Canthook

The summer solstice arrived Friday night at 8 PM. It's summer now, and that traditionally means a lot fewer hot meals.

I don't know what you had to eat this noon, but I hope you had a real Sunday dinner, with the family gathered around the table.

And the preacher, he kept preaching
Long is the struggle, hard the fight
And I prayed, Father please forgive me
And then I stood up and with all my might
I sang:
To the Lord, let praises be!
It's time for dinner, now let's go eat.
We've got some beans and some good cornbread
And I listened to what the preacher said
Now it's to the Lord let praises be
It's time for dinner, now let's go eat
-- Lyle Lovett

I used to love Jeff Smith. I know, I know. "There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us." Accusations of pedophilia, even if they are never prosecuted, are hard for me to overlook.

Besides, his cookbooks were terrible. They were wonderful to read, but the recipes don't work. Smith was a preacher, by trade and training, and he spent so much time talking about the meaning of breaking break with someone, that I guess it was easy to overlook the fact that the food was barely edible. I suppose I should have gotten a hint when I saw him eating shrimp without peeling it first. But what he said about gathering together for a meal still is true: where that happens, there you find God.

Part of the price of living in my parents' home was attending church regularly. I didn't realize that we were poor until I was living on my own. If you have everything you need, and some of the things you really want, that's the definition of working class, isn't it? But it's hard to keep fast-growing boys in shirts that don't choke you, and shoes that don't hurt from being too tight, and sitting through Sunday School with Patty, who was always mean to all the boys, was no treat, and spending an hour on a hard pew with little available to occupy the mind of a child? Torture.

And, I suspect, the things we did to amuse ourselves surely had my mother thinking of torture as well, although instead of thinking of "torture" as a noun, she was probably thinking in terms of the verb, "to torture."

When I was in high school, she'd sometimes allow us to remain at home while she went to church. When I was in college, I started going again, although on my terms. Instead of a suit, I wore clean new blue jeans, and an open-collar shirt, and a pullover sweater vest, and instead of dress shoes, I wore my Arthur Ashe Adidas, white athletic shoes with a little green trim.

To her credit, she didn't say a word. To the credit of the others in church, they didn't say a word, either. I suspect they were thinking, "Maybe I could get my kid to come to church, if I told him that the organist's son wears blue jeans, has his collar open instead of wearing a tie, and has athletic shoes on his feet." Or maybe their tongues were wagging, and I just never heard any of it. At least, everyone was friendly to my face.

But it didn't really matter. The heart of the Jewish faith, I am told, is based around the family hearth, rather than the temple or synogogue, and that's where our family's faith was centered, too. When we were young, the kids took turns saying the "god is great" prayer, and after we were smart-alec enough to start saying "Good bread, good meat, good God, let's eat", the formal prayer was jettisoned.

They say the job of parenting is mostly over by the age of four, and from there on, you don't raise kids; all you can do is sponsor them. It's a good thing, because when you're raising teenagers, it's amazing how much good parenting amounts to being a little deaf, a little dumb, and altogether too tired. Kids need to make mistakes, as long as they aren't too big. It's the same thing as an entrepreneur once told me about training up a manager. "The little mistakes, we eat. The big mistakes? They can eat us."

But it's amazing, when you're raising a teenager, and they're going through one of those sullen stages, how you can set him down for a Sunday dinner, and it remains mostly quiet though the meal, and Mom is relieved that the family isn't fighting for a change, and the kid lifts up his head, and says, "Thanks Mom. This is really great" and you realize that maybe you've raised a decent kid after all, not a monster. And then he helps clear the table, without anyone saying a word, and volunteers to dry the dishes, and you're wondering where that came from, and years later, you realize it.

It comes from God.

It's hard to be mad at someone when you're sitting down together, eating homemade fried chicken, mashed potatoes from potatoes, not flakes, and gravy from the drippings instead of a jar. If there's real biscuits as well, that just makes it perfect.

Lewis Grizzard used to say that when his wife made scratch biscuits, he knew she loved him. It's not really all that much more effort than thwack biscuits - you know, the ones that come in a tube, and you go thwack against the edge of the counter? - but they're so much better, and the symbolism is important. Thwack biscuits have the same nutrients, but the biscuits you cut out with a tin can, they have love added.

Somehow, the size of the dinner table matters. When I was younger, there were a half-dozen of us kids. There was a 7-year gap between the older four and the last two of us, though, and when sunday dinner went from 8 people to 4, a lot of the specialness evaporated.

Rip was my oldest brother, and he was out of school before I even started. He got a job doing highway construction, driving a Euke. They were rushing to get the work done to meet a deadline, and a lot of accidents were happening. An inspector came down to see what has happening, and he was watching when Rip rolled the Euke. He jumped clear, and was unhurt, and the Euke wasn't hurt either, once they righted it, but the inspector fired him on the spot.

The foreman called him aside, and apologized, telling him that he was a good worker, that he was only following directions - and that the company had another contract in another state, where they would love to hire him.

When Rip came home, which wasn't very often, the whole family celebrated - and when the family celebrated, it was with a meal. Rip's favorite was a local brand of baloney, cut thick, and browned hard, on a local brand of cracked-wheat bread, with lots of Miracle Whip slathered on, and a tall glass of icy-cold milk. It's hard to find that in restaurants.

It's even hard to find icy-cold milk. I sometimes pull a Jack Nicholson "Five Easy Pieces" bit, minus the sarcasm, simply ordering a glass of milk, and requesting a glass of ice. When it arrives, I can ice down the milk.

The first tomato from my garden was ripe this week. It was small, but it promising. Unfortunately, it looks like a couple of weeks before the next one is ready. I bought really big plants, and buried all but a couple of inches, and they've shot up like a rocket, big and full and lush. They're covered with flowers, it looks like a good summer for tomatoes.

We're not raising anything else this summer. That's unusual. If I raise anything at all, I tend to raise a wide variety of things, but this summer, it's just the six tomato plants.

One spring, they had celery starts at the garden center. Em used a lot of celery in her cooking, so I didn't just buy a six-pack, I bought the whole flat. When I got home, Em asked me an interesting question, "You realize, of course, that you're going to have 36 celery plants ripening all at once?" Oops. But it turned out to be a smart move after all. When they were ready, we pulled off the leaves and dried them, giving us about a gallon of dried celery flakes. The ribs, we chopped up and froze, and they were wonderful in the many soups Em made over the next year.

When I was growing up, soup meant a can of Campbell's. Em taught me what great soup was all about. Campbell's advertising is right - soup is good food. Too bad that Campbell's makes such poor soup. If someone wanted to start a business, they could do worse than to make really great soup, and drive a route, delivering fresh soup to restaurants. Restaurants thrive when they offer foods people can't, or won't, make for themselves. Many restaurants simply have portion-controlled convenience foods these days, offering families nothing special except freedom from loading the microwave before and the dishwasher after. If you make it easy for restaurants to offer food they can't have at home, that's the basis for a sound business.

And if a family sits together, eating your fine soup, maybe they'll find the love you put in it.

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
celery - church - Euclid - Five Easy Pieces - friedbaloney - Jeff Smith (Frugal Gourmet) - Lewis Grizzard - parenting - summer solstice - Sunday dinner - thwack biscuits - tomatoes