Let's Eat

As you can tell from past columns, I had an idyllic childhood, filled with fun, friends and little work. But I always wished for one of those big family cookouts on holidays like the Fourth of July. In my early years we didn’t have them for several reasons.   

First, we were a small family. Most of my dad’s siblings were dead, since he was the youngest of a hard-living, distant bunch. Even though my mother grew up in town, she was an only child, with parents who died before I was born. Also, my dad was a “meat and three” kind of guy. No charcoal-grilled flavor for him. Born in 1899, his dislike might have stemmed from his childhood, eating food cooked over a wood stove. 

Imagine my delight when my sister married and settled across town. Finally I had a cook-out clan! Marge grilled the hamburgers, mixed to Mom’s specs with dried onion soup and milk-soaked bread. Other times we’d have barbecued ribs or chicken.

Mom always made enough “inside food” to keep Dad happy, too. She’d set out big bowls of potato salad and cucumbers and onions swimming in vinegar and sugar. (Twice as much sugar as vinegar, according to her recipe.) Then she’d plunk down platters of sweet corn. Other times, she’d whisk devilled eggs or coleslaw from the fridge. And there were always plenty of those wonderful Indiana tomatoes, sliced and ready for salt and pepper or sugar, as Mom liked. It was not unusual for us to polish off five or six of them. We washed it all down with Sweet Tea. This was SOUTHERN Indiana, after all.

Dessert was usually homemade ice cream, churned with strawberries or other in-season fruit. This was long before the sissified electric ice cream makers of today. Luckily, my brother-in-law, Joe, had a good strong arm, as did my dad. So we weaklings cranked for a while, but once the ice cream started thickening, it was time for the A Team. After we’d consumed enough ice cream to stock a Baskin-Robbins outlet, the adults would collapse in a food coma.

Meanwhile, my nephews and I lit snakes as we waited for nightfall. Remember those little black tablets, the size of a tall aspirin? We’d set them on the pavement and light the top. Immediately a long black ash would rise, twisting and turning like its namesake. Our hands grew black from playing with the ashes and luckily, no one minded the stains left on the pavement for months afterward.  

Finally darkness came and it was time to bring out the “big guns:” sparklers. My parents bought boxes and boxes of the things, knowing that neighborhood kids would drop by and we could play with the sparklers as a group. First we did mundane things like writing our names in the air; other times, we’d put one in each hand and run around in circles, or like chain smokers, light a new one from the end of another. If we felt especially brave, we’d hold the sparks next to our arms to prove they didn’t hurt. Some years, we even had colored sparklers, or giant ones staked in the ground.

To keep us safe, Mom always had a bucket of water to douse the burned wires. No burned bare feet or arms for us!

With a good meal and plenty of play, we Old Schoolers pronounced it another successful Fourth of July.