Food and Family

It seemed like, when he was young, Johnny Miller didn't remember ever going hungry. It's true they ate a lot of pinto beans and cornbread, but Mom always managed to fix it so it was a treat. He'd often get to help sort the beans, removing bits of stone and shriveled up beans, and once the bag of dry beans had been gone through, Mom would rinse the beans, then let them sit overnight, in a pot, on the stove.

The next day, the cooking would begin, and by afternoon the smell of beans simmering would fill the house and escape to the yard beyond. And even if she had added only a slice of bacon or a bit of ground beef to the beans for flavor, there was nothing like having a slice of cornbread in the bowl, with a little butter on top, and then pour the beans and bean juice over on top of that - the corn bread soaking up the bean juice till it'd almost dissolve in his mouth.

His Grandpa, having lived through the depression, and having learned to make the most of what you had, wouldn't stop there. If he had beans, but no corn bread or corn cakes, he'd take anything of the sort - leftover biscuits from breakfast, chocolate cake from a birthday party - anything, and pour the beans over and eat it up. Johnny never quite could get a taste for chocolate cake and pinto beans, though.

Food wasn't always plentiful. You ate what you had. Oftentimes it was what you grew. Watermelons grew well there, as did tomatoes, potatoes, well - pretty much anything you cared for would grow as long as you took care of it. Then, of course, there was hunting, and fishing.

Johnny never had "seafood", in the sense of food from the sea. He ate plenty of perch and bass and crappie and catfish of various types, all of which were generally caught in the farm pond, or maybe the neighbor's pond, or even the river, over near town. Fishing was always a great outing.

One time they got to go on a fishing trip. It was just a mile or so from the house, but that neighbor had three ponds. The big one, just inside the gate between the road and the house, off to the side - that was where the fish were biting that day. They could do no wrong. They had started out with a can of worms, and caught crickets and grasshoppers.

Johnny's Dad, his brother just a year older, and Robert, his oldest brother - they were all fishing, and pulling in fish as quick as they'd cast the line out. They must have caught over a hundred fish that day - everything from good sized crappie (what a fun fight), to little punkin-seed perch, too small to keep, to big ones, and the bass and catfish. Their stringers, all three or four were full, and they ran out of bait. Robert took a couple of forked tree limbs, trimmed the branches off, and they started stringing fish up on them. When the bait ran out, they casted with bare hooks, and even then, the fish kept on biting.

Finally, they quit. It just didn't seem sporting anymore, with the fish just throwing themselves on the hooks that way. Besides, what a man catches must be cleaned. That was the bad side of fishing. Luckily, Johnny was a little tike, and although he had to help, that was mostly carrying the buckets of fish guts and scales and fins off into the woods and dumping them out. Hours later, when all the work was done, and the freezer packed to full with fish, they started planning a fish fry.

When the day came, uncles and aunts and cousins were all there. A couple of home-made deep fryers were set up in the yard, with big pots of oil. Momma and the other aunts dipped the fish in corn meal and spices, and brought them out to the men to cook. Boy, that was the best fish he ever tasted, before or since. Everybody kept saying, "Not sure if I like it or not, better have another piece." But, they all knew that it was just an excuse to keep on eating. As for Johnny, it helped that he'd been there when the harvest occurred. There was nothing like the feeling he had eating what he had helped to catch!

Later on in his life, Johnny would think back to that time, and wonder what in the heck was up with them fish. He hasn't ever had that kind of luck since... but that's all right, he never did quite learn to enjoy the cleaning of the fish. It was more fun to go out to the creek and drop in your hook and rest and ponder life's little problems and think about things, and if a nibble happened, then good, and if not, at least you got away for a while.