While reading through a collection of poetry, selected and introduced by Garrison Keillor, titled, “Good Poems for Hard Times,” I ran across a writing by Erica Funkhouser that could have been written by one of us.
The writing is titled, “My Father’s Lunch,” and it is reminiscent of so many noon time meals spent with my own dad. I can’t help but think that this is a universal blessing among farm families.
“For now he was ours,” Erica Funkhouser writes, “whether he smelled of chokecherry, tractor oil or twine. He’d washed his hands with brown naphtha soap and splashed water onto his face and shaken it off like a dog. He’d offer more ham, more bread to anyone who sat down. This was work, too, but he did it slowly, with no impatience, not yet reminding the older boys that he’d need them later or asking the smaller children if we’d stored the apples or shoved last year’s hay out of the wonderful window to nowhere.”
She speaks of this as the “interlude” of the day. “We could see it was an old meal with the patina of dream going back to the first days of bread and meat and work,” she writes.
It prompted me to recall my own father’s enjoyment of the noon meal. He ate with almost a reverence, commenting on the good taste of such simple things.
Near the end of his life, my father spoke of such things as the wonderful aroma of home-baked bread or the beauty of jam in glass jars lining the pantry shelves in his childhood. He gave credit to the women who did so much to make it all, who were often taken for granted.
He credited his mother and his grandmother, knowing they had either grown it or gathered it, and that work could bring the delicious treat of the simplest berry even in the dead of winter, spread with a heavy hand on a slice of warm bread.
He spoke with amazement of returning home from Sunday school to the scent of roast, potatoes and carrots simmering in the old cook stove. He wondered aloud how his mother had known the proper amount of wood with which to stoke that fire. Too much and there would have been dried beef and charcoaled vegetables; too little wood and the meal would have remained raw and hard. But, with such precision, that meal was cooking to perfection while they sang hymns and praised Jesus. He felt like the luckiest boy alive.
My father taught us an appreciation for such simple things as fresh bread with real butter, eggs and crisp bacon and potatoes with gravy. This went beyond the need for sustenance — this was a gift to be treasured. And it served as an opportunity to remind us to be grateful for our mother.
Funkhouser’s writing ends with this, “All our lives, my brothers, my sister, and I will eat this same meal, savoring its provisional peace, like the peace in the grain room after we’d scooped the grain from the bins, and the sticky oats and the agitated flakes of bran had slipped back down into the soft valleys where they would remain until it was time to feed the animals again.”
During busy seasons, Dad would often eat his lunch from a dinner bucket. One day, he made the measured announcement that he intended to come in to the table for each noon meal from now on.
“I work hard so that I can enjoy good food. Otherwise, what is the point of it all?”
That sort of says it all, doesn’t it?
