A Thanksgiving Message: We’re Grateful for the Grocery, But Where is the Ench?

     Regular blog visitors, if any, will recognize this ‘un from previous postings.  I had been working on a vitriolic Radio-Free Robin on the Dade Board of Education’s book-bannin’ ways.  But I couldn’t get the tone just right – it’s hard to be amusin’ when you are talking about a war on books waged by people in charge of for crying out loud education!  Plus I thought maybe they’d reverse their decision at Monday night’s board meeting, and I’d have to say, “Never mind!”

     (Actually I went to the B of E meeting last night and the book banning was never even mentioned!  Despite the fact there has been nothing but media hype since I covered the ish Nov. 7 – the Times Free Press in Chattanooga picked it up and splashed their own story about it  across the front page of their Sunday edish, then they had an editorial about it the following Tuesday.  Most recently there were two letters in the Freep this Sunday as well as one last week in our rag. Anyway I wasted a couple of hours on our most tragically busy day of the week, leading me to create the adage:  “Some days you get the elephant in the room; some days the elephant in the room gets you.” )

     In any case, with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up I decided something light and cheerful was more appropriate nohow.  So I cobbled this together for this week’s print edition by adding a little new stuff to that piece about the Ench I had posted here as a Boblet back in maybe September.     

A Thanksgiving Message:  We’re Grateful for the Grocery, but Where is the Ench?

By Robin Ford Wallace

            When my friend Madelyn married her longtime boyfriend they did the thing quietly in a government

building.  But this was California, San Francisco in fact, so even the no-frills civil ceremony took on a certain

sparkle. 

Mad’s brother happened to be in town so they had the family element, and just when she started to wonder if they shouldn’t have added a religious component as well, who should march in but some Buddhist monks?  Perhaps they were applying for a permit of some kind, but this being San Francisco maybe they had just sensed from the air they were needed.

            Anyway I have digressed from my point, which is how happy my friend was.  In her email she wrote:  “And suddenly there we were, in San Francisco getting married, both of us grinning like idiots.”

            Years later another couple of friends got married, this time with a big sloppy wedding in a pasture so everybody could watch, and as the vows were spoken I could see the same uncontrollable happiness shining from the same moronic grins.  I was so happy for them I cried a little.

            But it was only this past September that I experienced that same unstoppable, uncontainable, stupid-making joy for myself.  I was so thrilled to be living in that particular minute in that particular place that I realized I, too, was grinning like an idiot.  I was exalted and exhilarated and ecstatic and –

            – walking into the Ingle’s Market, which had recently reopened after four months’ closure following the tornados.

            Did you think I was going to tell you about my own wedding?  That was roughly 100 years ago, and though I was of course very happy to have been vouchsafed a husband against all odds, what I remember about the Big Day is mostly social angst and bursting out of my (size 8) wedding dress during the reception.  I expect it was the canapés.

            Anyway, back to the Ingle’s.  It was the day after the torrential rains of Labor Day, which had turned the air so unseasonably cool you had to wear a jacket.  I had just trotted around Cloudland Canyon with my dogs for the first time since the summer got so hot.  The leaves had already turned color from the drought, so it was like finding the door into autumn.  I felt that I was living at the throbbing heart of the universe.

            Then on the way home, I was able – finally! – to pop into the Ingle’s at the foot of the mountain to pick up what I needed for supper.  During those months after the tornado I’d had to detour to one of the other grocery stores in town, and though I knew I was lucky not to have lost anything worse in the storm – my house, say, or someone I loved – the hole left where my pet grocery store was supposed to be was like a nagging sore that wouldn’t heal.

            Now, finally the lights were back on, the parking lot was repaved, and when I approached the doors swung wide automatically, opened either by an electric eye or friendly invisible servants – I should care which? – to welcome me back.  Ingle’s was open, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

            I’ll admit, the new self-checkout stations they put in during the renovation worried me a little at first.  I heard customers grumbling:  “They’re not opening the real registers to encourage us to use the self-checkouts.”

“What that encourages me to do is go back to Wal-Mart, hon.”

So I fretted a little, and made tentative plans for an Ingle’s grand opening follow-up article called “The Agony and the Ecstasy:  Is Dade Ready for the Challenge of Self-Checkout?”

            But that was a minor concern, one that was swept away in the tide of joy, welcome and store-brand ration-style dog food I had found no substitute for anywhere else.  It’s embarrassing to be so happy about a grocery store but I’m old enough by now to understand you take your happiness where you find it.  Plus did you see what they did with the produce department?

It don’t get no better than this, I thought.  And that’s when I noticed all was not perfect in paradise:  The “Ench” was gone!

There used to be a bench on the sidewalk beside the newspaper boxes.  Somebody must have sold advertising on it because it was festooned with the names of local businesses.  But somebody else had very carefully, very meticulously, removed the first letter of every word, so what you read was:  ENEVA’S ESTAURANT,  I think maybe OORE’S UNERAL OME, but the one I particularly remember was ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING. 

I expect maybe my sense of humor is fairly basic but that always killed me.  I can remember dozens of time I’d stop by the Ingle’s on the way home from some awful meeting where somebody had hurt my feelings, or from some dreary day that had demonstrated to me the utter futility of going on, and I’d pass the “Ench” and see ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING and practically pee myself all over again.  There is nothing like ONY AND ELLY EATHERS OOFING to cheer a girl up.

Am I the only one who misses it?  If not, I urge fellow concerned citizens to join me in persuading Ingle’s to BRING BACK THE ENCH!

As Thanksgiving approaches I realize how profoundly grateful I am for all I still have, my life, my loved ones, the friendly little town I live in, the raw almonds in Ingle’s new bulk goods section.  

But I would be ust a ittle appier f Ngle’s ould ive ack the Ench!

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Oldie: A Little Light Flower Fiction

I’m posting this oldie on the blogsite because I looked it up to quote from in the Radio-Free Robin I’m writing and noticed it wasn’t already on here.  It’s really not my best work but I’m putting it up for a couple of reasons. 

First, after the Dade board of ed’s decision to commence banning books being taught by its English teachers, I got interested in profanity and sexual content in literature, and I was going to use the opening paragraph to prove that even a garden column can be objectionable if you try hard enough.

Second, the guy with the ski poles I mentioned toward the end of this column as being a man I knew slightly later became a better friend.  Some local readers may recognize him.  I thought it was interesting that I was dead wrong about the antiaphrodisiacal effect of the trekkers.  He does all right in that department ...  

A LITTLE LIGHT FLOWER FICTION

By Robin Ford Wallace

            It was a happening kind of night at the Heliotrope, a working-class dive where angiosperms stopped to vegetate an hour or two after a hard day down at the plant.  Herb walked into the bar wilted from a 12-hour shift photosynthesizing, but when he saw Iris sipping a mimosa at the bar he suddenly felt fresh as a  daisy.  As he considered the lily, his stamens became turgid.  Whoa!  This babe was in full bloom!

            “Hey, sweet pea,” said Herb, planting himself on the stool beside her.  “How’s about a little cross-pollination?”

            This is the beginning of a story I started some years ago, for reasons that I now forget.  Perhaps it was to take advantage of the literary market’s glaring paucity of racy fiction about plants; or perhaps I simply misunderstood the meaning of the term “garden writer.”  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve got it right even now. 

Regular readers of this feature, if any, have no doubt figured out by now that it’s not a normal gardening column.  One reason for that is your narrator’s dislike of much mainstream garden writing, which, if  you take out the merchandising plugs and the fantastically boring quotes from interviewees, often boils down to something like:  Flowers are pretty and you ought to grow some.

            So perhaps I go too far in the other direction, telling fantastically boring stories about my relations and making up tawdry little tales of horticultural romance.  But I am hardly the first to think of stories starring plants.  Folklore is full of them. 

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a handsome young man the nymphs were all crazy for, but he spurned their affections and instead fell in love with the best-looking thing he’d ever seen, his own reflection in a pool.  The reflection appeared to feel exactly the same way, but as a practical matter consummation was not in the cards, so the young man pined away and the gods turned him into the narcissus flower. 

I probably would have turned him into something rather worse, but the reasoning of the Greek gods was always oblique.  Grant them amorous favors, for example, and you are likely to get turned into a white cow, when really you would have preferred jewelry or a new car.

            Sweet William and Black-Eyed Susan were apparently a hot item in another story, which confused me because I thought Sweet William was the one who died for love of Barbara Allen.  Well, maybe old Bill flitted, as it were, from flower to flower.

            Forget-me-nots, I read, were named when a medieval German knight, going to the banks of the Danube to gather the small blue flowers for his lady love, was carried off by a flash flood.  As he was borne off by the torrent, he tossed the bouquet to his squeeze and shouted, “Forget me not!”

            I was leery of this legend.  For one thing, a more practical exclamation would have been, “Help!”  And secondly, whatever he said, it stands to reason it would have been in German. 

I’m sensitive on such issues, having believed until rather late in life that Napoleon’s last words were “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”  Finally it struck me that if you were going to squander the last moments of life composing a palindrome, you would probably do it in a language you could actually speak.  But I looked it up, and the word for forget-me-not in German is Vergissmeinnicht, which means the same thing.

            I read a charming French story in which the main characters were a bluebell and a poppy.  It involved shepherd lads they wanted to marry, evil rich men who wanted to marry them, and very little that had much to do with them being a poppy and a bluebell, a fact which, if dwelled upon, would certainly limit their romantic possibilities.

             I completely understand this human compulsion to make up ridiculous stories about flowers.  There is so little else we can do with them.  They are so wildly attractive we want to eat them, or something, but that would be counterproductive and so we instead spin tales.

            And flowers do lend themselves to anthropomorphism.  Zinnias look to me like tall, friendly country girls who wear too much makeup and call everyone “hon.”  Pansies would be those small, mean women who smile sweetly and then say terrible things behind your back, and roses impossible prima donnas who are allergic to everything and are always demanding that you turn the thermostat up. 

            At this time of year, my favorite flowers are wildflowers, and at any season my favorite stories are ones that embarrass people I know, so I will conclude by telling a flower story of my own.

A couple of weeks ago I was at my favorite wildflower spot when I met a man I know slightly.  With him was a woman he was courting, and I thought how clever he was to bring a date to this place where bluebells and poppies bloomed riotously among lush white bloodroot, reducing your narrator, and indeed most women, to girlish shrieks and swoons of admiration.  The sly dog.

            But in his hands were those ski poles that hikers use to hike really fast, and instead of dallying among the flowers with his lady, he took off up the mountain at 90 mph, leaving her to follow as best she could, eating his dust.  Perhaps he sought to impress her with his speed, but if I’d been in her shoes I don’t think he’d have made much time.  Among poppies and bluebells, ski poles distinctly limit romantic possibilities.

            Well, I seem to have wasted some serious column inches here telling flower stories without imparting much useful information.  I had better close with something pithy.  How about:

            Flowers are pretty.  You should grow some.

            Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.

Of Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes Not So Sweet, and an Evil Woman Named Ruby

     Jerry says I can't count on people to know the Ruby song:  We have officially reached farthood and what we take for popular culture nobody around us has a clue about.  He cited as evidence the failure of a young friend to recognize the "Green Acres" theme song.  (Gasp.)  But I was shaken up myself at Halloween when a sweet young thing of 25 I was volunteering with at the Canyon didn't know the Roller Derby Queen song even though -- brace yourself -- she had dressed up for the holiday as:  A Roller Derby queen.  

     I mentioned this to my friend Mary who's three years older and SHE DIDN'T KNOW IT EITHER.  So apparently the only two people who know the damn thing are me and Jim Croce and he's dead.

     FYI, youngsters, the RDQ was 5 foot 6, 215, a bleached-blonde mama with a streak of mean.  Most notably, she was built like a refrigerator with a head. 

     Now.  Ruby.  "Ruby" was a Kenny Rogers song wherein a paralyzed man watches helplessly as the woman he loves whores herself up to go out and "take her love to town."  He wants to shoot her but, as luck would have it, he can't move.  I'm not quite sure why I always found that so funny. 

     Anyway it's one of those ear worm songs you can't expunge from your consciousness, and I have never met a woman named Ruby without suspecting her of being Evil.   

   

Of Sweet Potatoes, Potatoes Not So Sweet And An Evil Woman Named Ruby:

Wherein A Gardener Takes Her Love To Town

By Robin Ford Wallace

            You’ve painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair.

Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere?

            OK, OK.  I get the idea.  Turn the damn thing off.  Infidelity is bad enough.  Country music just makes it worse.

Country music makes everything worse.

“Ruby” in particular has got to be one of the smarmiest songs ever written.  “You’ve painted up your lips,” indeed!  As if a little makeup means a girl is “taking her love to town.”  Honey, this is the South.  Nobody goes to the dump without lipstick. 

Nobody over 40, anyway.   I never painted much when it was a matter of gilding the lily but now that we’re talking sows’ ears and silk purses I get through buckets of the stuff. 

Not just lipstick, either, but the works, eyeliner and foundation and that gop you put on underneath to fill in the cracks.  They used to call it concealer, which sounded furtive and possibly illegal, the cosmetic equivalent of gun silencers or hush money, but I could live with that; who at my age has nothing to hide? 

Nowadays, though, they’ve changed the name to “primer” and they’ve put cutesy little brushes or rollers on the bottles so as you stand there in front of the mirror basically spackling yourself you feel not so much that you are primping as that you are shoring up your crumblin’ façade.  God, I hate getting old!

And that’s what all of it is about, the tubes and the brushes and the Age-Defyin’ Revlon, not so much feminine vanity as the reverse, a merciful reluctance to subject innocent humanity to the ruts and potholes left on a girl’s face by time’s winged chariot.  The line in the Ruby song that irritates me the worst is:  “The wants and the needs of a woman your age, Ruby I realize.”  Ha!  Like Kenny Rogers has any clue how it feels to be female, and aging. 

Not that it’s any of Mr. Rogers’ business but yes, my wants and needs do include hair tint of some vaguely convincing shade, not too light because blondness in a person of my coloring really does have a certain “Want a date?” connotation, not too dark or my face looks like the Parthenon.  Not as in classic beauty, I mean, but as in white and 2000 years old.

But let’s stop beating that particular horse.  I’m not mad at Kenny Rogers, I’m mad at you. 

Did it ever occur to you that our little problem might not be the fault of my painted lips, tinted hair and general air of geriatric sluttiness?  That some itsy-bitsy part of the blame might be yours for leaving me high and dry when I  needed you most?  “Still need some company,” my sagging butt!  I could have used some this summer. 

How many times did I seek you out in June, lips curved in pleasurable anticipation?  You weren’t there.

And in July, when I reached for you in the sweet-smelling hay, what did I find?  Nothing much.

And in September, when I gave it one last, desperate try?  You just lay there, doing precisely and profoundly nothing.

As you have for years now!  Really, is it any wonder I looked for comfort elsewhere?

I didn’t have far to look.  There, right where you should have been, was your natural replacement, ruddy and robust while you were wan and white, strong and sweet while you were anemic and atrophied, above all there for me when you were MIA.

So yes, I’ve moved on, so you might as well put a cork in the “Ruby” crap.  I am not an Evil Woman and unlike the man in the song fate has not left you a crippled invalid.  

Fate has instead left you a hopeless vegetable.

            Specifically, a potato.

All right, Gentle Reader, if you have not inferred by now that our subject this week is the relative merits of the Irish potato and ipomea batatas, the sweet potato, I would remind you, gently, that this a gardening column.  Sort of.  What else would we be talking about? 

Here is the situation:  This summer, for the third year in a row, my potato crop failed miserably, while meanwhile my sweet potatoes ate New York.  So from necessity I began using sweet potatoes for many dishes I usually make with white, such as my famous roasted potato chunks.   

One day I used such pathetic few white potatoes as we harvested this year to make a batch of the chunks, and eating them I realized I actually preferred the sweet potato version.  White potatoes require hefty infusions of garlic and herbs.  With sweet potatoes, add salt and olive oil and you’re done.

Also this summer I learned that sweet potato leaves are edible.  You cook them like spinach or any other greens, and they’re not just good for you, they’re good, too. 

Irish potato foliage just lies there and withers.

It was thoughts like that one that led to my feelings of disloyalty.  Longtime readers may recall that in “Sex, Lies and Potatoes,” I dotingly misquoted:  “Ah, Spud, shall we be true to one another?”

            Apparently not.

Anyway, here is how you make the chunks:

            Peel or scrub sweet potatoes and cut into biggish cubes.  Toss with salt and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.  Roast for 30 minutes in a 400-degree oven alongside whatever else you are cooking.  If you let the edges burn a bit they are particularly good.

            Compare these with the blander Irish potato version and I warn you, no matter how big a spud fan you are, you, too, may end up taking your love to town.

END

     Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.