Lunch in the Seventies

Soup simmers while Richard Gallagher's mud-with-gravel voice delivers the news in the living room. Tomato soup; either Campbell's or one Mom made using the strainer with the red wooden handle. Mom's tomato soup had golden flecks of butter floating on its milky surface. A few slices of JJ Nissen white bread stacked on a plate, bologna, cheese and Miracle Whip to make sandwiches, potato chips, and milk are on the table. It's noon. It's a cool summer day. We'd been out working in the garden most of the morning.

Sandwiches made, soup poured, we go into the living room to watch Gallagher finish up the news on WCAX-TV and for "Across the Fence" to start. Tony Adams, who also covered sports, hosted the show. What range. In one day he could be out talking to a local 4-H club about their quilts and then later he'd file a report on UVM baseball.

Lunch was always at the same time so Mom could listen to the news, watch "Across the Fence" and then maybe a soap - "Guiding Light" or "The Young & the Restless." During the summer though it was usually back outside to the garden or onto other chores. I remember shelling a lot of beans - the wind from the breezeway would blow the chaff away from the wash tub we'd drop the beans into. The beans were cool and hard. In the winter they'd become baked beans; simmering in the cellar on the wood stove with salt pork and maple syrup (probably other things too since my attempts at baked beans haven't been edible) for hours, softening, the small amount of pork working its magic.

I ate lunch today at my desk while people worked around me here in midtown Manhattan but for a little while I felt like I was in East Charleston.