Drunk Elks and Grape Snowcones

Sorry I’ve been gone so long.  Welcome to my Fourth of July memories from childhood. I lived.  Surprisingly.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi, this is Lisa, and uh this is Shiny Side Out. It has been a hot minute since I've checked in. Um the uh the holiday season was really hard with for me. My first uh Christmas, my first Thanksgiving without my mom and my sister, I mean pretty much my family. So it was it was rough, and then my my husband had open heart surgery uh during the holidays, and that dredged up all kinds of feelings about being left behind. And but I I'm in a better place now. So uh I got some more memories I want to share. So this is the 4th of July. Happy Independence Day to those of you who celebrate. Um, I was thinking last night, matter of fact, I was woken up at four o'clock this morning. Yes, that's four o'clock a.m. Are there, I didn't even realize there were two fours on the clock. But yes, so I was woken up and I started thinking about the 4th of July and all of the uh the political crap that's going on right now. And um I started thinking about a time when I didn't have to worry about all the political crap when I was a kid. I started thinking about what the 4th of July looked like when I was young. Um, and I look back now and I think, holy crap, I'm surprised I even lived. Um my earliest memories of the 4th of July was um my my uh my mother handing Angie, my sister and I, uh punks. If you don't know what a punk is, it's basically a little stick with compressed sawdust on it, and you light it, and it just kind of smokes and has an ember on the end. Um my sister and I didn't know any better. We were stupid little kids. We thought that was a firework, and so we ran all over the neighborhood with these little smoking sticks waving around the air like a like a couple of little hillbilly mindless children. Um then we got a little older and we started spending the 4th of July with my father's side of the family. Um, speaking of hillbillies, they uh uh my paternal grandparents were farmers, and um it was one of the oddest things is is my memories of my grandmother cooking in her kitchen. She basically had a bent fork and an old crocker cracked crockery bowl and a cast iron skillet that was the most perfectly seasoned thing you've ever seen in your life. Um, and with this, she she she cooked French cuisine. I don't know if she knew she was doing that, but looking back in retrospect, the treats that she would turn out for these family gatherings, she called them tea cakes. It was French shortbread. And it was the perfect Paul Hollywood would have wept at this shortbread. And she made what she called egg pie. This was a French custard. Do you know how hard it is to make custard without it curdling and separating and the eggs reaching up and extending their middle fingers at you? It's hard. Um, she would make these wonderful, she called it pudding. They were cooked puddings that that that were like silk running over your skin. And and she did this with no air conditioning and a flowered house dress that she made on herself on her treadle sewing machine. Yes, I'm that old, don't judge. Um, but it was crazy. So we would get together with these folks and me and my sister Angie and my cousins. I had three cousins that I hero-worshipped. It was Mike and Eddie and Mark. They were uh cousins from my father's side. They were so cool, they knew how to build forts. They um they had the coolest toys. I never wanted to play with my Barbies after I saw their G.I. Joes. I mean, do you remember the gear they had and they had like the karate gifts? Barbie did not have a karate grip, although she did the GI Joes might have liked her more. I don't know. But um, my cousins always had fireworks and they were so cool about it. They would light, they would take these um firecrackers, black cat firecrackers, and hold them in their hands and light them and throw them at each other. Looking back over the years, I thought, oh my god, I'm surprised they got all of their own fingers left. But uh yeah, at the time it was really cool. They would take the uh, if you know what a Roman candle is, it's long thin tube, looks kind of like a baton. And you light one end of it and it shoots fireballs at the end. And these crazy bastards would light these things and then shoot them at each other like some kind of Appalachian fire god. Um I thought, and they would. I remember my my favorite Fourth of July, they found a mud puddle. Okay, I know, and they built like this adobe structure out, like a little house. I thought, that is artwork. Then they put their G.I. Joe's all around. No, I'm sorry, they weren't G.I. Joe's, they were the little green army men, put it all over that, and then they put stuff the thing with black cat fireworks. Yep, and blew all of these green army men to to Jesus. I just realized my cousins were basically Sid from Toy Story. That's I just thought of that. Yes, they were, every one of them, but they were so cool. Um, I was being smarter than your average southeastern Oklahoma young woman. I I didn't much care for lighting fireworks. I uh I mean, but it was expected. That's what you did. Every 4th of July, my sister and I got five dollars. Now, this is back when five dollars would buy quite a lot of fireworks. Um a big package of a hundred black cats was fifty cents. Um, a package of bottle rockets, 20 bottle rockets was a quarter. Um, smoke bombs were five cents. You could get a bag full of stuff for five dollars. And um, I would light the smoke bombs, and and my sister and I, especially the purple ones, oh my god, the purple ones. They were they smell like smelled awful, but the beautiful purple smoke building, we would light them and then we'd dance around in this smoke and like sing the I dream of Jeannie song. And I just feel so sorry for those poor people driving along the street having to witness that because it's like, oh look, the slow coming's children are playing in the street again. Anyway, um, and then there was homemade ice cream. Um, they would they would like make us beg for chances to crank this ice cream. Now, as an adult, I appreciate that chef's kiss on parenting to make us beg to do the manual labor for the ice cream, and that was hard because our folks use like five pounds of rock salt. And um, well, after Angie stopped eating it, she she was like, I I should have bought her a salt lick every 4th of July so she'd stay out of the dang um rock salt, but that that was that ice cream was thick with two C's because uh especially at the end, so we would crank and crank and crank until our arms were sore, and then dad, who was probably a six-pack and a half in into his 4th of July by then, would come out of the house and he'd reach down and he'd give it a couple of quick cranks and go, Oh, it's not done yet. So we would okay, we're we're still going. So I would God, I haven't thought of this stuff in years. I would grab the crank and pull it up, and Angie would sit on it to push it down. And we got pretty good at that until we realized that the grown-ups were standing in there laughing at us. Can't blame them, I would have too. But um, and this homemade ice cream. Now, now that I'm a grown-up and I'm all fancy and bougie, um, I like like I will make I have an electric ice cream maker, just a little one in the it doesn't even use salt or ice. I put the little thing in the freezer and pour the stuff in it and plug it in and boom, 20 minutes later, ice cream. And I make the cooked custard and it's egg yolks and it's got imported uh Moroccan chocolate and whatever else. I happen to find it whole foods that makes my little foodie heart goes pity patty. Um, but this was junket ice cream mix. I don't even know if they still make this crap anymore. Vanilla junket ice cream mix, which is basically, I think it's a it's not even gonna be cream in it. It's milk and powder, and you don't cook it or anything, you just stir it up and you put it, and it it had a very distinct taste. Now I know some modern ice cream folks put out, like I think Bluebell's got a homemade vanilla ice cream. Okay, Bluebell, I love you, I love your ice cream, but that's not what homemade vanilla ice cream on the 4th of July tastes like. It tastes like uh milky, slush, and cigarette ash, and heat rash, and firework smoke. That is 4th of July homemade ice cream. Um, my uh my family were never, we didn't have barbecues, they were not hot dogs and uh hamburgers on the 4th of July when I was a kid. My my my dad was not a barbecuer. Matter of fact, I don't know that he ever cooked anything in the kitchen. I know we stayed with him once when my mother had to go in the no, she had to go to like Texas for an HR block tax school or something so she could um get her CPA's license, something like that. And uh she left us alone with my father for two days, wound up uh, we would either eat at the local diner, which was just like across the street from our house, or we would eat whatever mom had left in the fridge. Don't even the the hot dog incident, well, that's a story for another day. But sometimes, if we were good, and my dad was, you know, in a good mood, which wasn't often, but sometimes, um, we would get to go to the fireworks display at the um local rodeo arena. So the local Elks Lodge would put on the community fireworks display on the 4th of July, and they would do it at the uh at the rodeo arena. The grown-ups would all sit on the stands and the kids would all get down and sit among the cow patties or horse patties or whatever kind of crap it was, and would sit there and wait and wait and wait. In the meantime, the uh the locals' elk's lodge, the gentleman members of that, well, they weren't going to pay for somebody to shoot this stuff off, they could do it themselves. So they pretty much had all afternoon setting this thing up and drinking beer. So by the time it actually started getting dark, uh, you had a bunch of drunk elks running around on a rodeo arena. I mean, what could happen? So they set all these fireworks up, and um they were operating on a shoestring budget, so it was one pop at a time. We would uh and they would wait until dark. I'm not talking like 9:15, 9:30, I mean 10:20, dark o'clock, and you could see their little shadows, and they had they were lighting these things with road flares. So our eyes are blinded by these road flares, and they would light it, and they would all run, some of them would fall, and they'd get up, and some of them would drag, and then the shell would go off and pow! And everybody go, ooh, ah! And then five minutes later, the next shell would go off. It took them, we were we were sitting in that rodeo arena until midnight, and then and then it was over. We didn't we didn't know it was over until like 15 minutes after they had all loaded their stuff up, because it was five, ten minutes sometimes between shells. I I still to this day don't know what happened. But uh I remember riding home in the back of the country squire station wagon, sticky with purple snow cone juice, because you know, purple snow cones are the best. I will fight you on that one. Purple snow cone juice and dirt from the rodeo arena, smelling vaguely of manure and sweat, purple snow cone juice, and just laying back there, my ears still ringing from the one shell that didn't quite make it as high as it should, and thinking life just don't get any better than this. Well, it does, but you know, in that moment, that was just pure kid joy. Um yeah. So this 4th of July, I I would like everybody to take a moment and think about the 4th of July's from their childhood. If you celebrate the 4th of July, if if you're from another country and you don't celebrate Independence Day, or you are from this country and choose not to celebrate Independence Day because of your political affiliation, whatever. Just um have a hot dog, try to find a grape snow cone, and um happy Independence Day.