Tag: Family

Old Age Is Not For Sissies

My Mother, Mount Airy, NC – 1937

Long ago I remember hearing my mother say, “Old age is not for sissies.”  She was 84 and I was 45.  When you are forty-five,  you think you handle just about anything.  In the twenty-four years after college, I moved to Canada where we farmed for ten years, and we moved back to the US. By the time we got to Roanoke, Virginia had already been selling Apples for nearly a decade. While I was a very successful sales person at Apple, my mother who knew nothing about computers knew a lot more about life than me. 

She understood that families can get complicated, hard work does not always result in success, and most importantly she knew the value of continuing to work even when it was not easy.  She could accomplish amazing things, but she did it not through a flurry of activity but through methodically getting things done as she was able.  When she was in her nineties, she was proud of still being able to dress herself even though it took her over an hour. Her mother died during the 1918-19 flu pandemic.  At the age of nine she became the lady of the house.  She had to cook for her five siblings. Many times she told me the story of making biscuits in the morning for the family but having one of the boys put the heavy cast iron pan in the wood stove because she could not lift it. She left home in her teens because the new stepmother and my mother did not see eye to eye. 

If I remember the story correctly, as mother was leaving leaving home, she told the stepmother that if it ever got to her that the stepmother had laid a finger on one of her sisters, she and her favorite cast iron frying pan would be back to deal with it. Mother had grown into being very proficient with a cast iron pan. Blanche, after putting herself through cosmetology school, became a successful beautician running her own shop on Main Street in Mount Airy and later after I was born, she had one in the back of our house in Lewisville, North Carolina.  It was the way she supported us. As a single mom in the fifties, she managed to raise me and become a very popular Boy Scout mom who was considered a better driver than most of the men. 

I never lacked for love. I also learned the value of education and hard work. Like all of us, mother had things in her life that challenged her, but she always rose to the challenge even if it involved a lot of false starts.  She was someone you could count on when help was needed.  We had a cattle field day at our farm in the late seventies.  My mother who was in her late sixties got on an airplane and flew from North Carolina to New Brunswick which included switching terminals by herself in Boston to help feed the 300 people who showed up. Mother was in her mid-eighties before she gave up her driver’s license. When she did it, she told me not to worry, if there was an emergency, she could still drive.  A few years after giving up driving, she had to give up working in her flowers.  It was the stairs in and out of her house that put an end to the flowers.  It was then that we realized the house was holding her prisoner.

When our good friend RJ who was living upstairs in the house died suddenly, mother had to move.  RJ had been her legs, getting groceries and things that they needed. She had continued to cook for them as he continued to work for the local newspaper. Mother moved in with us and we offered her our main floor bedroom.  She wouldn’t hear of it. Every night, she would go up the stairs on her rear, one step at a time to one of our other bedrooms.  It is appropriate to mention at this time that one of our daughters likes to say she comes from a long line of stubborn. It is pretty easy to see the source. Eventually we built mother her own room and bathroom but it was only a matter of time, before mother reluctantly had to move into an assisted living facility.  In spite of declaring she could never make new friends, she made some of the best friends of her life in those last three years.  It was only in the last few days of her life that she had to have help getting dressed.  Only after all her new friends passed away was she was ready to let go.  Her mind was still clear but her body had worn out long ago. She was ninety-three years and six months old.  She is still missed every day by those of us she touched and nurtured.  I have cousins who say that they would have never had Christmas if it wasn’t for their Aunt Blanche, my mother.  Another who is now ninety himself claims that he would have gone down a bad road and likely be dead if my mother hadn’t forced him to go to military school.  She was a force of nature.

While I still miss her, I am proud of the values that she instilled in me, and the help that she provided our family when our children were growing up. I hope she is pleases at the kind of family we have become.

Our Quirky Family Food

Years ago people ate what the cook, usually the mother of the family, put in front of them. When I was at boarding school, you ate what was on the table or went for the jar of peanut butter. It is interesting look back at not only what we ate but how our tastes have changed. Driving around the country in my teens taught me you could have ketchup with you eggs. Going to military school in Tennessee introduced me to grits and unfortunately powdered scrambled eggs.

A lot of today’s foods weren’t around when I was growing up.  I still remember my first fast food restaurant, a Burger King, near Winston-Salem in the late fifties.  Mostly we ate at home which in the South meant fried chicken on Sunday and lots of vegetables during the week. 

My mother canned a lot, and she also froze some vegetables. We had relatives with bigger gardens and freezers than ours so we were never out of vegetables We ate a lot of Pinto beans and cornbread. I learned to love cabbage. Excitement when I was young was a Chef Boyardee Pizza kit. I didn’t have a real pizza until freshmen year in college.

After college on our farm in Canada, my wife and I were lucky to grow most of our food. I was the seventies and early eighties. There were hippies afoot but we were serious famers with tractors and lots of cattle.  When we lived in Nova Scotia, we picked broccoli in five gallon buckets and rushed fresh picked corn to already boiling water in the kitchen. We gambled on tomatoes but ones ground on the shore of Nova Scotia were nothing like North Carolina tomatoes. New Brunswick had more heat which better tomatoes, more reliable corn and less broccoli.

Eating out when you were running a farm far from town and have three kids was maybe a trip to the one McDonald’s on a run to town or a stop by the Chinese restaurant that was usually deserted enough for the kids to run around and play.  With a farm there was always beef in the freezer and my wife put up something north of one fifty jars of vegetables each year and froze plenty to go with that and fill our two big chest freezers. We hauled out of the cellar each year four times the number of potatoes that we ate.

My early years in North Carolina were different than when our kids were growing up. I never remember asking for something different than what was on the table. When our children grew up in Virginia, there were so many grilled cheese sandwiches and dippy eggs that I sometimes felt like a short order cook.

Our tastes started evolved as we started grilling salmon but we never gave up on canned salmon cakes which were always a staple when growing up. I never gave up on Codfish cakes, but my wife never took them and always maintained they were just an excuse to drink a lot of beer. When we could get good seafood, the years in Nova Scotia and our sixteen years on the North Carolina coast, fresh seafood was included as much as the budget allowed or my angling skill would put on the table.

I have always done some of the cooking. My wife claims that she has never cooked my breakfast in over fifty years of marriage.  Even the very few times we had pancakes, I always cooked the breakfast meat. Now I am semi-retired, working only three or four days a week, and my wife is unable to do the shopping.  I try watch my carbs and my wife has to watch what she eats because of her kidneys. We also have an adult mid-forties son living with us. He will not eat chicken, turkey, or fish. He eats limited amounts of pork, beef, and hotdogs.  My wife and I love beans and soups. We have expanded beyond Pintos, eating Anasazi beans and whatever we see that catches our eye on Rancho Gordo’s site. We have older relatives who supply us with a localized version of Crowder peas which we call Joe’s peas since his family has been growing them and saving the seeds for over one hundred years.

We are also fans of cabbage, broccoli, and whatever else that can be sourced locally.  My wife and I love local berries and all sorts of apples. Our son will only eat honey crisp apples preferably from Whole Foods. We grow our own tomatoes during the summer and readily admit to loving either plain tomato sandwiches or BLTs.

I am a huge fan of country sausage, country ham, and true country bacon, but the breakfast meat that I eat the most is turkey sausage which no one else in the family will touch. I also love country fresh eggs and rarely buy any from the grocery store.

I started baking sourdough bread in the seventies and my wife took over the bread baking in the eighties until we moved back to the states. I took up sourdough baking seriously again fourteen years ago. Recently to save time and mess, I have been using the Wildgrain par-baked frozen bread service.  When I want a loaf of bread, I put a frozen sourdough loaf from the freezer into the toaster oven.  It bakes for 21 minutes in the oven and finishes baking another twenty minutes outside the oven. It is very good and very little different in price  from the bakery bread I sought out when I didn’t have time to bake.

I enjoy grilling, my favorite food to grill is half-chickens. We have consciously given up on the big steaks that I used to carve up into fillet mignon and a strip steak with a bone. I would buy a couple on special,  my wife and son would eat the fillets. I would eat the strips, first hot and then cold sliced in wraps or on a salad. I am also a big fan of smoking food and chicken thighs would be my smoked food of choice.

This is North Carolina so a good third of meals out revolve around barbecue. We try to limit out eating out to one or two meals a week. My wife and I often split a Jersey Mike’s sub while our son can do in a whole one.   We sometimes do fried flounder at one the local restaurants and maybe once every three months, I might get some Chinese food and try to go light on the rice.

My wife loves ice cream which I try to avoid but I did have a Dairy Queen cone with her the other day. It was the first Dairy Queen we had seen in the three years that we have been here. That Dairy Queen in Salisbury, NC has been operating in the same spot for 75 years.

Given all that, meal planning and the shopping to make those meals is challenging.  My son is always up for a taco and since I have found some good low-carb wraps, I can live with that.  My wife makes a great turkey meatloaf based on the Barefoot Contessa’s recipe, I can eat that hot or cold, breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Given all this history perhaps the hotdogs and steak at the top of the post make a little sense.  My wife and son had hot dogs and I ate a grass-fed sirloin steak. Neither of them like sirloins. I have one eight ounce steak a month from the Pre company.  It usually costs $7.99 on sale which I consider reasonable for the quality.  It took me a little experimenting to get it right but I can now cook it perfectly to my taste. In the continuing effort to improve the quality of what we eat, I added red Quinoa to my spinach salad. Usually by this time of year I have switched to the spinach from our garden but something has eaten most of it and the weather hasn’t been kind to the rest of it.

However, Sunday April 28, we had a big lettuce harvest with a small bag of spinach. With an upcoming week of heat, we figured it was time to take what we could and hope for a better season next year. It turned out to be a pretty nice harvest.

This afternoon it was time for another food compromise. My wife was worn out from processing all the lettuce we picked. I had hoped to grill some chicken thighs but I ran out of time. I agreed to a simple dinner. We stuck a frozen baked ziti into the oven. My wife made fresh Caesar salad. A baked a loaf of sourdough from Wildgrain and made some crouton from hotdogs buns. Normally I would veto a pasta and fresh bread at night but I considering the circumstances I went for it. Tomorrow, I will really have to watch my carbs but not until after breakfast.

The McCallie Years

Me back on campus fifty years later

Chapter Three, McCallie, “Honor, Truth, and Duty”

It was the fall of 1963, and I was headed for Chattanooga, Tennessee.  I was being sent to McCallie School so I could have more male influence in my life.  In retrospect that almost seems funny since my mother was far tougher than most men.  She might not have been much at hunting and fishing, but that was only because she did not enjoy them.

Still I was destined to go to McCallie.  Like most teenage boys, I was not particularly interested in being dragged away from what I considered a perfectly good life.  I had enjoyed an exceptionally rich family life for an only child with a single mother.  Living close to my mother’s sisters and her oldest brother, Henry, had given me just about everything you could ask for in life except a dad.  It was really tough going to away to school, and I fought it pretty hard.

Sometime during that first fall away, my dad had a heart attack. He was 88 at the time of the attack.  If you do the math, you can figure out that I was born when he was 74.  Something in the care he was receiving really upset my mother who in a very short time went to live in his house and took over his care.  She eventually agreed to what he had wanted for many years, and they got married.

I know my mother made a few trips to Chattanooga to try to help me adjust that fall, but it was only when Major Arthur Burns had a talk with me, that I finally gave up and decided to make the best of what I considered to be a tough situation. I was a heavy kid so that created some challenges for me, but fortunately the academics came pretty easy to me so I did well there.

I had also been taught to not get into trouble so I stayed out of trouble, did my work, and figured out the system.  The system as a freshman was not a lot of fun.  We had to carry our laundry down the side of Missionary Ridge each week.  As freshmen we also got to carry that of upper class students.  I can remember a couple of frozen laundry bags that I had to carry.

I managed to get involved with things and eventually paid enough attention that I started succeeding in the military world.  Getting by at a military school means getting up when the bells ring every morning, getting your name checked off at breakfast whether you ate or not, making your bed, and showing up for inspection with a shiny belt buckle and shoes.  For some strange reason, I enjoyed shining my shoes and brass so that was never a problem.

Each morning we would head off to chapel for a few minutes of talk and announcements. There I mastered one of the great skills in life, sleeping while appearing to be awake. Then we would have classes, drill, lunch, another chapel meeting, more classes, and then sports.  Unfortunately, I figured out how to do as little as possible in after school exercise so my weight remained a problem all through McCallie.  I did get involved in some school sports as a manager and really enjoyed that.

In the evenings we had a very short time after the afternoon activities before our six PM dinner.  Lunch and dinner were both eaten at a family style table with a teacher at each table.  When I became a sophomore, I was rescued from the life at an ordinary table by my Latin II teacher, W.O.E.A. Humphreys.  I joined his table which eventually came to be known as the Establishment.  It was a bright spot in an otherwise uninspiring dinner environment.  It offered intelligent conversation and a group where I felt like I belonged.  Perhaps that explains why I took four years of Latin at McCallie.

After dinner was study hall which ran from 7 to 9:30 PM each night except weekends when Saturday was free and Sunday was a little shorter.  You had to do study hall in the study hall unless you had good grades and had stayed out of trouble.  If you met the requirements, you got to study in your room.  I do not remember many weeks in the study hall.  If you got over ten demerits each week, you had to walk them off around the track on Saturday afternoon. It was a system designed to keep you on the straight and narrow.

Some kids fought the system, I decided to make it work for me.

I had come back to McCallie my sophomore year with a different last name since my dad went through the formal adoption process so I could have his name.  My roommate was a little worried until I showed up, and he figured out that the new person was actually me.

Somewhere along the years, I became popular enough to run for office.  I ended up in the student senate for a term or two.  I still remember one of our great victories was outlawing the hazing of freshmen students.  We lived on floors in dorms.  Each floor had a room with two seniors who were called prefects.  Their job was to inspect our rooms, make certain we were in bed by 10:15 PM and in general keep us in line.

The summer of my junior year I was chosen as one of the prefects for the second floor of Founders Hall.  It was one of the nicest dorms on campus and housed mostly juniors.  I had worked exceptionally hard my junior year, often waking at 5 AM to study by a flashlight in the small alcove for our room doorway.  I had risen to second or third in our class rankings.

That spring I was also one of four juniors appointed to the rank of captain. I was also inducted into some leadership organizations.  It was to be a pretty good senior year.  I can remember getting into some trouble with the senior play when we executed Santa Claus which I believe was me, but I doubt anyone goes through high school without a few challenges.

My senior year, I got a special privilege which was to keep my car on campus because my dad seemed to be rotating in and out of the hospital, and I was often called home because he appeared to be dying. I was only allowed to drive the car for these emergency missions, but still it was nice having the car there.  I think my parents had felt guilty about sending me away so they had given me a blue and white GTO convertible.  It was a very cool car.  It took me a while maybe even into my college years to figure out that having a cool car did not make you cool, but I suppose I figured it out a lot sooner than some.

A big part of McCallie was getting into college.  Getting into college in those days did not mean you had been on a grand tour to select the colleges which you liked.  You applied to some colleges, got in to some and went to the one everyone thought you should go to.

Lynn Weigel, my prefect my junior year, had gone to Harvard.  When he figured out what a great experience it was, he convinced me to apply to Harvard.  Harvard even sent an admissions person down to Chattanooga and I spent some time with him. I am sure he had other stops, but he made a compelling case for going to Harvard.  When the admissions slips came, I had gotten into Harvard.  In what seemed like an obvious decision, I decided to go to Harvard.

I was glad to leave McCallie, and I vowed to make the most of my experience at Harvard.  I can still remember pulling the cord of my alarm clock out of the wall.  When I got home to Mt. Airy, I filled the clock with solder so that I would never forget the exact time when I left McCallie.

I know I learned to work hard, take care of myself, and to be careful with any power that was given to me, but sometime you have repeat lessons until they really sink into your character.  I did vow that my children would never be sent way to school.

The next chapter is Harvard and the world beyond the South.

When people do stupid things, I remember Mother’s words

Watching people sometimes make me think we should license parents and  I am drawn back to one of my mother’s favorite phrases- “Who raised those folks?” http://ow.ly/oshSy  For more click the link or the picture.

The White Oak River, Near Swansboro, NC
The White Oak River, Near Swansboro, NC