With the Help of God and the Big Kitchen Spoon

When I was five or so, my parents moved to a farming area 20 miles or so south of Charlotte, which was so out in the boonies that none of the houses had addresses, only names and RFD numbers on the mailboxes. And all the mailboxes were on the main road so, if you lived off the main road like we did, you had to walk or drive to it to get your mail.

My brother, Curtis, and I started exploring the area the day after we got there. There was a dirt road which ran by our house and we took it in the direction which led into a pine woods. After a few days of this we decided one afternoon to walk the road in the other direction towards the main road. There was a big house where the dirt road met the main road. We'd walked a few hundred yards when we saw a group of three boys come out of the big house and begin walking towards us.

I became afraid when I saw them. My brother and I had spent about six months in an orphanage. It was a time when my mother was very sick and my father was, for reasons I'm not sure of, unable to take care of us. The orphanage was part of a complex which included a reform school filled with big kids. My contacts with them had made me fear big kids.

But we kept walking toward them and they toward us. Then they started waving at us and smiling. When we got to them they shook our hands and we exchanged names. They were the sons of Velma Williams, soon to be a big part of my life. They were Wayne, the oldest, who was about fifteen at the time, Rick, the next oldest who was about nine, and Gary who was a year or so older than me. They invited us to their house where we met Velma and their sister Judy, who was about Curtis' age. This was the beginning of a relationship which lasts even until today. Our families became close and at least once a year after we had moved to the D.C. area, either some of us would come to Velma's or some of them would come to our house in University Park.

We often went back to Velma's farm for Christmas: Wayne and Gary from nearby, Rick from Germany, Judy from Baltimore, my mother Anne and brother Curt from Laurel and myself usually from New York and, of course, the wives and cousins and girl and boyfriends and many other friends. Most of us stayed for all of the Christmas week, housed some of us at Velma's, others in nearby homes.

There was a lot of storytelling. One of my favorites I call by the title of this story.

In grade school Rick suffered for a year or so from a stomach ailment. I guess it was an ailment because every afternoon after the school bus dropped him off, he'd run into the kitchen and vomit into the sink.

"Keep that up, Eric, and one day you'll vomit your guts out," his mother would chide him when she saw him doing it. Velma did not believe in disease. For her, any disorder was in your head.

Velma had a chicken farm. She raised, killed, and dressed the chickens for nearby restaurants and other eateries. As to other eateries, I remember especially one by the Catawba River, that slow-moving snake which winds and back twists through the woods surrounding where Velma and my family lived. The area was sandy as an ocean beach and dotted with pines kept scraggly and low from the occasional flooding. The kitchen was in a school bus from which not only the wheels but the axles had been removed and was equipped for frying the catfish which abounded in the sandy-bottomed river. A few of the windows had been removed and a serving counter set into the opening. A dozen or so picnic tables were nearby, along with a few fire pits covered with steel grating so people could cook hamburgers and such. The kitchen also fried the chicken breasts and legs which Velma sold them.

Hands Fish Fry was another of Velma's customers, a restaurant all of us visited at least once during our Christmas stay. Fresh caught and fried-just-right catfish, hush puppies, and locally brewed beer are some of my memories of the place.

One afternoon Velma was gutting chickens into her kitchen sink when the phone in the living room rang. She rinsed and dried her hands and rushed out to the living room.

At about the same time Rick came into the house and rushed past Velma into the kitchen. I'm sure Velma would have warned Rick about the chicken guts in the kitchen sink if she had noticed him. She didn't though, engrossed as she was in her phone conversation.

Given the title of this story, need I say more?

Well, perhaps, so I'll continue. Rick rushed to the sink and not noticing the chicken guts vomited into the sink. He then opened his eyes and saw the chicken guts. "Oh, God! It's actually happened!" he moaned.

Not yet having taken high school biology and thus having little understanding of his anatomy, he decided that he might remedy the situation if he simply put his guts back where they belonged. Looking around the kitchen for something to help, he saw the big spoon hanging on the wall by the sink. He grabbed it and began to shovel the chicken guts down his throat. He had completed the task just as Velma entered the kitchen.

"Mama," he cried seeing her. "You were right, but with the help of God and the big kitchen spoon, I got 'em back in."