Happy New Year! This year, we hosted the Moseley Family Christmas at our house. My Mom & Dad came from East Texas and my sister, Meredith and her husband, Jamie, flew in from NYC.
Carey did a great job carefully planning the meals and schlepping to the grocery store(s) multiple times to prepare for the holiday. I was in charge of the turkey, so I opted for deep-frying a bird, cajun style. Jamie was quite interested at the turkey frying. I suspect the main reason he took so many pictures of the frying was so he could show all his Yankee friends in New York and say, “You won’t believe how my redneck relatives cook a turkey - in a damn fryer!” But who could blame him?
After injecting the turkey full of cajun spices, we took it outside, way outside, to drop it in a hot bath of cottonseed oil.
Carefully following the directions resulted in: (a) no trips to the Baylor ER to deal with those nasty little 3rd degree burns (b) no scorched, well, no scorched anything and (c) a darn good turkey.
It was such a nice day, and I was having so much fun manning the deep-fryer, I dispatched a messenger to the kitchen to ask a simple question: What else can we fry? When Saxon and I went to the State Fair of Texas this year, we had the mandatory Fletcher’s Corny Dog. The heavenly concoction entered Saxon’s little mouth and she immediately made the sign for “more” and did it again and again while munching on the corn dog. Instead of trying out the deep-fried Oreo cookies, deep-fried twinkies, deep-fried PBJ sandwich, deep-fried pork ribs, deep-fried cornbread dressing or the fried Coke, we opted for…another Fletcher’s Corny Dog.
Neither the executive chef nor any of the kitchen crew encouraged much creativity, so we did not discover the next-new-deep-fried thing that would make us zillionaires at the 2008 State Fair, so they sent out onions. Here’s my dad giving Saxon a first taste of onion rings. Good, but not nearly as good as those darn corny dogs!
Fried turkey by day, conquering the world by night.
So, a belated Merry Christmas to all of you.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed is hearing my dad tell stories. For years, we’ve encouraged him to put some of them down on paper. Click “continue reading” below to read a funny (and sentimental) story he wrote a few years ago and shared with family.
Upon arising this morning, I had a flashback to my past which I believed would be rather cathartic to put in print. Since I have no means to publish it, I thought I would send it out by email. It is written as if you did not know the people involved but you certainly do. Here it goes:Much of the time, my body has some kind of early warning system which alerts my conscious mind that an illness is approaching. Most of the time, it is something which is so very indistinct that I have no specific symptom but just I get a feeling of impending physical malaise which almost always comes to pass after I have experienced that vague premonition.
Physiologists might say that I can sense the activities of my white blood cells in fighting a stealth infection and self-help psychologists might opine that my mind has laid the groundwork to allow myself to become ill. Whatever the cause, for the last few days now, I have felt that I was coming down with some kind of illness and, sure enough, I woke this morning with a throat which felt as if it had been sandblasted by poltergeists as I slept.My first thought was “I wish Daddy was here to swab my throat.”
By way of explanation, when my brothers and I were small boys, the very hint of a sore throat would bring about a cure which may have been unique in our family, one which I never visited on my children: Daddy would swab our throats. To give you something of a picture of this, you must first understand that Dad was a big, gruff, straightforward but kind and loving bear of a man.
Cousins on both the paternal and maternal sides of our family have, since our maturity, expressed to me that they sometimes genuinely feared Dad because he was so large and because he had seen the wrath of his punishment for our misdemeanors as was visited on us, my brothers and me. I was surprised on the instances that they had told me of their fear of him because my feeling about him was more closely akin to awe. He was both loving and stern, a very odd combination.
But I digress.
In our household, having your throat swabbed probably equated to other households’ dread of being given castor oil. (I never tasted castor oil and never heard of any of my friends whose mothers did this but many of the comic books I read had children who were constantly being spooned castor oil as if it were the panacea elixir, shoved down the gullets of any unfortunate child who suffered any kind of malady.) Dad’s sure-fire remedy was swabbing our throats when they were sore.
You must understand that swabbing of a throat was not something that was a great deal of fun for the patient. Dad kept long, thing pieces of wood and would adorn the end of it with a wad of cotton, twirling the cotton onto the end so that it looked like a very long and very loosely-tied Q-tip. He would then dip the cotton into what I am almost certain was mercurochrome but may, on occasion, have beenmerthiolate (which we always called “monkey blood”).
As a kid, I equated the amount of pain which an antiseptic inflicted as being the gauge of how effective it was because Mother had told me that the pain was caused by germs who were kicking in death throes as they died – which gave me some satisfaction that the germs were suffering as well as I; as a result of this belief which I firmly held, I considered putting mercurochrome on a wound as being the bringing out of the big guns on potential infections because it burned like liquid fire on a wound whereas monkey blood caused relatively very little discomfort.
I have since discovered that mercurochrome contains 26% mercury and I have wondered how much of my various mental quirks were caused by mercury poisoning from being swabbed or from the hundreds of scrapes and cuts which were treated with it.
Getting back to the swabbing of the throat. After Dad had made all of his preparations, appearing to us to be something like a quite rough-sawn and overgrown mad scientist, he would draw the sick child toward him and instruct him to say “Lean back.” We each knew the drill; we would have to lean our heads very far back with our mouths wide agape, much as you would see baby birds holding open their mouths to receive worms from their mothers. Dad would then deftly insert his home-made swab into our throats and mop the insides of them with the antiseptic.
Now, you must understand that my brothers and I considered it something of a source of sadistic entertainment to see our siblings in pain or discomfort. We grew up in the early days of television and our sources of amusement were somewhat limited. Watching someone else having his throat swabbed didn’t approach the humor of watching them run into a door or something but it had the advantage of forewarning and you could watch every jerk and spasm.
There was also the pronounced relief of the “There but for the grace of God go I” kind of thing, knowing certainly that when we got our throats swabbed, there would inevitably be an audience of two to evaluate your performance.The performance was almost always something to behold. You can certainly imagine that there is a rather substantial gag reflex which would be generated by having an eight-inch shaft with cotton (saggy with antiseptic) on the end thrust far down into your throat and bobbled around.
It seemed to me that rather than being limited to the throat area that Dad was likely also swabbing the inside of my ankle bones at the same time he was performing this act of medical mercy to my throat.Despite the gag reflex, we would seldom jerk away. With Dad, administering the treatment, there would not have been a great deal of point in doing that because he would then have decided he did not coat enough of those germs (who would be kicking in death throes) to have done sufficient good and would insist upon a repeat of the process.
At any rate, Dad would swab our throats thoroughly with the antiseptic, a process which seemed at the time to take at least 15 minutes but likely took only 2 to 4 seconds to accomplish. It was certainly long enough to fully kick-start the gag reflex into high gear, I assure you.
After the swabbing took place, the real performance began. The patient would grab his throat with both hands and either run around, gagging or bend over and act like he was certain to vomit, coughing and gagging with gusto. The other two brothers would watch and grin in quiet appreciation of the art of the demonstration of just how bad the experience had been. It was almost as if the patient were putting on the kind of show that he fully expected his siblings, at its conclusion, to hold up cards with numbers on them to indicate the quality of the reaction to the swabbing which had just been inflicted. I think that I often earned at least a 9.3 or 9.4, but Haywood, my eldest brother, could almost always reach a 9.9-quality presentation, being somehow able to make retching noises that were so loud that they made the walls shake and so convincing that my other brother, Sam, and I would step back in awe, just certain that he was going to throw up.
The amazing thing about all of this is that it worked. We boys may have been permanently poisoned for life with mercury poisoning, but by the next day, there would be no more sore throat. This miraculous cure effect may have been partly brought about by our bodies healing themselves to defend against further throat-swabbings on following days but, by golly, whatever the cause, it worked. Christmas is almost here. As of this month, Dad has been dead for 33 years. Mother and Haywood both died four years ago. With this sore throat and with Christmas approaching, I wish, I wish, I wish – oh, how I wish – that Daddy could swab my throat for me. I would put on a performance for Sam and Haywood which would certainly achieve a perfect 10; Mother would even applaud it.
