It Don’t Seem That Crazy To Me
I made fun of the burghers in Screed.
I said I was the only sane man in
It didn’t seem that crazy to me, quitting the bank
and staying at home to cook cheap, nutritious meals,
from scratch, and be there when the kids got home from school
with a home-made snack. Fruit and milk and cookies, made with
oats and raisins and honey or molasses. Or a bowl of whole-grain cereal.
Cheerios or bite-size Shredded Wheat or Weetabix. I got my produce off
the reduced-price table at Neal’s Farms Market and my meat from Publix,
marked down for passing its sell-by date. I called it aged. The French
hang a pheasant in the shed and when it falls off its feet it’s ready to cook.
You put a river rock in the pot with a loon and when the rock is tender,
the loon is ready to eat. When Owen brought home barracuda I’d cook it
on the barbecue grill, steaked, like a kingfish, or a wahoo. The small ones
won’t give you ciguatera poisoning. I bought our clothes at the Goodwill.
I found a Martin tenor guitar in
Owen plays it to this day. I bought a painting
signed Frank C. Wright ’77.
I don’t know who he was
but I liked the painting.
I cooked a lot of dried beans and brown rice.
I made a casserole and added Parmesan cheese and Tamari soy sauce.
We lived like hippies. We went to bluegrass festivals. We had a yellow,
secondhand fiberglass canoe I paid $75 for. When we moved to Parker,
Owen and Balder gathered oysters in it in Polecat Bayou.
I drove a Datsun B210 with 180,000 miles on it.
A roof rack on the top for the canoe.
My heater leaked so I stubbed
the hoses off and wore a parka,
a scarf, and a Greek fisherman’s cap,
with a hi-fi headset over my ears.
I looked like a colored airplane pilot.
Richard Pryor as a black stock-car race-driver.