Domestic Gods

Some things that should be very easy are actually quite difficult for men. If it isn’t difficult, we will expend huge amounts of energy making sure that it becomes difficult. Housekeeping for instance is reasonably straight forward. If it’s dirty, clean it and if it’s in the wrong place, put it where it belongs. If it’s raw, cook it. Simple, right? No, men can take the simple and turn it into the impossible and not even know they are doing it.

My best friend in high school and I both decided to become optometrists. The local optometrist seemed to have a good life. He worked warm in the winter, cool in the summer and he was dry when it rained. He appeared to make a decent living that provided the amenities that make life fun, like eating every day. At eighteen, my needs were simple. I wanted to have a lot of stuff without having to perspire to get it, so optometry seemed the perfect profession. Besides, people called you “doctor”, and that had to impress the girls.

So, in the fall of 1967 off we went to Memphis to attend Southern College of Optometry. We rented a two-bedroom apartment on South Willett that housed mostly medical and dental students. It cost $62.50 a month and we split that. Ah, the good old days. Of course, we lacked about fifty dollars having any money at all, so it all comes down to perspective in the end.

My mother had stored some old dishes in the attic and secured us an ample supply to take with us to Memphis. This was really funny, because neither of us knew anything about cooking. We could open a can, pour the contents into a pot and set it on a stove eye. When we saw smoke we assumed it was done. That was about it. Needless to say, she didn’t pack a lot of measuring cups, mixers or cooking thermometers. Our kitchen inventory consisted mostly of glasses, plates, bowls and eating utensils. She sent a can of something called "Pam" with us, but we tried spraying it on several foods and it tasted awful! Mom also threw in an iron skillet hoping that one of us would want to experiment with actually cooking something. We tried it once. We fried some pork chops ( this was before I learned they will kill you ). We took turns scraping the burned residue of the bottom of the skillet for the next three days. Apparently, you are supposed to spray something on the bottom of the skillet before you cook anything in it. Looking back, we should have tried spraying that awful tasting "Pam"on the skillet. It surely wasn't good for anything else. Anyway, we had learned our lesson, and the skillet stayed on the top shelf in the cupboard until we found it when we moved.

The first time I went home, I told my mother that we needed more dishes. She looked a little puzzled, but she went back to the attic and found more dishes for us. I had been reasonably responsible during my growing years, ( well, except for the summer of ’63 ) so she knew that if I said I needed more dishes, she should find more dishes. When she and Dad came for their first visit to our apartment she learned why we needed more dishes. We were washing them on Saturday. As long as we had a clean dish, we didn’t see any reason to wash more. Conveniently, we always seemed to run out about Saturday when we had time to wash them. We had grown accustomed to the smell of milk souring, and the moldy things in the bottoms of the cereal bowls became like household pets. One weekend, we got really busy and had to skip the Saturday dish washing. The mold had time to evolve to the point that they took on individual personalities. We felt like we should name them. I don’t really think mold evolves. I just thought that sentence was kind of funny. Maybe they do though. Who knows what mold does when we’re not watching them? Anyway, my mom seemed to think that our Saturday dish washing was a bad idea and I recall her mentioning something about a plague. We told her that we would do better and asked if she, by chance, had brought any more dishes.

Actually, we did experiment with several different food procurement methods over the next three years. There was a cheese-like food that came in an aerosol can that you could spray directly into your mouth without creating any dirty dishes to lie around until Saturday. We found it to lack a certain dining ambiance, but it couldn’t be beaten for convenience. Of course you had to pre-chew the crackers and have some Hi-C grape drink handy to chase it down, because it was a bit on the gummy side just on its own.

After a full year of Hi-C grape drink, we decided that making tea couldn’t be that hard. We figured you just put a tea bag in a pot of water and boil it a while until tea happened. It tasted like pond water, and the tea bag would usually disintegrate in the boiling water and we had all these little tea granules and tea bag parts in our pond water. We didn’t know how to solve the problem, but we knew it wasn’t right. We gave up and decided to live on soft drinks.

After two years of spraying cheese-like food into our mouths, we decided that we should experiment with the oven. We swept out the cob webs with a broom, ( of course we had a broom. Do you think we were Neanderthals? ) and put in two chicken pot pies. After about three weeks of chicken pot pies, we learned that if we left them in the little tin pans that came with them, they would hold together better and we wouldn’t have chicken parts and little mini-carrots all over the bottom of the oven to clean up on Saturday. And Mom thought we might not do well on our own! Ha!