wandering again on Wednesday

Perhaps, or maybe even probably, from being born during and growing up in The Great Depression, I acquired, and have held onto, an odd food ethic. Don't waste food. Eat everything on your plate. Don't take more than you can eat, and finish all you take. In a restaurant, if there's food left on my plate, ask for a go-box - - in my Time, a "doggie bag" even though there was not even a pretense that it was for the dog, IDK, maybe there was some social aversion to seeming "cheap" - - or "poor" -

which the wandering mind surfaces a family story that I've told here before - -

in the mid-to-late 1940s when my father had returned from maritime service during the War and was restarting his wholesale seafood business, and could not get the new trucks he needed, he bought two very good and suitable trucks that had been Army ambulances, a 1937 Chevrolet, then a 1937 GMC (a flathead six that he said was an Oldsmobile engine but might have been Pontiac) for business use with commission-paid drivers hauling fresh, iced fish on their "routes" up into north Florida and throughout southern Alabama and Georgia. The customers, clients, were grocery stores, fish markets, restaurants.

It quickly became clear that he needed a vehicle for local use, including hauling boxes of fish, crushed ice, and 300-pound blocks of ice, here in St Andrews.

So he bought the 1936 Pontiac Six business coupe that I've remembered here many times, cut out the trunk or rumble seat, and built in a wooden plank bed, finished at the tail end with a width of angle-iron, to create a "pickup truck." My father was handy, skilled, and creative, could fix anything, could and did make anything he needed. He has been dead soon thirty years, but his skills amaze me to this day.

Anyway, the wandering story.

"The Pontiac" as it was called, also became our "second car" - - not that Mama ever drove it, but I certainly did, and loved it, and I'm pretty sure Walt drove it later. And it was the car in which our father daily mornings drove us from home to school - - dropping Gina and Walt off at the wartime Annie B Sale Housing Project that had become Jinks Junior High School, and then me at Bay High. Without any particular awareness of it whatsoever, a family order sense had me the oldest always getting inside the car, sitting down and closing the door, and Gina and Walt sitting outside in the wooden "truck bed." Which was fine with me, including arriving in the disreputable-looking old car.

But evidently it bothered my sister, because at some point, Gina asked our father, "Why do you drive this car? People will think we're poor." We had a nice house in The Cove, always warm in winter, clean clothes, food on the table breakfast, dinner and supper, a boat down front in Massalina Bayou, piano lessons, braces on our teeth from Dr Bell, an orthodontist in Pensacola; the thought of being or seeming or people thinking we were "poor" never occurred to me. Nor, I'm guessing, to Walt. But Gina, apparently so. Our father was not amused by her question, which still to this day eons later makes me laugh, now in her memory.

Walt was the extrovert, and Gina was the character. In our family growing up, Walt and I were kept in check by our father, and knew what not to dare say or even look like were were thinking. But from birth, through growing up years, which I can swear to on a Bible, Gina was the independent-minded bold and sassy confrontive one with a big mouth and a quick, sharp tongue. She suffered no nonsense from anybody. She was never, never, never "lost" in the middle-child syndrome. And from start to finish all our growing up years through Fall 1953 when I went away to college and never returned as the same person, Gina and Walt were the "They" versus, and often against, me, I, my solo self.

+++++++

Where was I, I have to finish this, things to do today - - get a hearing aid adjusted at the hearing center, go by the eye center to get a missing nosepiece replaced on eyeglasses, get a haircut, stop by the church office.

Oh, food as usual. I've lost my antecedent and thought. A spicy poblano omelet at IHOP yesterday morning, a third of it brought home in a go-box and just now consumed along with two eggs over medium on a splash of canned chili; a styrofoam go-box of fried mullet from noon dinner yesterday, waiting to share with Linda for noon dinner today.

To my - - whatever - - I've broken my longstanding, years long vow to myself that I would never again buy Kristen a car that had to be serviced in Pensacola.

Anyway,

Places to go, promises to keep, and hours to go before I sleep.

And let everybody say - - AMEN.

RSF&PTL