Rain, Rain, Go Away

This isn’t highly dietetic but suits my taste for either a light breakfast or a light supper, so I’m having it a couple times a week. Icy cold from the refrigerator, two ounces plain kefir in a mug, then six ounces Bulgarian style buttermilk to fill the mug. Stir vigorously, sip slowly and savor over the course of a half hour. Never heard of kefir until Joe introduced me to it during his visit last summer. He likes blueberry kefir and the strawberry, I think there’s one with something and banana. I like those too, but prefer plain. 

Buttermilk I've loved ever since my mother gave me my first glass as a boy, but I don’t drink it often. For max delicious, I buy Bulgarian style at Tyndall AFB commissary. Why is Bulgarian style buttermilk so good? Tastes like thick, rich tasty buttermilk off the farm, poured into the bottle right out of the old wooden churn after most of the butter is scooped out. 

Mama introduced me to tea also. I was a little boy, maybe five or six, not feeling well one day. She fixed me a cup of tea with milk and sugar, and a slice of toast. I still love hot tea, with white toast, but nowadays drink mine plain or with a splash of milk, and lose the toast because I don't eat white bread. Tea tastes better than coffee, is more soothing somehow, but it doesn’t jolt me awake early mornings. Nevermind what they told me at Cleveland Clinic, my cardiologist said I can drink regular coffee now, so I do. In fact, I like a cup of the DS that James makes at church on Sunday mornings.  

Anyone who is into language nonsense immediately sees that the “me” in the underlined sentence above is dative. A sense of knowing nominative from dative from genitive from accusative also helps people know better than to say "me and Jimmy went to the pitchur show," which undoubtedly is costing many young people their job interviews after college. 

My mother also used to cook me (dative again) a favorite sick boy meal, scrambled eggs with tomatoes, and sometimes for my supper. She brought that egg dish into her marriage with her. Mama said that early during the depression many friends and relatives were out of work and nothing to eat at home, but there was always food at the Gentry table and if there were a lot of folks and not much food, they knew how to stretch. She said they always had plenty of eggs, not sure but I think my grandmother may have had a chicken coop out beside the garage at the house in Pensacola. Mama said at supper the kitchen table was always filled with relatives and friends and happy conversation, and that she and her mother might crack a dozen eggs or more into a large bowl to be stretched with milk, then poured into the pan and scrambled with canned tomatoes that they had put up. After supper the table would be cleared for poker, cokes, and a bottle of bourbon for the adults. It was a Baptist household where the bottle was tucked away quickly if the preacher rang the doorbell. I've stood behind that table watching the action, and I don't know what the preacher must have thought about the fragrant whiskey breaths filling the room. Anyway, every time mama cooked scrambled eggs and tomatoes for me, in my mind I was at that heavy round wooden table in the Gentry kitchen. I dearly loved my grandparents, who were kind, generous people. These days, I try to honor their love by visiting their graves when I’m in Pensacola, as we will be Friday.

My grandparents' garage had a cement floor with a deep pit in it, to get in and stand up under the car to change the oil and otherwise service it. 

That's a 1930 Chrysler Royal such as my grandmother would have had and perhaps serviced himself. But I have a mental image of the neighbors’ garage with a late 1920s or early 1930s sedan with wooden spokes, parked over the service pit. 

Mr. & Mrs. Tate lived next door. Two doors down was Mrs. Dunham, a widow who apparently didn’t drive, and her husband’s car just sat there my growing up years. Her name was Jemima as I recall, but maybe that was her daughter.

Her son Clifton had been a young doctor. One day to combat an infection another doctor gave him an injection of something to which he was highly allergic, and he died within minutes. Early 1940s maybe, because I remember Clifton as an older boy when I was very little.

The red and blue sedan is a 1929-31 Hudson. Though I don’t remember Mrs. Dunham’s car being a Hudson, I had Hudson in mind because of a friend’s email that mentions a 1936 Hudson. That's a Terraplane below:

which reminded me that my parents’ friends Ferrell and Roland had a 1936 Hudson Terraplane that’s still sitting here taking up space in my mind. It was just like the car above, black except theirs was a coach, a 2-door sedan that was popular as safe for families with small children in the back seat.

When my Weller grandparents lived in this house, they had a Hudson along with a Model T Ford. Regretfully, I never thought to talk with my father about the Hudson, but this is what I visualize, a 1917 touring car they drove from St. Andrews to their new home in Ocilla, Georgia a couple years after they lost their son Alfred.

For all that, I loved Hudsons, my favorite being the sleek new postwar model introduced for 1948

Finally, yes. My memory of those old garages with service pit reminds me of the restaurants in Japan that had a table over a hole in the floor. Taking off your shoes at the door, you sat Japan style on the floor at the table, which was covered with a tablecloth, and hung your legs in the hole -- 

-- a style of eating that I enjoyed  until the time I saw large spiders in the hole, 

and have never sat at such a table since, 

but enjoy your meal. I am sure 
they were not those

Japanese jumping spiders. He's a scary little darling, but doesn't he have beautiful eyes. However, the spiders I saw in the hole under the table were 

larger.

TW