red-wax hoop cheese snack

SomeTimes, usually not but someTimes I fix a little snack to have with my mug of hot & black; this morning three Triscuits, each with a bit of cheese and a touch of mayonnaise to hold the cheese from falling off. 

It's interesting. From the almost "fleeting" taste, I'm never sure it's really cheese at all: hoop cheese from a small wedge that I bought at Tanya's Garden. And this is the interesting part: not the cheese, but the reason why I'm drawn to buy it now and then: 

When I was a boy growing up, seems like there was almost always hoop cheese in the icebox (then later, in the early 1940s, the refrigerator). My father would take out the wedge of hoop cheese, with his pocket knife cut off a bite of it, and nibble on it. He once told me they'd had it at home when he was a boy growing up. 

He liked it best when it had been sitting on the kitchen counter instead of cooling in the icebox. 

It can't be cold; hoop cheese has to be room temperature, basically, to get any taste out of it. This was red wax hoop cheese, Tanya's someTimes has had two types, red wax and black wax. Some years ago I tried both at once, and my uncertain recollection is that the black wax hoop cheese had more taste. 

I'm not going to let this tentative blogpost wander far off track this morning, but I remember the icebox. In those days we had the iceman as well as the milkman. The milkman came every morning, but the iceman only came two or three mornings a week, and it seems to me that he came to the back door. The lady of the house told him how many pounds of ice she needed. With his icepick he chipped off that much from the big block of ice in his van, grabbed it with his ice-tongs, and brought it to the house. Seems to me he came on in and put it in the icebox, was paid a nickel or whatever, and went on next door to knock at the Guy's house.

Some of that memory is pretty sketchy, it came together as I typed it.

Early in the 1940s my Gentry grandparents bought a new GE refrigerator to replace their old one with the monitor on top (remember those?), and gave the old refrigerator to my mother. Having an electric refrigerator instead of an icebox was a touch of luxury for us. Seems to me that it even had a little cubby to freeze a little tray of ice cubes, but that may have been our next refrigerator some years later.

Someone else might remember otherwise, but I think my grandmother Weller had an icebox, never a refrigerator, all her life. There's no family but me to remember, though, because all my father's generation are long dead, and in the next generation only my brother and I are still living, and it's not likely that Walt, four years younger than I, would remember Mom's kitchen. I remember though, I remember turning the meat-grinder for her to grind liver, and I remember watching her go out the back door to the chicken pen (Mom always had chickens), chase down and grab a hen, wring its neck, the chicken then running around for a minute or so with no head or its head hanging down neck broken then falling. Mom would pick it up, pull all its feathers out, go ahead with the prep including burning al the pinfeathers off with a match, and we'd have fried chicken that day.

Dinner at Mom and Pop's house always started with soup, a thin tomato vegetable soup, then the plate of fried chicken and bowls of vegetables would be passed around (it was only Mom, Pop, my cousin Ann, and me). At the most joyful meals Ann might announce, "Mom made floating island!" which was our favorite dessert.

When I was a boy, Mom was my favorite person in life. When she finally sat down and rested In the living room she always sat in the same chair, Mom's Chair, don't sit there, a small dark brown wood rocking chair with no arms. I liked to crawl up in her lap and beg her, "Tell me a story about Alfred!" and she would.

To this day I'm sad when someone's grandmother dies, because I remember how I felt when Mom died.

That I knew, Mom had two sisters, Aunt Alice and Aunt Nell. They were married to King brothers and lived in Grand Ridge. I used to love going with Mom and Pop and Ann to visit them for the day, riding over and back in Pop's black 1937 Chevrolet two-door sedan, which GM called the "coach" model. Arriving in Grand Ridge, we'd stop at Aunt Nell's house first, and I'd "play" the pump organ on the front porch. Then we'd drive on to Aunt Alice's house for the heaviest-laden country dinner table imaginable. 

Mom also had a half-sister, Grace, who was married to Pop's brother, Uncle Charlie. They lived in Pensacola, where Uncle Charlie, a retired Episcopal archdeacon, had been in charge of Christ Church, Pensacola for a while during World War Two while the rector was away as a Navy chaplain. 

Uncle Charlie had a, it must have been a 1935 year model, Willys car. While Mom and Pop were visiting Uncle Charlie and Aunt Grace, I liked to go outside and admire the car. Uncle Charlie baptized us, at St Andrew's Episcopal Church here. When I was confirmed, age ten, he sent me a personal size Book of Common Prayer, red leather binding with my name engraved in gold, which is in the bookcase in my study office den here at 7H. He died when I was a freshman at Florida. 

He and my grandfather Pop were from a family of thirteen children, a brood spread out over more than twenty years. Their father was the rector at St John's Episcopal Church in Jacksonville, where they grew up. One of the brothers, Reginald, was a priest and later bishop in Wisconsin. Around here somewhere I have a photograph of Uncle Heber at his consecration as bishop, along with a dozen or so other consecrating bishops, at his consecration in, 1903 as I recall.

Growing up in a clergy-laden family, I knew from age ten that I had it coming, and I headed in this direction early in life, only to bolt when I was in college, spend a quarter-life in the Navy, and finally give up and start theological seminary on my forty-fifth birthday. I'm the eighth or ninth Episcopal priest in my Weller family in the past two-hundred or so years, I guess it just sort of settled on me like the sorting hat in Harry Potter.

The peace of the Lord didn't come upon me until the day I started seminary and everything seemed right, home at last.

RSF&PTL

T90