summer memories: a dubious gardening hint, a dubious recipe adaptation, and why the daycamp carpool was late

The name of the little village in which Flintstone Manor is located is derived from the ancient Algonquian language of the First Townies. Because it's on Long Island, known for its inept railroad service, for its surfeit of shopping opportunities, and for the number of electric company executives currently participating in Witness Relocation - because, as I say, we are on Long Island, I translate the name of our village to "Place Where There Is No Mall," or PWTINM.

We chose the town because what's the point of having a weekend/summer place if you can't get to it? Other towns, other beach communities, have more facilities, more stores, more nightlife, even restaurants. We have the joy of not having to take planes, not having to spend an extra hour and a half in traffic each way, being able to run out of a snowy night to make sure the electricity is still working (points to second sentence of this paragraph). And we have a few friends who also have places, if not right down the street, then nearby.

Some of these friends hadn't lived in a house before. In apartments, generally, if you have a problem, you call the super, and if you garden at all, it's in a container or a terrarium. If, indeed, a live plant is even involved. So when our friends Jake and Thelma (not their real names) moved in to their new little house (with pool! with fireplace! with deck! with skylights!), each discovery of a new Person Who Must Be Paid was, well, an event. In a house, you pay people to bring things - oil, gas, TV service - and you pay people to take things away - trash, recycling, dead leaves, fallen trees. You pay people because you can't or won't do what they do. You also pay people to keep the house from getting overgrown by random vines and malicious tree roots, and so on. "Fair enough, I guess," Jake said, "I come out here to relax, and dealing with butane tanks and septic tanks and anything else with tank in its name is outside my comfort level." But we all have our limits, and one day Jake learned that the strange lumps and bumps in the "lawn" were not some floral experiment of Thelma's gone wrong, but were mole habitats. He hopefully inquired if moles are seasonal migrators. "I love to come here," said the gardener, "you have such a dry sophisticated sense of humor. Are you English?" Then he quoted a price for mole work, and Jake knew he had reached his limit.

Jake's next-door neighbor advised Thelma that she should drop Ex-Lax tablets down the mole holes, 5 or 6 tablets per hole. Thelma counted up the holes and sent Jake over to the drugstore in the next town to pick up 2 dozen packages. The lady at the counter asked if he was sure if he really wanted that much. "Oh," said he, noticing the stares of other customers, "they're not for me, they're for my wife." He told this to Thelma when he came back from his mission, and she has since refused to enter that drugstore. She has also insisted that the remaining supply of chocolate-flavored laxative be kept in the basement in a covered box.

Some summers you get enough pleasant days in a row to feel like cooking. This has not been one, so far. But when I do make a dinner that includes a made dessert, a favorite is a lime chiffon pie. This is not difficult to assemble, it's very pretty and cool-looking, not too sweet, indeed a little tangy, and I no longer give the recipe. This is why:

Himself's cousin Bryony (not her real name) was desperate to meet a guy and get married. Clocks were ticking, wives were not being left (that hiss you heard was the ghost of my mother who upon meeting Bryony for the first time told me "nice enough girl, you need to tell her he won't leave his wife, they never do" and Bryony had arrived alone). So I was making dinner for - oh, some relative or other, and I made the pie, and honestly you would think this crowd had never been fed pie before. And the next day I had four phone calls - the recipe? Three people lost interest when it turned out the pie is not based in green jello. Bryony was more insistent, she was having a guy over for dinner and needed a lovely dessert. 

I began with the crust - you grind up enough almonds to make a cup and a half and you mix in melted butter.

I use margarine, said Bryony, and almonds are very expensive, a can of mixed nuts would be just as good, wouldn't it?

Every step, every ingredient - she put up a fight. Using only half a teaspoon of gelatin was wasteful. Heavy cream was expensive. Fresh limes were expensive. Four eggs - expensive, two would do, and she wouldn't bother getting her electric mixer dirty, she'd just use the egg beater. And since she wasn't buying limes, she'd use green sprinkles left over from cookie-baking instead of grated lime rind as the final decoration. "Bri, I really don't think it will taste or look like the one you liked at my house," I said. She assured me she knew how to substitute.

She was very angry when the pie was unservable and was dank and inedible even when spooned into little dishes. No proposal, naturally. She held a grudge for years. 

Now the thing about carpooling your kids is this: not every parent in the car pool is going to be your friend. There are times, however, when you need to carpool the little darlings for x days a week and you have x minus 1 drivers. Civilized people might consider having everyone do an extra day once a month, but that's not always possible, and so someone knows someone who's "maybe a little [ambiguous but unfavorable adjective of your choice] but her car is big enough." And you know there will be trouble. The thrifty mom will run out of gas, the casual lady will confuse Tuesday with Thursday, and there you are, dealing with a woman who has a kidnapping phobia. Why is her kid the one being kidnapped and not any of the others? Quite reasonable, she explains that anyone can tell at a glance that little Andrew comes from wealth, his father is a surgeon, and therefore his parents would be able to pay the ransom. Whereas Bam-Bam, Richie, Douglass and VanDyke would have to wait to be dropped off at home until their kidnappers could no longer afford to feed them, I guess. 

But everyone had a busy summer lined up, and so we asked Susan if she cared to be part of our carpool, and after discussing it with her husband the surgeon, she agreed. I have to say that she was prompt, if a little fussy about dirty tennis shoes and wet towels. I mean, it was a daycamp carpool. It worked like this: you drove up a long one-way street, were checked in at the foot of the driveway, continued driving to the your assigned drop-off point, were checked again by a second clipboard lady, at which point the children were allowed out of the car and into a fun fun fun experience. At the end of the day, the process was reversed: first clipboard lady checked you in and gave you the number of your pickup spot, you crept up the drive to your spot, and second clipboard lady had your group ready. Sounds like a bit much, but at another program, I once found 2 strange kids in my car. Someone had hollered "Faster! Get in the car!" and they did. I gave the extra kids back, of course. I already had Bam-Bam, Pebbles, the Boy of the Jungle, Dino the Olde Englishe Sheepdogue, and Himself to feed. Like Jake, I know my limits.

So one day Himself needed the Real Car for work, and I was left with the Station Car - bought used, elderly, unfashionable, but with a reliable starter and killer acceleration. I always thought one of its previous owners had used it as a getaway car.  No big deal, I was used to the car and expected to make no great demands on it. Then a little before Daycamp Pickup Time, Clarissa called - she was stuck in traffic and would do anything I asked forever if I would make her pickup run. She was lying, but very pitifully.

The Station Car did not like surprises, but in fairness it tried. The first clipboard lady asked for ID, because she didn't have the Station Car on her Approved List. I complied, and we proceeded to the second clipboard lady at our pickup spot. She hustled the small group of tired boys toward me. Bam-Bam was excited to ride in Dad's Station Car, Douglass, Richie and VanDyke were curious, and little Andrew announced that he was not getting in THAT CAR. Everyone explained that our regular car was not available and this was the Station Car. Andrew explained that his father was a surgeon and therefore he did not have to ride in old cars. The car chose that moment to backfire (it accelerated, right, but didn't like idling.) Andrew burst into tears. The other boys behaved like 5-year-old boys behave when someone they don't like very much anyway acts like a baby. The second clipboard lady told me I had exceeded my time at the pickup spot and would have to drive around and get on the end of the line and try again.

This is where I might mention that Andrew's mother had not given us her phone number because her husband was a surgeon and had strong feelings about privacy.

By the time I had come around again, the other boys were singing a song about Sturgeons and Andrew was weeping quietly. The camp director told me he'd been calling Andrew's home, but the number was busy. "C'mon, Andrew, let's get you home," I said, and he set his jaw and got into the car beside me. His house was not the first stop in the normal course, but that's where we went. As we turned into his street, he recovered his aplomb and said he hoped the neighbors wouldn't see him getting out of this car. No problem, the neighbors were busy looking at the three police cars and the group of officers trying to calm Andrew's mother. It turned out she had called her husband the surgeon, who was operating. She became hysterical and the hospital connected her to the operating room. When her husband the surgeon learned that she was upset because the carpool was late, he brusquely instructed her to call the police if she thought the kid had been kidnapped.

"Licence, registration and insurance, ma'am," said the tallest policeman.
"Howya, Tony, just a minute," I said.
"Hey, howaya! Didn't recognize the car!"
"It's Himself's Station Car."
"Yeah, I know, I was just messin with ya. Is this the missing kid?"
"He wasn't missing, he just didn't want to ride in the Station Car."
"Well," said Tony the Cop, "after all, his father's a surgeon."

food and drink on memorable occasions - a funeral, a trip back in time, payday conviviality

There's more to enjoying a meal than just ingesting food and drink out of reach of wind, cold, and rain. If all you want is to stop your stomach from pinching you, beer and popcorn will do that quite well. But there could be more... I'm trying to categorize some of the meals and drinks that have stuck in the fuzzy web of memory: joyful, luxurious, adventurous, great occasions, truly horrible, comforting - the right thing at the right time. Like these, maybe?

Himself and I sat through a long service at his uncle's funeral, wondering at eulogies that described a man we had never met. Even the aunt and cousins looked confused. At one point I slipped out to double-check that we were in the right room. Surprisingly, we were. I speculated that someone else might have chosen to be buried under Uncle Felix's name, but decided this was improbable. Finally the multitude got into cars to go to the cemetery, and, headlights glaring, we joined the procession. Until--

-- It was really dry in there. Aren't you thirsty? I am.
Asking if someone is thirsty is like yawning in company - soon everyone is thirsty, or is yawning. I agreed that something cold to drink would be just fine.

-- I bet, he continued, if I made a right here, and then another, we'd be at the Dairy Queen. How does a vanilla milkshake sound?

-- Chocolate sounds better, I tenderly replied. But are you sure there's a DQ, and do you know the way to the cemetery?

-- I have a plan, he said as he turned right. If there's not a long line at the DQ, or if there isn't a DQ, we can just turn right again, come back up, and fall in at the end of the procession.

-- What if there is a line at the DQ?

-- We'll have to a terrible decision to face.

Two kids were at the front window, paying, when we pulled in. We jumped out of the car, leaving the motor running, charged up to the window, ordered, paid, grabbed our shakes, drank deeply, and turned around. There, having pulled in behind us, filling the parking lot, trailing down the streets, more still coming, headlights glaring, was every car that had been following us to the cemetery. We had drippy moustaches, mine beige, his white, so the excuse of a sudden need for the ladies' was not available. Later I found out that many of the mourners had turned right because they thought Himself knew a shortcut.

-- Only your relatives, I told him, would think it was normal to want to get to a cemetery faster.

One summer I had a summer job at a company that had a vault in which customer records were kept forever: who had bought what, how promptly did they pay, were there complaints, was the buyer's father a bum? the sales force was expected to know this stuff before placing an order. And who found the information for them? da collitch kids, dat's who.The vault was dim and moldy, and seemed to go on forever. If a buyer's former owner had failed to pay, it was in there. We hid in the vault to duck worse assignments, to avoid people who thought we'd profit from hearing their life stories, to shirk being called upon to make up the numbers at a wake or funeral - people died in that industry with alarming frequency, and if they didn't, their relatives did, and the company would hire a small uncomfortable bus. I will always think of the Flatlands area of Brooklyn as a place where custom required the deceased to wear his glasses in his coffin, as he had in life, to make recognition easier.

My friend Carol and I lurked in the coolness of the vault most of that August, stifling sneezes, not putting on lights... and then we found that at the end of the longest passage, there was a door. In hissing whispers, I dared her and she dared me. The arrival of Billy the Tooth - an elderly supply clerk who would have preferred to be called Ace - saved us from standoff. Billy was nominally in charge of - something, but was still young enough to be kind to da collitch kids, and his shoulder got the Door of Mystery open, revealing a room that Billy identified as having once been a Bomb Shelter.
We saw dusty piles of little boxes - K-rations, C-rations, rapidly soluble coffee packets, flat beige cookies ornamented with an intricately spelled out "mother". Billy had heard that these supplies were provided by the Civil Defense people. Imagine surviving Armageddon only to spend eternity in the Vault, surrounded by yellowed purchase orders, living on dried food and reconstituted drinks: we couldn't. We pushed past Billy the Tooth, broke for upstairs, for sunlight, and ran across the street, for cold sweet vanilla cokes.

That company paid every two weeks, and we got an extra half-hour for lunch on payday, the Legislature having decided during the Great Depression that workers who were not paid in cash should be given time on paydays to cash their checks immediately. Since by my time, fears of one's employer's imminent collapse and closing were part of a faraway past, the extra time was put to good use boosting the profit margins of local bars and restaurants.

My department was supervised by Mildred. Mildred's age and personal life and history were secret: your personal life does not come to the office, she would say. She was tough, skinny, sharpeyed. There was little left of her but a few tufts of white hair, pointed elbows, and arms like Popeye's. Rumor had it that she had run away from an orphanage and talked her way into an office job, where she rose to become the company's first Lady Typewriter. Her rise continued, steadily, inexorably.

historical note: in what i think may have been Mildred's early years, although who knows, the machine was called a Typewriting Machine, and the person who operated it was called the Typewriter.

On paydays, Mildred unbent and treated her staff to as many pitchers of whiskey sours as we could get down in the allotted time.

another historical note: the drinking age was then 18, not 21. This was immaterial to Mildred. She told us that Japanese babies were considered one year old at birth, and further we all could have been Japanese but for General MacArthur and other accidents of fate, and another year or two was immaterial.

We left in convoy, heading to a restaurant with the icy pitchers already on the table. I don't remember what we ate. There may not have been any food at all, I don't remember. Mildred gave us career advice,
 from the perspective of one who'd been the only girl in the office before harassment was a word. No wonder she's tough, we'd murmur. She would say things like "Every girl needs to know how much liquor she can handle. In advance of need." The convoy reeled back exactly an hour and thirty-five minutes later. Promptly at 2 p.m., Mildred would nod, and we would silently rise, cover the papers on our desks, and file out for the cigarette break that company rules permitted. None of us smoked. That was when we ran to cash our paychecks. Then, like everyone but Mildred, I'd spend the rest of the afternoon in a mild daze, daydreaming over maps that still bore researchers' abbreviated notes, wondering what I might have looked like had I been born with glossy straight black hair....