest voice in the Southern topics of the sites, with great long tales of childhood cooking and learning and the experience of long hot garden-gathering days, canning days over the stove, baking and preparing and cooking for our family and countless others over the years. And my memories are long but not too far-reaching---Southern tables and kitchens, with all the preparation and method and customs and the sheer preposterousness of some of the ideas and manners. I have not traveled much, and now live far from those roots, but they seem to stretch all the way to the here and the now of my life and of those in my chain of family and friends.   

But LEAH, NOW---she is the finder and creator of so many new items and recipes and exotic spices and herbs and methods, such welcome flavors way past enchiladas or Naan.   Our house is often fragrant with za'atar and sumac, as she whirls the chickpeas for hummus, or nine kinds of inferno, with her choice of lethal new pepper varieties.

Past and present, and new visions always welcomed.

FLAGS, CHICKENS AND OLD TIMES THERE

In the one picture I have of Mammaw’s side of the family, my Great-Grandmother Roma is a solemn-faced woman, wrinkle-browed and worn by work and sorrow and the total responsibility of ten children born and a husband buried by the time she was thirty-five.

My Mammaw related, time after time, the story of the day her Daddy died---"Come in out of the field, drunk two dippers of water, and fell dead in the yard." That was 1904, and he was forty years old, with ten children, the youngest six months.  She always ended with her usual "It was the Fourth a' May and we didn't have a seed in the ground."   I can attest to those May temperatures, and Since-Daylight-plowing-with-a-mule must have been his morning's work, there in those red-dust hills of Yalobusha county, we agreed that it must have been sunstroke.   It certainly mustn't have been "heart trouble" because all but one of their children lived well into their seventies---with one lost to a lung problem in his twenties, with a wife and two babies.

She usually finished with a tribute to her Mama's two older brothers---Unca Taylor and Unca Fate, saying "I don't know what woulda become of us if not for them and the Mattress factory."   They had created quite a thriving mattress-tufting business, with a great talent for upholstery and even cloth-walling the elegant rooms of the more affluent denizens of the county.  Even back then, ladies would save fabric, or the skirt of an older "nice dress" and have fancy pillows made for their parlors.

Mammaw's four sisters were "dab hands" with sewing and quilting and such, and each earned a little money with the needlework to help out at home.  Mammaw did her part with the cooking and baby-tending while everybody else was in the field or at the factory.   I know that's where I got my Tend-to-People gene, for she had a way with sick folks, or tired folks, or some of the lovelorn young folks, feeling their way into adulthood with a cautious touch.  She could plant, tend and raise a garden to feed her brood, as well as take every item from seed to table, canning and later freezing her garden's bounty for free-handed sharing amongst the whole family.    

You know, I'm just realizing that I never once set foot in either of those uncles' houses---we just went on Sunday afternoons, driving out to visit the uncle and aunt who were the last dwellers in the family home.   Speaking of decoration, that little living room  had a couch up against what had been the fireplace, with an enormous red-white-and-blue CROCHETED American Flag----48 stars then, and at least 8x10----hanging down behind---can't imagine WHAT it was originally made for.  The weight of that heavy flag made it into a great curved swag like a curtain at the top, falling clear to the floor---I cannot imagine the time and weight of that project in a lap, and always thought they must have somehow made it on something like the quilting frames which were hung neatly in the ceilings of several of the houses--it was HUGE, and my imagination made it the work of several folks, sitting around that big rectangle, slip-stitching and chaining away in their respective areas. 

But ALL THOSE CHILDREN raised in that small, small-roomed, no-screens house, all of them coming up in the Mississippi hills with such a start, and all the wonders they achieved in those lives they lived!  I could never parse the rooms enough to know where they all SLEPT, and three meals a day for that brood must have meant a garden of several acres, and of course, their own milk and a few pigs, with what started as LOTS of chickens.  

She and Great-Grandpa (who did not live long enough to be a Grandfather) had had the felicity of having a full chicken-house as inheritance when they married, from a great wagon-full of chicks donated by family and community.  

It was the one and only Chicken-Shower I’ve ever heard of in the history of matrimony, but it really makes a frugal kind of sense. 

  Everybody had a flock of some kind---Reds and Domineckers and other barnyard breeds, and any chicken that hatched was a bonus one way or the other.  So when GG Roma and GG Earnest married, they were showered with a pot or pan or two, maybe a pair of homemade pillowslips from one of the older sisters, and a nice flock of chickens.

 

 

In the first couple of their married years, GG Romie would fry TWO on Sundays, for there was the go-home-with-you-from-church crowd of family, and even on their Sundays to themselves, they killed and cooked two, for Mammaw said, ”They had a-plenty then, and my Mama always said ONE chicken is just not enough for two people and some leftover for dinner next week while we’re in the field.”   Mammaw’s philosophy echoed that:  Why fry twice, when you can do a lot at one time.

 

That idea had its influence over our own family as I grew up, for though Mother might gingerly fry a chicken once in a blue moon, having to start off her Sundays for so many years in such a gruesome manner as killing and cleaning a chicken put her off eating it for life.   Oddly, the liver and gizzard were sacrosanct, reserved just for her (far removed from all the pluck and singe, I suppose), and she readily bought and cooked whole packages of those.

 

Mammaw always had a chickenhouse right there in their backyard, along with a fruit-house, an immense rose garden, a twice-as-big vegetable garden, and that little moon-doored necessary, and for many years they had a cow which I “walked” to and from the town pasture, from when I was about four.   Boss would see her friends already out there in the grass, grazing and gossiping, and she'd take off by herself while my little Buster Browns would pelt along in the dust alongside, trying to beat her to the gate. 

And when Mammaw and Grandpa were married in 1917, they took with them about a half dozen of the layin' hens and one rooster.   Those sufficed for breakfasts and GOOD cakes for many years, and still had a few descendants scratching out by the outhouse way up into my teen years. Mammaw's other dowry was a few cuttings from a huge pink floribunda rose which almost took over their small yard, with the cuttings I took to my new house in the 70s still thriving out there on the land of my second family.

 

Years later, when in Mammaw's own words, she was "gettin' on up there," the flock were layers only, but by then, I’d named them, and so rendered amnesty to the whole stupid, cackly, feckless bunch.  Had it not been for those immense, richly brown “yeller yawked” eggs which were the linchpin of those legendary Pineapple Cakes, she’d probably have swapped the lot for a card of buttons.