Do Not Drive Into Smoke

(Please excuse any formatting peculiarities on this entry, blogspot has conveniently decided to not let me use their full featured editor)
Long ago in a galaxy not so far away I made a trip from Illinois to California in a 1955 Chevy. People made trips similar to this in similar vehicles in those days and thought nothing of it. This was in the days before the interstate system was complete and much of this journey was made on two lane highways. On the outbound leg of the journey while driving through Oklahoma I noticed highway signs which said "Do Not Drive Into Smoke". I thought this was odd, but saw no smoke during my passage and thought little of it.

A couple of months later on the return trip in the heat of August with no AC and the windows wide open I chose to go by way of Kansas and mid afternoon near Hiawatha I saw a cloud of smoke drifting toward the highway. Having seen no warning signs in Kansas I drove on. At 50 miles per hour and too late to do anything about it, I noticed just before entering the smoke that it looked strangely particulate. No sooner had I noticed this than I was in the cloud and instantly the car was filled with grasshoppers!

When I say filled, I mean that there was not a cubic inch of space inside the car that did not contain a grasshopper. At highway speed I couldn't get pulled over until I was through the cloud and by that time I had grasshoppers in my hair, in my clothes, all over the seats, clinging to the upholstery and ceiling, covering the dash and floor, and in every vent and cranny of the Chevy. A long period of "debugging" myself and the car ensued and even a year later I was still finding grasshopper carcasses in forgotten crevices of the machine.

I was irate and freaked out at the time and wondered why more information was not supplied by the warning signs in Oklahoma. But then what would travelers of the times made of signs saying "Do Not Drive Into Grasshoppers"?

Passages

Last summer my 91 year old parents passed away within 3 months of each other. Since then my sisters and I have been traveling back to the small town we grew up in to finalize the preparations for an estate auction and eventual sale of the house. The three of us are scattered across the country and gathering to complete this project involves considerable planning and expense. This week we'll make the third and hopefully final such trip. The longer this takes - it has been seven months since Dad died - the longer it takes for closure as the emotional wounds are to some extent reawakened on each visit.

Mom and Dad lived in this house in this little farming town for 65 years from the time Dad returned from Europe at the end of World War II. They remodeled the house in 1955, expanding the capacity for three children and belongings. During that period of time the storage areas of the house were leveraged to the maximum and they threw little away of records and memories of their lives together. Photographs that date back to the late nineteenth century were carefully stored in boxes when the sheer quantity overwhelmed the efforts to contain them all in albums. Records of expenses and purchases were meticulously filed never to be retrieved; receipts for car repairs on vehicles long since passed from all but vaguest memory, warranty information on household appliances replaced many times over, copies of letters to vendors and manufacturers seeking repairs or refunds for items now many years consigned to landfills, and newspaper clippings, report cards and piles of notebook paper filled with childish scrawls chronicling the passage of the three of us through our years of schooling.

What to do with all these things? We continue to return to the house and sort through items that in reality could be handed over to the auctioneers to separate into disposables and salables as if the continued attention to this process somehow suspends the finality of events that have already taken place. So many things. Things which each meant something to one or both of our parents and now must be disposed of. For myself I need little materially to remember them but for my sisters letting go seems to be more difficult. To dispose of their possessions seems disturbingly to discount their importance to those who chose to save them. Yet we all accumulate our own life's collection of memory's touchstones. I cannot find it in me to haul boxes of remembrances home to store them away and pass the task on to the next generation.

And yet - if we pronounce the job finished - then we must face the fact that this time when we close the door we close the door also on the beginning, the middle and the beginning of the end of our lives. The blessing we had of all these years of an intact family meeting for holidays in the family home is over. As these things pass through our hands, the minutia of a couple who spent sixty-nine years together and raised three children, and we realize that most of these things are ephemera that must be relinquished to mere memories we are acutely aware of our own mortality. We hold items in our hands whose only value is emotional and remember how as children our lives seemed to stretch on infinitely and now seem all too short.

Head Cheese

An old tale of mine from days spent on IRC. It falls under the category of nostalgia. Read it or don't.

Amidst the fond remembrances of my youth there lie scattered here and there the occasional memory which might best be consigned to oblivion. But constant urging from friends and acquaintances not to let folklore of this nature perish convinces me to reluctantly preserve for posterity an eye witness account of the arcane ritual by which the substance head cheese is conjured. The author assumes no liability for the results of attempts to duplicate this process but urges you "DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME."

It would be in the crisp fall air of October at that time when thoughts of children turn to the donning of ghost and goblin gear and the winesap apple plucked right off the tree hurt your teeth and squirted you in the eye. During Indian Summer, that brief return of warm temperatures before the plunge into winter, the last summer activities would be put to rest. Yards would be raked, the garden shed would be put in order and closed for the season, and the last potatoes and onions would be dug and consigned to the cellar. And surely on one of those fine fall days, early in the afternoon the clank and clang of the huge cast iron kettle could be heard as it was wrestled atop the woodstove. At this sound little children would run for home, dogs would crawl under crumbling porches and strong men would hurriedly close open windows, for all knew that granny was preparing to make the dreaded head cheese!

No sooner had the stove been fired and stoked and the kettle brought to a boil than Grandpa would make his appearance. Fresh from hog butchering on the farm he would emerge from the decrepit old ford truck carrying a pair of hog's heads..or maybe three. These heads were in exactly the same condition as they were in life, with all their accessories excepting only their detachment from the majority of the hog. Notwithstanding the baleful stares still seen peering out from their rapidly cooling brows, Granny cheerfully seized the heads and hurled them into the kettle.

Now followed a period of time that drew onward into the late evening when the fire snapped and crackled in the stove, the water boiled merrily and was topped up from time to time and the aroma proceeding from the kettle became more and more indescribable. This fragrance was of such potency that it actually had WEIGHT, and would flow out from the kettle down the stove and onto the ground where it would propagate outward in an ever increasing radius until it gradually began to dissipate at a distance of some three blocks from the epicenter of the event, meanwhile crawling up back steps and seeking entrance to unprepared houses where unwary denizens could be heard to exclaim, "Phew...is it headcheese time AGAIN??" Meanwhile Granny, without the protection of a gas mask, nay without so much as a moist dish towel to cover her nostrils would walk right up to the stove and stir the kettle time and again until all the soft parts of the heads (that's ALL the soft parts....yes even THOSE parts) fell off the skulls which she would then cast into the yard to the army of cats which had been gathering by the kitchen door all afternoon.

Hovering over the steaming kettle in the darkening evening like one of the three sisters in Macbeth, Granny would pass a sieve through the water and catch large undisintegrated pieces of hog physiognomy which she would drop onto the chopping block and gleefully reduce to appropriately bite sized bits with a meat cleaver. Once everything in the kettle (it doesn't do to think to long about everything in the kettle) was of the requisite homogeneous size, salt, pepper and vinegar would be added, the fire stoked up to full force and the evil stew would be rapidly reduced to a sludge-like consistency. During this final step the odor of the miasmic fog covering the neighborhood would reach such an intensity that any clothing or household linens inadvertently left on clotheslines would irrecoverably bond by some mysterious chemical reaction with the Eau du Swinehead and become fit for use only as bootwipers. Even indoors with the door closed, within three blocks of ground zero the eyes would itch and run and the sinuses would begin to drain.

The final act of the evening would be to pour the reduced contents of the kettle into large crocks held in readiness since the decimation of last year's batch sometime during the long nights of the previous winter. Granny and Grandpa would tip the huge kettle on its side and hope that most of its contents would find the crock waiting on the floor below. The batch would roll into its containers, steam would rise in prodigious quantities and Grandpa, who was not nearly so immune to the corrosive fumes as his spouse, would swear mighty oaths audible a block away.

The crocks, now brim full of their precious cargo would be wrestled down the stairs and into the fruit cellar to cool and solidify.

During the ensuing 48 hours, the fumes abated. The cats got over considerable intestinal distress. Dogs could be seen daring to cross Granny's back yard and those families living nearest to the scene of the manufacturing process began to think about actually consuming food again.

The end result? The mass left in the crocks would jell while cooling and become a grey amorphous semi-solid which could be sliced and eaten on bread with liberal quantities of mustard and horseradish. I have heard tell that headcheese is more toothsome than its nightmarish origins would lead you to believe but I am not able to confirm it, as it takes a stronger stomach than mine to even contemplate the consumption of this pig-face jello.