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.