My wife’s grandmother was at one time a good cook. I know this because my wife has told me this. I do not have firsthand knowledge of this fact because by the time my wife and I started dating, Granny was not a good cook. The first time I ever remember eating at Granny’s house was either around Christmas or Thanksgiving. Several people were there and the counter was packed with food. I was following my wife in the line. She leaned over and whispered to me “Don’t eat anything that I don’t eat!” I followed this warning very carefully. Eating at Granny’s house could be dangerous.
Today, I was eating lunch at a fast food restaurant. This is one of the restaurants where they take your name when they take your order instead of assigning you a number. When your order is ready, they announce your name. The young lady waiting on me asked my name and I told her. She didn’t understand and asked me again. I repeated my name and spelled it for her to make sure she understood. She smiled as she replied, “OK! Cool!” I thought it was unusual for anyone to think that the name Art is cool but I thought she was just being nice. While I was waiting for my food, I prepared my drink and grabbed some napkins. I stayed near the counter because the store was crowded and I wanted to give it a chance to clear out before I sat down. Another lady behind the counter was gathering food for orders and I thought I recognized my order in her hand. At the time, I was the only person who was waiting near the counter for an order. She stepped up to the counter and announced “Ant!”
Several years ago, I was driving my son to school on a Friday morning. My cell phone rang. I looked at the screen and it wasn’t a number that I had programmed in my phone so just the number showed. I saw that the call was from a phone with a Memphis area code. I have several friends who live around Memphis that I could potentially get calls from so I answered. The voice on the other end said “Let me speak to Leroy!” I wasn’t expecting to hear this and wasn’t sure what I just heard so I replied “What!?!” Then they asked “Is this Leroy?” I answered, “No, this is not Leroy.” I replied saying the name so my son would hear me say it so I would hopefully remember the details of this conversation. The person apologized for calling the wrong number and hung up.
A couple of weeks ago, I was asked to help judge a talent show. I enjoy watching talent contests, especially when there is a possibility that some of the contestants may not be very good. I enjoy watching American Idol during the audition episodes because this is when you get to see a lot of people who have a false sense of confidence about their musical ability. Watching these train wrecks can be very entertaining. Beauty pageants with a talent component have the same appeal for me. It is unfortunate for these beautiful young women that they have to come up with some sort of talent to participate in these competitions. Many sing that should never sing. More of them should try ventriloquism. Bad ventriloquists are more tolerable than bad singers. There isn’t that much difference between a good and bad ventriloquist.
Anyway, this is the second talent show I’ve been asked to judge in the last few years. The previous talent show had younger children than this one. This contest had older kids and promised the possibility of moving on to bigger competitions. This was more serious business. I was possibly the oldest judge in the bunch but my music and entertainment credentials were the least among the bunch. I was with music educators, professional musicians and performers that I respected. I’m just some hack singer/songwriter that one of the organizers could count on when they needed a male among the judges.
As the contest began, I made a mental list of rules for myself. These rules were intended to help me be a better judge and help keep me from hurting the feelings of any young person in the competition. Here are my rules:
Several years ago, a friend and co-worker passed away. He worked in the same department that I do. He had been ill and in the hospital for a short period of time previous to his death. It was still hard on the people in our department. This is the first time I remember having a co-worker this close to me die. It was also the first time that I remember going to the visitation and funeral for a co-worker. My friend was also African-American so it would also be my first black funeral.
My neighbor has several crepe myrtles in his yard that he had cut back to an extreme about 2 weeks ago. The trimmings from the tree were rather large and some of them ended up in my yard. I’m an easy going guy and while I didn’t really like it, I didn’t say anything to my neighbor. My wife did say something to the people that cut the trees a few days later when they were moving the trimmings to the edge of the road to be picked up by the city. She asked if they cut them and they said no. I think they were afraid that she was upset. Anyway, they moved them to the edge of the road. Even then, some of them were still in our yard. I ended up have to mow around them at least twice. Still, I didn’t complain to the neighbors.
I have never spent much time around deaf people. While there are plenty of people in my family that are hard of hearing, I have no family members that are deaf. The people in my family who have the most severe hearing problems have never been so bad off that there was any consideration of them needing to learn sign language. At the same time, there were never any deaf people in the schools I attended, churches I went to, or places that I’ve worked. I’ve definitely been around people with hearing aids and who had hearing issues bad enough that it affected their speech. But I’ve never spent any significant time around people who regularly use sign language. So I was fascinated when I saw the couple at the bookstore signing at each other.
Not all stores are created equal. People with different sensibilities gravitate to different stores. Stores try to appeal to different types of customers. Stores do this with the types of products they carry and the environment they try to create. At first glance, Walmart and Target seem to be very similar. But as I look closer, I get the feeling that Target may be attempting to shoot for a slightly more sophisticated customer. Their products offerings seem to be less varied but aiming for a higher class customer. Likewise, when I encounter shoppers at Target, they seem to carry themselves like they are more important than the typical Walmart customer. You go to Target to impress, to be seen. For the same reasons you go to Starbucks. I think that’s why there is a Starbucks in our local target. You go to Walmart because they are cheap.
It was a Sunday afternoon. My mother and my sister had gone to a baby shower or a wedding shower. I was at home alone with my dad. It was raining. It was stormy and rainy enough outside that I couldn’t go out and play. My dad would usually have some sort of project going on outside but the weather was too bad for him to be out. He also wanted to spend time with me. It was his idea to make homemade ice cream.
Making homemade ice cream is an outdoor activity. I have seen people put an electric ice cream maker in the sink but our ice cream maker had a hand crank. We were going to have to put the ice cream maker in a large plastic dishpan in the middle of the floor of our kitchen. We were not ready for that yet. First, we had to mix our ingredients.
My mom would normally prepare the mix for the ice cream. Most of the time when we were making homemade ice cream, we had guests at our house and I would be playing with kids. I paid very little attention to what my mom was doing. My dad was usually trying to get the ice ready. My family would fill old milk cartons with water and put them in the freezer to make blocks of ice to use when making ice cream. This was a great way to make ice blocks but then you had to bust them up before you could use them. We had little to no idea what my mom would usually do when she was preparing the ice cream. Our decision to make ice cream was made at the last minute. If we were missing anything, there was a possibility we wouldn’t be able to make ice cream at all. This happening in the early 1970’s when all of the stores in our town would close on Sundays. My dad started looking for all of the ingredients. We had plenty of milk. We also had those little Junket tablets which was lucky because the package also had a recipe. Those were the only two ingredients that I knew for sure were included. Researching this story, I have seen recipes that use evaporated milk and others that use corn syrup. I’m sure that the recipe we were using was the most basic recipe possible. As far as I knew, the ingredients were just milk, junkets, sugar and magic. I know that the recipe we were using called for vanilla because my dad said we didn’t have any. This was not going to stop us.
What would you consider an acceptable substitute for vanilla? I would consider another flavor, wouldn’t you? Knowing my mom, I think there might have been some chocolate flavoring somewhere up there in the kitchen cabinet. I did not help my dad select what he chose as a substitute. At the time, I did not realize that his selection had very little flavor and what flavor it had was sort of bitter. But the food coloring would look cool, wouldn’t it?
Yes, we used food coloring as a substitute for vanilla. How much food coloring do you add when substituting for vanilla? I don’t think it really matters. What matters is putting enough in to make it look really cool. What happens when you add a lot of all of the colors in the package? We were hoping for a nice rainbow striped effect. What we got was a turquoise swirl effect.
Part of the fun of making ice cream was everyone getting to take turns with the crank. I was still young enough at the time that I wasn’t very much help. I could really only crank at the very first when it was relatively easy. But I didn’t have very much endurance either. Since it was just me and my dad, he ended up doing most of the work. In addition, he didn’t have the benefit of the ice cream maker sitting on the ground. It slid around in the dish pan as he hand cranked the concoction until it was done.
We tested our experiment. I don’t know if you can accurately call what we made “ice cream”. It might be best described as frozen turquoise milk. My mom and sister tried some of it when they got home but most of it remained uneaten. My mom put the rest of the dessert in the door of the freezer in a clear plastic container. Every time we went to get ice from the freezer, we would see the leftovers. Think it remained there until we moved to another house.
Years ago, my wife was the news editor for the newspaper in the small town where we grew up. Being news editor for a paper like this meant that she covered a variety of events. If a story was going to be written about an event in our county, she almost always was the person going to the event to cover it. She went to city board meetings, fires, automobile accidents and lots of sporting events. I went with her many ball games and other gatherings that were more entertaining. We went to the county-wide NAACP banquet at least two years in a row. The first year we went it was 1992, an election year. Our local congressman was retiring and several of the candidates running for his seat attended this banquet. I spent time with several of the candidates. I watched the man that eventually won spend no less than five minutes trying to pick up a penny from the floor in the cafeteria of the county high school where the event was held. There was a meal, entertainment and a speaker. Also at the end of the event, they gave out door prizes.
