Can You Hide in Your Own Home?

The title is not meant to be rhetorical. These are just a couple of the questions I have been asking myself recently.

Physically, I am residing in eastern North Carolina. Mentally I am living in the world of the books and music that I’m currently enjoying. Emotionally I am drawing closer to my immediate family and spiritually I am trying very hard to listen to the still, small voice inside of me.

Now as to what in the hell I have been doing besides not writing very often on this blog, let me give an explanation of myself.

First of all, what has Bob been eating? I have been dining way too much at fast food places and they are never that good. Some places have better fries then others and some do their burgers better but all in all they are a waste of time and money because they are seldom fast or cheap. At least not like back in my youth when they were first starting to appear nationwide. My life has been hectic and way too many times I have just made quick and easy choices.

Fortunately I have been eating other things and in other places besides these dens of inequity. I have already written about Ralphs and since I live close by now, I have had the pleasure of dining there several times. I also intend to visit and undoubtedly write about several of the other barbeque places that abound in this section of the beautiful state of North Carolina. Word has reached me recently that there are a multitude of barbeques and styles in South Carolina as well. All in good time, all in good time. Other places of local interest where my wife and I have had very good dining experiences include David’s Restaurant and the Second Street Lunch. All located in beautiful downtown Roanoke Rapids, NC. Check them out when you visit this fair city.

We are still getting the house we are living in set up so my cooking has been limited but I manage to fry some bacon and eggs on occasion and my normal breakfast of peanut butter, banana and soy milk has been maintained. This is probably as good a time as any to talk about just what this house is like. We live about a mile down a private road in a newly constructed house that backs up to a small pond and wilderness. The place is very peaceful and the quiet is deafening. Our back yard is filled with squirrels, rabbits and song birds. In the first two weeks of living here we have observed two turtles digging holes and burying their eggs, a flock of wild turkeys, several hawks and a large groups of my favorite birds (vultures) as well as a happy group of six baby skunks. I have only recently learned to carry a camera with me wherever I go.

Escape of the Hawk

It was several days of living here before I heard my first car and have only seen a couple of them drive by since then. The quiet is very nice but it is also a great place for serious music appreciation. No matter what volume I choose, it seems to be impossible to disturb any neighbors. Yesterday I listened to about two and a half hours of Wagner at a volume level that allowed me to truly appreciate his genius. We listen to a wide variety of styles and often fall asleep at night with some Miles Davis or John Coltrane playing. With no one to bother and only ourselves to please, life is good.

Another great feature of the silence that surrounds us is that it provides an atmosphere extremely conducive to reading and it seems like weeks since I have been able to sit down by myself and do just that for an hour or so. I’ve been filling in some of the blanks of my Shakespeare education and rereading a few of my favorite classics. It’s has been more than thirty years since I read The Scarlet Letter and I am enjoying it even more than the first time. Perhaps because I am older I am able to appreciate more of Hawthorne’s humor. Some of his passages, especially in the introduction, had me laughing out loud. Quite an image I guess, a funny old bearded man sitting in a chair in a quiet empty house all by himself laughing out loud. As I mentioned previously, life is good.

Our move from the west coast was hard. We had fun on the trip and enjoyed staying with our daughter while we got a place of our own here in Carolina, but it was stressful as well. Change is never easy and the best relationships are strained when the quarters are close. We were lucky to have family that has watched over us and helped us out. That is what family is supposed to do and we are grateful. We want to be there for any of them if they need us.

For the present we are enjoying the quiet of our new home. There have been and will be many kinks to work out and life is always made up of some percentage of struggle, but we know we are blessed or watched over or just plain lucky. Call it whatever you want, it’s all the same to me. I hope to do a lot more writing at this new location and some of it will probably end up here. Thanks for looking in from time to time and keep up the good fight. Life is Good.

P.S. Just a couple final thoughts. I know that not everyone likes to have their words or thoughts placed on public view. Many people are reluctant to leave comments as they don’t care to have the world see them. If you feel like leaving a comment but do not want it published, just say so. I will respect your requests. Of if you would like to drop me a line independently of this site, just send your emails to rkwhaley@gmail.com. I will be placing the address on my home page in the near future.

Sweet Potato Pie and Coffee

One more thing. Check out the sweet potato pie my wife bought at the local hospital and brought home for me the other day. Yum yum. Yes, it was tasty and yeah, it is gone.

The Cavendish Banana

A peanut butter sandwich, a banana and a glass of soy milk.

It may not be as poetic as, “a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou”, but it works pretty well for me.

I am a creature of habit. I need nourishment soon after I rise in the morning and I usually have the sandwich, fruit and beverage that I mentioned above. Lately however I have been concerned about reports that the banana, as we know it, may become unavailable in the next ten to twenty years.

Bananas were practically unknown in America before 1870. The only real fresh fruits available in our produce stores during the winter months were from the citrus family. Two different individuals discovered the year round marketability of bananas at nearly the same time and by 1899 the various operations had merged to form the United Fruit Company. Because the fruit was available year round and could be picked green and allowed to ripen either naturally or in gas chambers it was easy to promote and deliver on a regular basis.

There are hundreds of varieties of bananas from all over the world. Some have large seeds and they vary in color, size, sweetness and texture. Most of our bananas come from the Caribbean and the variety we see in abundance in our grocery stores is the Cavendish. But that was not the variety that was marketed originally by the United Fruit Company. The first popular variety was the Gros Michel. It sounds like such a royal name that I cannot help but wonder how it tasted. I will probably never have the opportunity to find out. By the 1950s the Gros Michel was dying in large numbers due to Panama disease. It soon became unprofitable to produce and market it so the company replaced it with the Cavendish. The problem that some scientists are predicting is that this variety is doomed to a similar fate in the foreseeable future. What will replace our precious banana? Who knows? I hope it doesn’t have large seeds because as the Hoosier Hot Shots put it so musically, I Like Banana Because They Have No Bones.

The banana is such a large part of our food culture here in the United States that we take it for granted.

One of my favorite character actors is the late Andy Devine. If you are a fan of old Westerns you will undoubtedly remember him as “Cookie”, the side kick of Roy Rogers. He had a high pitched whining kind of a voice that contrasted well with his rather large frame. I like to think of him as being “traditionally built” but then I also like to think of myself as being the same size that I was in High School. I like to think lots of things. I digress.

The Great Andy Devine

Mr. Devine had a long and wonderful career and appeared in well over a hundred movies and many TV shows. He was in the classic western, Stagecoach as well as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Word and Myra Breckenridge. His television appearances include everything from Bonanza, Twilight Zone and Batman to a regular character in the first year of the show Flipper.

He characters were often humorous but he did dramatic roles as well. Probably the role he is remembered for most in our house is the voice of Friar Tuck in the Disney animated film Robin Hood.

Frank Zappa wrote a song called Andy that is a reference to him and contains some very strange lyrics but that is nothing unusual for Mr. Zappa.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were watching a movie I borrowed from the library called Torrid Zone.

When I was kid and we only had two or if we were lucky three stations we could watch on our television, the networks used to have regular hours set aside for old movies. I guess they had a harder time filling time slots so whenever they were at a loss as to what to use to fill a couple of hours they would show some old movie. I remember in particular an afternoon slot at around 4:00 PM when either NBC or CBS would show an afternoon movie. Most of the time I was outside riding my bike or playing baseball or fishing, but occasionally the weather would be bad or I would just be bored so I would plop down in front of the old black and white set and watch whatever movies they had on.

While watching the Torrid Zone the other night I remembered seeing it as a child on one of those quiet afternoons I spent in front of the set.

Torrid Zone is from 1940 and it stars Pat O’Brien, James Cagney and Ann Sheridan. The action takes place on a banana plantation somewhere in the Caribbean. Pat O’Brien is the manager and James Cagney plays an overseer who works off and on for O’Brien. Cagney is one of the few people capable of getting the bananas to the shipping port on a regular basis. Ann Sheridan is a singer/card shark who is passing through the local port.

Pat ‘Obrien basically runs the whole town. The local police do everything he says and he wants Ann Sheridan out of the way and on down the road. He cannot tolerate anything the does not help get his precious fruit shipped.

The actual history of the United Fruit Company was quite close to this in the way they operated in Guatemala, Costa Rica and other banana producing countries. They were such a large part of the economy of these small underdeveloped nations that the company itself was pretty much the law and what was good for the company was what was good for the country. If you have ever heard of the term “Banana Republic” this is where it comes from.

In the movie a local peasant hero is captured and sentenced to die by a firing squad. He meets Ann Sheridan in jail and as he is leaving to go to his execution he gives her a ring he is wearing.

The particular piece of dialogue that I remembered from my childhood is when he tells her that he won’t need the ring where he is going. Her reply is classic.

“What, are you afraid it will melt”?

The whole movie is full of snappy one-liners like that and I found it a joy to watch.

And to make it even better, Andy Devine plays James Cagney’s helper. His whiney voice and comical expressions fit right in with the quick repartee of the other stars. The movie is a great example of fast pace modern humor and a great example of just how much control this American business had over the politics of these small countries. Gee, I wonder? Do you suppose American businesses have any control over foreign economies and politics anymore? I guess I’ll just let that one lie there.

Another nod to the notion of a “Banana Republic” can be seen in Woody Allen’s great early film, appropriately entitled Bananas. Woody, of course, takes the whole concept way over the top in a slapstick manner, but it still works very well.

Banana (the book)

While writing this I dug around into some of the many books I own on food and cooking and came up with a gem of a book called The Banana by Philip Keep Reynolds. It was printed in 1927 and has a tipped in sheet in the front of it that indicates it was a gift to someone from the Fruit Dispatch Company. The book is full of black and white photographs, maps and illustrations and it chronicles the early history of banana production and marketing in and around the United States and the Caribbean. Of course this is about the Gros Michel variety not the Cavendish. At this point the Gros Michel was not dying from Panama disease.

I’m sure that the reason I like peanut butter and bananas so much is because we always had them in the house when I was a kid. Whenever we were hungry and there wasn’t anything else to devour my Mom would say, “Go make a peanut butter sandwich”.

Now we are faced with the demise of the banana as we know it and added to that is the new threat of salmonella in our peanut butter. I’m sure you are all aware of the massive recall of certain peanut butter products. My wife told me the other day that I should stop eating peanut butter sandwiches to be on the safe side. I don’t know that I need to be that concerned but who knows? If you don’t see a post from me after this, I guess you might consider that I ate one too many PB sandwiches.

It was great watching that old movie and making that connection with my childhood. Peanut butter and bananas may end up going the way of the late great Andy Devine. Just like many people, I try to hold on to the past but change is inevitable. What I think is important is not the things we had or the things we try to hold onto. The real value is in the memories. No one can take those from us.

I did not want to like this book. Actually, I did not even want to read this book but all the ladies in my book club (Hello Book Scouts!) seemed to think it was a good idea and they had been kind enough to read the dark novel I had proposed a few months prior to this so…. I decided I needed to get over it and read the book.

I was already making up titles for a parody of the book. How about Town Car, Sedan, Convertible?

Maybe Liar, Cheater, Thief.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of how the author’s family decided to try to spend a whole year eating foods that came from within a small radius of where they lived. They wanted to eat locally and thus save the fossil fuel that is consumed when produce is transported across long distances to reach consumers who would not get the food otherwise. It was an effort to shrink their carbon footprint and to stimulate local economies. They grew a large garden and spent a lot of time canning, freezing and drying food for the winter months and they frequented local farmers markets for food produced close to where they lived.

While I have never read any of Ms. Kingslovers fiction, I have read a collection of non-fiction essays she wrote a few years ago entitled, Small Wonder. I thought her writing was very good but I also felt she was a bit preachy and you know how I tend to rebel against people telling me what to do or think. I was quite prepared to disagree with her and to attack her premise at my book club meeting.

The first thing that got my goat was that they did not begin this experiment in the place they were living. Ms. Kingsolver lived in Arizona and she was very straightforward in admitting that Tucson would be an almost impossible place to conduct this experiment. OK. Strike One. You have to live in a certain place in order to do this stuff.

Another thing that really bugged me was that I knew for sure that there was no way you could eat bananas since they certainly do not grow in the United States let alone Virginia where the whole family moved. “I gots to be havin’ my bananas”. Strike Two.

This brings me to another problem for Bob. I don’t drink a lot of coffee but I really like that cup I have as soon as I get up in the morning. Coffee is just as exotic as banana and perhaps more important to most of the folks I know here in the Pacific Northwest. That is, of course, Strike Three so I won’t even start on how I would miss the great wines of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc., etc.

But as I moved through the beginning chapters I started to get upset by something completely different from these problems that I had already outlined in my mind. The biggest one was that she was not avoiding any of these issues and instead was taking them on in an honest and forthright manner. Then she went and did something that really disappointed me. She told about how the whole family (husband, wife and two daughters) sat down and decided to allow each of them to pick one food item that could not be obtained locally and make that an exception to the rule. Now I was really mad. You mean to tell me that you are not going to get all hardcore and snooty about the whole thing? How am I supposed to ridicule that?

They started the year long experiment in the spring and they planted a large garden. At local farmers markets they found sources of locally grown beef, chicken, eggs and dairy and the husband kept his coffee. It can be very hard to like people who act like regular human beings. They found sources of local wines and beer, which in this day and age is easier than ever. They made friends with local farmers and helped support the small businesses they were trying to run and the adults forgave themselves when they were lucky enough to take a trip to Italy for a couple of weeks. After all the idea in itself, while perhaps not 100% attainable is a good one. Why should we support giant food corporations that use huge amounts of gasoline to transport tomatoes to us so that we can eat them all year long instead of in the summer time like our grandparents did. If they wanted tomatoes in the winter they had to spend the time canning them and if you have ever done any canning you know that while it is rewarding, it is also work. (Hello Randy, I miss canning with you, you crazy fool).

The final straw in my capitulation to the book as a whole was that the writing was not only very good but funny. Whenever I find myself laughing out loud at something I read, I have to give credit where it is due. I love to laugh and I love writers who can make me burst out in vocal glee.

Thank you Ms. Kingsolver for the information. Thank you for the story. And most of all thank you for the laughter.

The taste of good food will always trump the nutrition for me and good writing will always beat out information, but laughter wins it all. Even though there is no actual food inside this book there are a number of interesting recipes so check out Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for all of the above.