Ohh, We're Soo Fat!

Surely, you’ve read recently that Mississippians have won the Fat Award for the fourth time. Hey, if you had our biscuits, cane ribbon syrup, grits and real butter, summer vegetables cooked in ham hock, cornbread with chitlin’s, and the variety of fruits at our disposal, you’d find it difficult to think thin.

Mississippians love their desserts. Home made ice cream, baked goodies, fudge brownies, not to mention candies made in our kitchens, and the sweetest of all—iced tea!! We drink gallons of sweetened tea during the summer. A day isn’t considered a good one without a tall, frosted glass of sweet tea. Go to any McDonald’s, McAlister’s, Krystal, and restaurants scattered throughout the state and you will find sweet tea so sweet your brain waves will jitterbug if you aren’t attuned to sugar.

In this week’s local Clarion-Ledger one of my favorite columnists, a popular chef and cookbook author, Robert St. John, defends us Mississippians and our love for good food by making this suggestion to the CDC on polling:

“Instead of a telephone poll to decide which state is fatter, the CDC needs to rent the Georgia Dome and host an Olympic-style competition of all 50 states. We might not win the 400 meter relay every time, but we could kick butt in the shot pu ,dead lift and pie-eating contest.

We’ll dust off all of the old high school cheers. When competing with Colorado—the nation’s skinniest state—we can chant from the sidelines:

“Two bits, four bits, gumbo roux, you better look out or we’ll sit on you!”

(Thanks, Robert, for your cheering words!)

We never get tired of fried chicken, barbecued meats, and catfish found on every day’s menu. And when you hear of a friend saying he’s going to neighboring New Orleans, he’ll mention in the same breath, FOOD: Louisiana is fourth in obesity with their mouth-watering Cajun foods, among them gumbo and jambalaya, which we Mississippians have adopted into our menus.

There's a local country restaurant just on the edge of Madison called Hamil’s. Ohh, do they know how to barbecue ribs. Their menu of “down-home” cooking packs the dining halls every day between 11 a. m. and 2 p. m. The folks there are known not to turn down a hungry straggler a bit past closing time.

My family has agreed that any of our northern friends who will brave the hot summer and visit us will be treated to lunch at Hamil’s.

The Long Days of Summer

What do you do on a rainy night in Rio?
What do you say when the lady says, “Si, Si”
Where do you go when can’t go for a walk—
Do you stay home and talk, or do you sit and sigh
“Ay, Ay.”

This old song from either a Hope/Crosby movie or one of those extravagant musicals of the 1940’s runs through my mind. It’s Latin rhythm keeps me swaying. Here’s my poetic entry:

What do I do in Madison, when the temperature is high?
What can I say when I’m asked why not New York?
Looking outdoors I see the sun and dappled shade
and turn back to my book, and, yes, I sigh
“ Oh my,Oh my!”

That’s the record of my days at home, battling the urge to move around outdoors. No interest in improving my jewelry work, no custom orders, no deadlines. Reading six books a week (Don’t ask me names or authors) has become a nighttime labor of love. So for daytime business—no television for me—I’ve returned to my roots. On I’ve begun to enter into my family tree three years of methodical gathering of letters, public records, and correspondence, as well as notes from hundreds of phone calls scratched on bits and pieces of paper. A lot of updating from the last time I worked. This move came after emphasizing—in the harshest tone of voice-- to my kids not discard a single box of genealogy. Being unable to predict their interest in holding on to thousands of pictures gathered from over 100 sources and those notes no one can interpret, gave me impetus to go online.

Sitting before the computer during the morning, I turn my head occasionally, looking through the window to check the droopiness of the plants on the patio, making the decision to water or not, then gulping a mouth full of cold water before resuming work.

By 2:00 p.m. I take a siesta and dream of what I could be doing at our bit of heaven in the lower Catskills. I like to imagine that the temperature there is similar to Madison this summer. (We still haven’t discovered a battery-operated fan that moves the air satisfactorily for the cabin.) In this state of mind with the air conditioning keeping me cool, I don’t miss lying on a steaming mattress in a stifling cabin on a sun-drenched hillside waiting impatiently for the cool of the evening.

Be satisfied with what you’ve got, I remind myself. And that’s why I’m not pining for the hills and water and woods of New York.