Moist Food and Memory (or should it be Moist, Food and Memory?)

When I was growing up we would trek several times a year down to South Carolina to see Miss. Effie. Miss. Effie was Miss. Effie Joyner who had previously been Miss. Effie Todd and before that Miss. Effie Parker. Ms. Effie was retired school teacher who I found out later must have taught all the northeast quarter of Horry County between the 1920s and the 1950s. She was my grandmother on my Dad’s side. The trip south from New Jersey took one long ass day to make it there the route being nigh onto 500 miles door to door.

Not much to recommend my grandmother’s place as a youthful vacation destination. Up until I was in the later years of high school there was no phone. I believe that the installation of this modern convenience was only motivated by the sheriff’s patrol finding a murdered corpse in the filed in front of the homestead. My grandmother didn’t care she had her rifle but her sons decided it was time to have immediate contact with the outside world available henceforth.

The nearest store was in Red Bluff which was a good two mile walk in the hotter than blazes summer sun of South Carolina. I was a town boy and I wasn’t walking to Red Bluff for an RC Cola and a moon pie. Once I did. It wasn’t worth it. Still I remember that walk.

There was no air conditioning and there were snakes. There was a dog usually, normally a collie. My grandmother would always say as she was shoeing the dog off the porch, “Its cooler in the yard” and the dog would go lie in a hole it had dug under the porch. You could play with the dog, but it had this habit of picking up snakes and shaking them until they were dead. Such behavior could be off putting. Being myopic there was also always the danger I would pick up a snake as opposed to a stick during a game of fetch. My father used to say I was so blind I would pick up a snake to kill a stick. He was sensitive that way.

If you were really bored you could go look for arrow heads and Indian pottery shards out by the tree in the corn field. Over the years I found some but alas a trip into the field means we are back to the snakes again. You could go look at the hogs in the pen. Still snakes.

Yup, the TV was black and white and most of the program was regional fare of gospel hours and Amos and Andy reruns. My uncle Bill who had a hunchback and who was as one of my friends of English descent used to say, was a member of God’s special people, would sit in the rocker and laugh at “Them old boys” when Amos and Andy came on. I was still young and didn’t understand the racism inherent in that program. I just didn’t find it funny.

However there were a couple of things that recommended the place. Food is involved.

If it was a fall trip there were oyster roasts. An oyster roast is when you put a tub of oysters out on a grill, my grandmothers was an old 55 gallon drum cut in half, and steam those little shelled beasts until their shells just start to crack open. You then take an awl, crack open the shell and pop them succulent critters out. Then you suck ‘em down. Hush puppies were omnipresent and there was plenty of Pepsi Cola and Orange soda. Eating until you had to unbutton your trousers, even after you had belched any excess air out of your system, because it was the only way to keep blood flowing to your extremities due to the straining and bulging of your abdomen was not just encouraged it was expected.

At other times of the year there were boiled peanuts. Salty, hot and gummy/chewy with a hint of the taste of the earth these were a delicacy to my palette from an early age. It is hard to explain these little things dug out of the ground have no right to taste that good and they should have no attraction to a kid, but they were wonderful.

The only reason I am talking about this stuff was that on my recent trip I had a small oyster roast at a seafood place on Hilton Head Island. I got about 18 oysters out of what was served me. It wasn’t enough. In the day I could eat to half a bushel of roast oysters by myself. Once at a fried oyster dinner I ate 45 fried oysters. When I was popping oysters open at that restaurant I was a teen again hanging with my family at my grandmother’s house, no two ways about it. Life was good and I was still in the care or the old man and my mom. All the memories of those trips came back from the black sandy soil, the chiggers and the Spanish moss to digging up yams that had been stored in a sandy pit in some weird tepee set up for winter eating. What is it about a single food item that can unlock such memories?

On this trip the boiled peanuts were contemplated first on a rural stretch of US 21 in lower South Carolina as we whizzed by several farms with signs for ‘em.
But they were actually purchased at a farmer’s market in Asheville, NC. These legumes, now that is a fancy word isn’t it, were good. Served warm and moist in a Styrofoam cup they too were childhood come back. The kicker was that my oldest boy loved ‘em too. Peanut appreciation must be in his genes despite him being raised here in the frozen north.

Ah I am back to food again. Must be the gallbladder thing, I can’t eat so late I night I remember the good food. Sorry about this detour, I will try and get focused and talk about something like politics or sex soon. Or both.