Memoirs, Ink

Do You Make Gravy?

By Jennifer Blomgren

A roaring, dust covered, mud spattered, ex-dark green Toyota Land Cruiser hurtled through the warm dusk of eastern Kansas in late June of 1977.  Riding shotgun was a young blond woman, me, clutching a pink purse;  in the back lay a large, unneutered yellow dog with sad eyes and a noble, patient expression, guarding a half-full 50lb sack of peanuts.

His master, also unneutered,  not as patient as the dog, medium height, medium build, with curly brown hair and a longish dark beard  exploding from his head as though electrified, had one thumb on the wheel and a smirk on his face.   The man held out his other hand in mute demand for more peanuts.

I looked at his hand and shrank back. Neither the man or the dog had had a bath in recent history.  I held my pink purse tighter.  It contained soap, deodorant, lipstick, a picture of my mother.  I was a long, long way from home.

The vehicle sped down a narrow asphalt strip that drew a beeline between wheat fields turning deep butternut in the quickly fading light.  Distant white farmhouses, silver silos, red barns, drew close and fell away.  

I turned my head away from the man and dog to gaze at the rapidly deepening twilight, and in the blur of dry grass and fence that was the ditch, I saw a dim light flash.   

"My God," I exclaimed, "Slow down!  There's a one-eyed cat in the ditch!"

"Shit," he replied, "Haven't you ever seen a lightning bug?"

"Now how would I have seen a lightning bug when I've never been east of the Rockies?  How am I supposed to know?"

My tone was petulant.   I was nervous.  It wasn't just that I had been riding in a dust-covered Land Cruiser for weeks on mostly, make that almost exclusively, bad dirt roads with a silent unneutered man and dog,  the testosterone and dust so thick you could cut it with a dull jacknife.  That was the least of it.   I was used to that.  The real reason I was nervous was that I was mentally preparing to meet my possible future in-laws, perhaps in just a few short hours, if the gasoline and the peanuts held out.

They sounded nice enough. Hog farmers, lived in a house, drove a car, were normal, yet they had produced this hairy male renegade who occasionally grunted charmingly and had, with my youth and susceptibility, won me by means not always pure in  intent.  One other thing:  I had forgotten to mention that I was vegetarian.

With the specter of marriage looming  like a Kansas tornado,  Dick and I had been practicing bickering for nearly two thousand miles and were getting really, really good at it.  We could have won a contest with stiff competition from actual married couples who had many more years' experience.  From my current vantage point I  am incredulous that at the time this did not particularly concern me. 

Fighting with Dick was exciting, like just about everything is exciting when you are very young.  And of course it was never really serious fighting, just border skirmishes. Nothing to worry about.   Lust, in its ever present quest to perpetuate the species, had stalked me, tackled my sturdy ankles, wrestled me to the ground and put blinders on me.   I was beyond the powers of reason and rescue.

My friends were all young and foolish too, but they were far smarter than I. They could all see we were hopelessly mismatched.  But being young, I didn't listen to common sense.  I listened to the devil gonads, who spoke quietly and in deadly earnest over the pheromone underground.  So put us together in a small nursing program--which he had characteristically labeled a "stocked pond,"  empty a 55 gallon barrel of youthful hormones, beat the drums, and there you have it.  Proximity and lust triumphed as they have for millions of years.

And so, on this beautiful, tranquil, soft summer night, I was headed for the bull'seye, the  farm that had been in the family for generations.  If all went as we expected, this might be my actual future.  No wonder I was shaking in my size 10 flip-flops.

Hours slipped by as twilight turned to black dark; the glow of St. Louis brightened slowly on the eastern horizon.  Still, on either side of us was mostly dim, open farmland, the homeplaces lit up with mercury vapor lamps on tall posts.  I felt like a bee homing in the night, going strictly on instinct and faith.

At last we burst into the city and over the massive river, still on the freeway, less than an hour to go.  The roadside restaurants and gas stations were garish islands of fluorescent light; the massive trucks bottled us up between them, roaring like dinosaurs.  The rail flew by in a blur.   I was numb with the noise, and fighting back fear.

Abruptly, Dick took an exit that led us onto a two lane tar road.  Within a mile, we were swallowed by the night.  In the sudden hush I heard frogs and crickets.  The air felt and looked like black velvet.

The stars came out from behind their veil of freeway glare;   we were riding past low fieldsunder a crescent moon.  Dick explained that the biggest of these fields was his father's prized creek bottom.  Suddenly he turned the cruiser to the left, up to the top of an undulating ridge.

We swooped up and down on the narrow tar road, following the lay of the land over gentle rises and dips.  At last a low white house came into view, its lights blazing under massive trees, next to an old silver boarded barn.  Dick swung into the driveway and turned the rig off.   The engine still roared in my ears. 

Then I heard the scream.  It was my prospective mother-in-law, running on short legs and tiny little feet, her large bosom quivering mightily, rounding the bend of the sidewalk, arms open wide. 

She was followed at a distance by Dick's father, a gently ambling, tall man shaped like an elongated football, his hands in his pockets, jingling his keys.

Laughing, she threw her arms around her sweating, hairy, generally unkempt and odiferous son.  Her mind was on greetings; his was on food.  She shouted as she hugged him, "Oh Honey, you STINK!"

I thought silently, "I am going to like her." 

Dick said, "This is Jennifer.  Is there potato salad?"

His father gave me a sweet smile and asked,   "Do you make gravy?"

 

Jennifer Blomgren was born and raised in Forks, Washington, a small, isolated logging town surrounded by spectacular wilderness and peopled by unique characters.  As one of the youngest members of a large and colorful clan, she caught glimpses of history through the stories of her parents and grandparents.   Her father, a serious reader and storyteller, took her to the library often and both parents read to her and her sisters;   many a stormy night was spent reading under the blankets with a flashlight to escape detection, while Pacific storms battered the house.  She was ill a lot, and books and dogs were her best friends.  When she grew up, she became a nurse and married a renegade, who took her, a vegetarian, to live on a hog farm in the Midwest.