Christmas at the Waffle House by Cappy Hall Rearick

c Christmas at the Waffle House

By Cappy Hall Rearick

 

“There's nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child.” ~ Erma Bombeck

Babe and I had every intention of sleeping in on Christmas morning. Our grown children were in South Carolina with their families, so Santa had no reason to drop down our chimney. We could sleep late and visit with the kids a week or so after the live greens had drooped and tired old Santa had flown back to the North Pole.

I was dreaming about a steam-driven train full of happy people when my two hungry cats plopped down on my stomach. Their breathing sounded eerily like the huff-puff train in my interrupted dream. 

I dragged myself to the kitchen pantry in hopes of finding some non-smelly cat food. The day, being a special one, meant that my kitties would dine on turkey ala Fancy Feast instead of generic questionable fish. 

After opening the cans, I looked up to find Babe, seated as if in a trance, right in front of the lighted Christmas tree. 

“What are you doing, Babe?"

He looked at me as if I had glitter for brains. “Waiting for you to get in here so we can open presents.” 

He grinned. I love it when he does that.

When my first cup of Starbucks kicked in, I became aware of Michael Bublé dreaming of a White Christmas. I sat down next to Babe, leaned over and kissed him smack on his smackers. He grinned again. “Can we open ‘em now,” he asked. "Can we?"

“What are you, five?” I took another swig of Starbucks. “Okay, let's do this Santa thing, Babe. I can handle it now.” 

Later, after all the gifts were opened, we were both hungry for something that didn’t need cooking, so we decided to go out for breakfast. 

“Where to,” Babe said as though asking a cruise director about the next port of call.

“Waffle House,” I said without having to think about it. 

When we drove up to the second home of every man, woman and child South of the Gnat Line, it was packed. The parking lot was jammed with cars, motorcycles and pickups. 

As we arrived, a family of four was leaving, so before their table could be cleaned of leftover waffle crumbs, we plopped down in their abandoned seats.

“Cheese omelet,” I announced to Donna, the server dressed in a red T-shirt with Merry Christmas, Y’all stamped on her bosomy front. “And a quart of coffee.” 

Donna, seemingly unconcerned about her missing front tooth, smiled at me and winked at Babe. He ordered one of everything on the menu and winked back at her.

I gazed at the assorted groups gathered in the little house of pecan waffles and enough fat fuel to power us to Uranus and back. 

Taking up two tables and hanging off each end, a group of bikers dressed in red leather were eating waffles, hash browns and milk. Milk? 

A mom and dad at the table next to ours were trying to keep their five pajama-clad children from killing each other. Dad must have suggested eating breakfast out at the place that stays open 24-7. Mom likely replied, “You had me at eat breakfast out.”

I looked around the diner and noticed an elderly woman wearing a red wig that didn’t fit. She was too thin, her eyes were rimed in deep pink. She ate alone and looked sadder than anyone there. It broke my heart.

Donna refilled our cups, spilled some on the side and then rolled her eyes. Babe winked at me. There was a lot of winking going on that morning. 'Tis the season …

Friends we hadn’t seen for a while were there. We hugged and wished each other Merry Christmas. It had been too long since we visited making me wonder where the time had gone. 

My omelet arrived loaded with cheese and animal fat. Babe stuffed himself with eggs, waffles, bacon, sausage, grits and hash browns. I stifled a grin when he requested whole-wheat toast.

Between bites, I became aware of more families, more pajamas and a variety of exhausted parents, evidenced by Dad's blood-shot eyes and Mom's droopy ones. I remembered being that young and searching for missing screws for unassembled toys. 

It didn't seem so long ago that instead of cats jumping on my stomach, tiny hands were shaking me and a small voice was whispering to his brother, Is she awake?

Is the Waffle House on Christmas morning now representative of the 21st Century Family? We never ate breakfast outside of home on Christmas when I was a kid. Mama may have fixed waffles, but more likely she toasted slices of Miss Sunbeam, or if we were lucky, added cinnamon and sugar before yelling for us to put down our toys and eat. 

Home life is so different today and it's a good thing. I applaud the difference. 

When I see a family at the Waffle House with five kids still clad in pajamas, I smile. When Donna proudly wears her Merry Christmas, Y’all T-shirt that shows off the thirty pounds she lost at Weight Watchers, I say, “You Go, Girl.” 

And when Babe orders every item on the Waffle House menu and manages not to have a coronary, I ask him, “Did you save room for fruitcake?”

Christmas at the Waffle House is our new tradition even though they don't serve fruitcake.

 

 

 

 

Myles To Go Before We Eat

 

 Myles To Go Before We Eat

By Cappy Hall Rearick

 

Myles Standish, Captain of the Mayflower, is to blame for your holiday stress.

In August, he invited the Indians to a Labor Day party, got them roaring drunk hoping they would tell him where the wild turkeys hung out. Promising more firewater, he then conned them into teaching Pilgrim women how to grow, harvest and cook maze, squash, pumpkins, and Boston Baked Beans.

By the middle of October, Myles was saying, PAR-TAY! 

Picture, if you will, Captain Standish reciting Julius Caesar aloud, mooning over Priscilla Alden and watching football. (Pilgrims vs. Indians).

His wife, Barbara, is in the kitchen wishing she could wring his neck instead of the fifty-pound-turkey. Overwhelmed by twenty sacks of potatoes to mash and pumpkins the size of wagon wheels, she’s not a happy camper. The experimental spaghetti squash exploded in July while the zukes grew to the size of Labrador Retrievers. She’s got wheat to thrash and dough to rise and roll. The colossal turkey has eighty-five pellets in its butt, thanks to Myles who introduced both firewater and firepower to the Indians.

The first Thanksgiving feast makes Barbara mutter to herself and quiver.

“Would it have killed him to ask me before he invited every Indian in the new country? I’m supposed to entertain strangers dressed in animal skins. Gimme a flippin’ break.”

Baby Lora is walking now; son Charles is into teenage angst, and young Myles is a nerd. Big Myles mostly muses. 

“Husband,” Barbara shouts. “Quit musing and get in here.” 

He stomps into the dirt-floor kitchen. “Now what, Babs?”

 “What are ya, blind? I’m knee-deep in unshucked maze and pumpkins that need to be stewed. Baby Lora messed up her last clean nappy while you were mooning over Priscilla. She  married somebody else, Myles. Get over it.”

Myles poses like a Fifteenth Century Mr. Clean. “Blimey! It’s Disaster City in here. Other than whining, what have you been doing, woman? We have guests coming today. What is so difficult about preparing enough food to feed a small continent? What else would you be doing?”

She looks around for something sharp. “I’m hormonal, Myles, so I would rather take a nap and have you wake me up in 1776 in time for the Fourth of July fireworks.”

“Are you daft, woman? What is this nonsense you spout?”

She sidles over to a knife that rests under a sixty-pound zucchini. A vague smile crosses Barbara’s lips as she and the knife focus on the bad-tempered, albeit intrepid Mayflower Captain.

“Myles,” Barbara croons, “Why did you invite the entire Wampanoag Nation?”

 “There you go exaggerating, Babs. Dr. Phil calls that non-productive behavior.”

“Do not,” Barbara snarls, “repeat, do not speak to me about non-productive behavior. I push my tush while you’re sitting around musing.”

He throws up his hands. “There you go again.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She tugs the knife out from under the seriously heavy zucchini.

“Merely a reminder that the entire nation was not invited. Only the families of Squanto, Samoset and Chief Yellow Feather.”

Barbara hides the knife within the folds of her grease-spattered skirt. “Husband, how many family members do the savages have?”

Myles lights up a cheroot. “Ninety or so. Why the long face? Is entertaining a few of my friends too much to ask? I have a colony to run, you know.”

“Ninety people? Ninety? Are you out of your freaking gourd? Who is going to look after your wild offspring, do the laundry and cook the stinkin’ pumpkins? I’m no Martha Stewart.”

“Babs, what we have here is a failure to communicate. What would you rather be doing?”

“I’d rather be pummeled to the ground with a 20-pound sack of flour until I pass out.”

“There’s no need to get your bloomers in a bunch over a little dinner party. Chill. Call the Butterball Hot Line. They know all about turkey stress.”

Barbara stares at him. “Maybe they could send a wagon train of cooked food and an army of servers.”

“Babs, Babs, Babs. The Butterball Hot Line is designed to get you through turkey angst, it doesn’t exist to spoil you.”

“Myles, I have a raging case of PMS, a migraine and a knife. I am on my last nerve and I don’t give a flying fig about the Butterball people.”

“Hey! Don’t go all nutterootie on me.”

Barbara closes her eyes and wraps her fingers around the hidden knife. In a low voice, she hisses. “Get out of my kitchen, Myles!”

The intrepid Captain Standish retreats like a cowardly lion and returns to his sanctuary. A quirky grin sneaks onto his lips and spreads across his face like warm cranberry sauce.

“Whew! For a minute there, I was afraid the old lady was gonna bail and I’d have to cook that fifty-pound turkey. Not! I have a colony to run.”

Coping With Covid

Too many of my friends are fighting a hard battle with depression.

“We’re tired of sheltering in place,” they say, “sick of the isolation. There's nothing to look forward to except another day just like the day before.”

I get it. If it were not for my seven-day pill container staring at me each morning, it would be easy to believe I’m on a hamster wheel stuck in a lifetime of Mondays. 

After it was announced that all America was in danger of getting and spreading Covid-19, I hid. I listened to Dr. Fauci when he said that seniors like me were the highest risks. Fauci became my guru, my main man. I followed his rules. If Tony said don’t do it, I didn’t do it. I wore a mask and washed my hands till the skin fell off. I cut my own hair with a pair of dull scissors. I even gave up mani-pedis.

 😩

Once a week, I left my house to go to the one grocery store in town telling customers to wear a mask or shop elsewhere. Days when I wasn’t buying food were spent looking like Willie Wonka’s grandfather who only got out of bed for free chocolate. 

My once-a-week outing made it necessary for me to wear clothes. Real clothes. Not pajamas. Not sweats with stains down the front from bacon grease spatter. Real honest-to-God clothes with buttons, zippers and waistbands. I could have gone formal, but even in the South where being over-dressed is quite the thing, that would have been too much. 

I was born and raised as a Fifties Southern Belle. What does that mean? It means that belles don’t even go to the mailbox without doing their hair and fixing their face. It means that wandering through the day with pink sponge curlers in your hair is how you get to be labeled trailer trash. We were taught to fix up. If we didn’t, we didn’t leave the house.

After months of not fixing up except when the cupboard was bare and my husband was starving, I didn’t like the person I’d become. And what about Babe, my patient life partner? He had to be sick of me looking like Maxine, the cartoon old lady.

The day I realized that another person was beginning to take over my body was the same day my friends confessed their depression. They told me that they slept ten to twelve hours at night and schlepped around during the day wearing ragged sweatpants and worn-out t-shirts. I saw myself that day and knew I had to do something. 

So, I got dressed EVERY day. I washed and blew my hair dry EVERY day. I fixed my face EVERY day. I wore outfits with matching socks even if I didn’t wear shoes. I became a homegrown, homebound fashionista. At first, I did it because I wanted Babe’s last sight of me to be a good one in case I dropped dead. Later, I did it because it made me feel better about myself.

I fought depression in other ways, too. Five o’clock every day became a time for Babe and me to sit together and drink a watered-down martini and snack on hors d'oeuvres. Setting aside a special time with no television or cell phones to yank us away from each other took a chunk out of isolation’s endless hours. 

When he smiled at me over a martini glass, I felt pretty again. When the love of my life told me things about his life before we met, I felt closer to him. When he told me about one of his aunts, a world-class beauty who was married five times, I was aghast.

I looked forward to creating fun appetizers, some even good enough for inclusion in the church cookbook, other creations I prayed wouldn’t clog up the disposal. 

Do I want my life back? You bet. But I’m not fool enough to think that when this horrible virus is behind us, things are going to return to the way they were. They won’t.

Meanwhile, I intend to fight depression by fixing myself up each morning even when it’s not a grocery day. I will create hors d'oeuvres for our five o’clock ritual and I will sing along while Alexa plays soft jazz. I will treasure the minutes each day that Babe and I are alone together and can talk. Really talk.

I refuse to let Covid-19 overshadow what is left of my life.  

Sackcloth and Ashes 2021

SACKCLOTH AND ASHES

By Cappy Hall Rearick

 

“To every thing there is a season. A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to love, and a time to hate; A time of war, and a time of peace.”

 

On the second September Saturday morning of 2021, we Americans will turn off our alarm clocks, get out of bed, put on the coffee and do our morning rituals.

At some point, we will glance at a calendar and remember exactly where we were when terrorists attacked our country twenty years before. We will experience, just as we did for nineteen previous years, a sickening feeling in our bellies; fear, helplessness and unbridled anger. It has been a very long twenty years.

9-11 made such a profound change, whether needed or not, in our lives. We saw things differently because we looked at life in a different way. We know now that nothing can ever be the same. How then, have we dealt with its effects twenty years later?

The following is my story.

After the attack in 2001 someone asked me, “How can you write humor after everything that’s happened?” Actually, I didn’t have one creative thought after the attacks. Fortunately for me (and my editor), I had tucked away six upcoming columns during an August streak of manic productivity. I was not alone; many of my writer friends were struggling with the same affliction. Some said it was writer’s block. I called it writer’s paralysis.

Mystery writer Ed McBain reported that he expected to throw away most of what he had been able to get down on paper since that dreadful day. His admission provided me with a better understanding of the national grief attacking us all at that time.

National grief is not something all Americans have experienced. I was a baby when Pearl Harbor was attacked, a young mother when JFK was assassinated and middle-aged at the time of the shuttle explosion. As saddened as Americans were at those times, nothing compares to the magnitude of national grief, the sackcloth and ashes worn by us because of September 11, 2001.

Maya Angelou said, “Now is the time for thinking Americans to think.” We did that. We ran the gamut of emotion, in fact, from shock and disbelief to vengeful hatred. Who among us was not touched by the incredible burden placed on a newly elected President? He told us to go into the world and live courageously. He said we should pick up the pieces and continue to go to our jobs, to school and to church. We should hold our heads up high, he said, and be thankful that there were not more victims when the Twin Towers were struck by evil.

As appalled and saddened as I was following the tragedy, I knew in my heart that it was unhealthy for me to wallow in grief, to remain out of touch with everything except sadness, but knowing something doesn’t make it happen. CNN’s constant coverage of America’s New War offered no comfort to me. It frightened me instead; it made me cry harder.

It took time, but eventually I came to realize that laughter was long overdue, that laughter, even in the midst of my mourning, was something gone missing in my life. I needed to put grins back on your faces as well as my own because I owed it to the innocent souls who died on September 11, 2001.

 

As the twentieth anniversary of our nation’s tragedy once more brings up so many emotions, I ask myself this question: Can laughter be the medicine to help heal our brokenhearted country? Is it possible? Maybe, or maybe not, but I think it is worth considering.

So this is what I propose. I will do my part but you’ll have to do yours. I will sit at my keyboard day after day and week after week writing good humor and sometimes not so good, but always with the sincere hope that you, my readers, will look on the bright side of things so that your smiles and your laughter will light up our world once more.

 

September 11, 2021

 

All day today, rain

Gray, sad

God

Is still crying.

The Town That Time Forgot

Several years ago, while living in Coastal Georgia, hot flashes and global warming took control of the upwardly moving saturation of my body. That’s when my husband Babe and I began to look for a summer getaway in the mountains. It took a while to find the right town with just the right character (and characters), but finally our search paid off when a Saluda blip appeared on our personal radar screen.

Laying claim to a main thoroughfare not much longer than a football field, specialty shops and restaurants line up on one side of the street. A defunct set of railroad tracks stands sentry between the business side and a few children playing outdoors on swing sets and monkey bars in the town’s well-used playground. Squeals of laughter can be heard even when it snows. I love that sound.

Weekends often bring visitors to our midst, curious to find out how a town the size of ours has survived the onslaught of high tech as it moves toward the isolation of all people everywhere. The visitors receive friendly smiles of welcome and easy chatter, but it is difficult to portray Saluda in mere words.

“We believe Saluda is a special place,” it might be said to the visitor. Or, “Saluda is like a modern-day Brigadoon —it’s magical.”

Indeed, none of the residents have lived here for over two hundred years as in the mythical Brigadoon, but Saluda has no problem claiming to be the town time forgot. That, in itself makes it a haven for throwbacks who long for how things used to be back in the day.

In Saluda you don’t often see people in restaurants texting the person seated across the table from them. They actually talk to each other using real words. I once even witnessed a mother boldly snatching a smart phone away from her teenager. “This is called real time. Get used to it,” she admonished. Good for her!

Saluda people do some texting but they don’t overdo it because they like talking with each other. They still speak and spell the language learned in grammar school and they don’t much care what’s going on in the Silicon Valley. Saluda people don’t know a lot about fiber optics because electronics are not allowed to rule their lives, inhibit their conversations or steal their humanity.

Friendly folks chat with each other while munching on old-fashioned hamburgers, hot dogs or a made-from-scratch milkshake served up in a metal ice cream shaker.

When a visitor wanders into a local café, it’s not unusual for them to be invited to sit for a spell. A local might talk about the new grandbaby born the week before or give an update on the Historical Society project. The stranger learns about the produce sold at the Friday tailgate market. “Best doggone tomatoes since 1945.”

There could be a report on the Saluda Dog Society’s recent fundraiser when enough money was donated to build a new shelter. Information might be shared that local thespians plan a new performance during the summer.

A tear or two will grace the eyes of an older resident as he reports, “It’s official. A community barbeque will be held in the park with proceeds going to the VFW. God Bless America.”

They support the lonely veteran struggling to adjust to a life without legs. They sit in church next to the widow who feels abandoned since the love of her life is no longer by her side. They attend town meetings; they donate blood to the Red Cross and they always, always vote.

Saluda folks still use Ma Bell to ask about a friend’s son in the service of his country and they still phone each when they just feel like saying, “Hey, how’s your mama and ‘em?”

Saluda people figured out that caring and nurturing each other makes a difference.

It took Babe and me a few years to settle permanently in this magical place that is not Brigadoon but comes pretty darn close. What took us so long?

Brigadoon, Brigadoon, blooming under sable skies.

Brigadoon, Brigadoon, there my heart forever lies.

Let the world grow cold around us, let the heavens cry above!

Brigadoon, Brigadoon, in thy valley, there'll be love!

 

 

 

 

The Beat Goes On

Today is the birthday of American writer Jack Kerouac. 

I was busy having babies and trying to mimic Donna Reed during the provocative 60’s, so I pretty much slept through it. Chasing after two rambunctious boys left me too worn out to focus on anything more serious than Pablum. For all I knew, the Beat Generation that Kerouac wrote about was a group of tired women not unlike myself, and the Hippies were people born with unfortunate hips.

Jack Kerouac. Ken Kesey. Neal Cassady. Allan Ginsburg. William Burroughs.

While I was changing diapers and making formula, Jack Kerouac, in a multi-colored, psychedelic bus loaded up his friends and took his first cross-country trip. He called that trip, Further, but Tom Wolfe later named it, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I didn’t know squat about any of it. Long-haired hippies lived in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, not in my little corner of the world. By the time I was in a position to boogie with the Grateful Dead, I was too old to dance.

A few years later, I awakened from my civic narcolepsy and did something totally foreign to the person I had been: I marched in protest against the war. My rebellion did little more than guarantee my name and photograph to be forever embedded in a folder at FBI headquarters, but I was proud of myself for having done something. After recovering from the initial shock of breaking with tradition, that one act of defiance allowed me to see that it was okay to think outside of the Pablum Package.

About that same time, Ken Kesey took me on a journey inside of his head ~ not a psychedelic road trip, and a much shorter one than he ever took. His movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius for me, my Aha Moment. 

For middleclass Americans like myself ~ those of us brought up in or before the 50’s, Jack Nicholson’s role in the film was that of a crazy man. Even though for years I had behaved more like June Cleaver than June Cleaver, I didn’t see Mac McMurphy as crazy. It wasn’t just another award-winning role for Nicholson. To me, McMurphy was the brave kid on the playground standing up to the class bully. I saw the wretched Nurse Ratched as the bully, McMurphy’s antithesis. God knows how, but that film showed me a different view of the power structure going head-to-head with the counter-culture and anti-establishment groups. 

There’s no doubt that we are all guilty of taking freedom for granted. We’re like kids given too many toys at Christmas so that none of them are special. Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters hoped that their message, as drug-induced as they likely were, would resuscitate an apathetic people. For sure, the arrested childhood of the counter-culture was a backward way to move forward, but they made waves and they made a difference. Pandora’s Box was opened up and cans of political worms wriggled out. Heroes have earned that title for doing less.

These days I don’t protest march or march with placards, but as an American citizen, I insist on my right to do so. I want to get back to the freedom of speech I used to know but have too often taken for granted. I need to trust that my right of peaceful assembly written in the First Amendment to the Constitution will always allow me to protest what I perceive as wrongdoing. I am not willing to forfeit that privilege and you shouldn’t either. The Constitution of the United States says we don’t have to.

We have been charged with a provocative edict: to uphold the visions set in motion when early Americans defied England over two hundred and forty years ago. If we are to make our dissenting forefathers proud, we cannot sleep through movements Black Lives Matter or ignore the gluttonous games played by corrupt officials. We cannot make our forefathers proud if we choose to do less. 

The Beat Goes On.