My wife
says that when we first met one of the things she found attractive was that I had
been “pre-trained.” Specifically, she found
it appealing that I had grown up in a family of five sisters and had thus been
exposed to the lofty standards of behavior that females expect, such as no
spitting in the house and closing the bathroom door before you settle in to
make a boom-boom.
In addition
to such things, we boys (I have two brothers) were also taught how to cook and
do laundry. If you were a male growing up on our dairy farm, you had to possess
a Swiss Army knife-like skill set, capable of sorting cattle in the morning,
clothes in the afternoon.
I’m not complaining.
On the contrary, learning how to perform domestic chores came in handy when,
for a few years, I led the life of a Norwegian bachelor farmer. It was useful
to know which household tasks – such as extinguishing a grease fire – required
immediate attention and which jobs could be put off until later. For instance,
who, exactly, cares about the petrified spaghetti that has glued itself to the
couch cushion? It’s not as if the President is going to drop by!
One of the
earliest domestic lessons I learned was how to whip up enough pancakes to feed
ten people.
It somehow
became a tradition at our house to have a Sunday evening supper of pancakes and
bacon. Perhaps it was a subliminal echo of Sunday morning church services with
its Communion wafers and syrupy wine.
When Sunday
evening’s milking hit the halfway mark, I would be sent to the house to construct
a pancake supper. Our pancake recipe is a snap: two of everything except for
the sugar, which is a third of a cup.
Getting the
batter right is an art. Too runny and your pancakes will be thin as Bible
leaves; too thick and your flapjacks will be tough and doughy and will have approximately
the same density as lead.
We had a
massive cast iron griddle that could accommodate six pancakes at a time. Gauging
the proper griddle temperature is a marriage of magic and science. When a droplet
of water (or spit; not that I would know anything about that) hisses and bounces across the griddle, it’s ready.
As the pancakes
piled up in quantities that were measured by the foot, I was also frying mounds
of bacon. One spring, Dad took a skinny old sow to the butcher shop and she bestowed
us with strips of bacon that were nearly a yard long and lean as shoe leather.
Just as tough, too.
The
objective was for supper to be on the table by the time milking was finished. We
could thus be done eating by the time Bonanza
came on.
Bonanza was a popular television series
about a single dad who was struggling to raise a family under difficult
conditions. And by “difficult” I mean “on a replica of the Old West frontier as
envisioned by Hollywood set designers.”
Bonanza detailed the travails of the
red-blooded, all-American Cartwright clan. Its rugged, steely-eyed patriarch
was portrayed by Lorne Greene, a Canadian actor who was of Russian descent. The
Cartwrights employed a cook named Hop Sing, a Chinese gentleman who neither
hopped nor sang.
Our pancake
supper would be narfed down swiftly and our family would gather around the TV.
We didn’t want to miss a millisecond of our time with the Cartwrights!
The cast of
Bonanza were all guys, so there was a
lot of manly action such as fistfights, gunslinging and posse chasing. Despite
the distinct lack of feminine influences in the Cartwright household, none of
the guys ever sat on the couch and clipped their toenails with a hedge trimmer
or excavated navel lint with barbecue tongs. They were a pretty genteel bunch.
A female love
interest would occasionally pop up on the show, but the gals never stayed for long.
Ben, the paterfamilias, had buried three wives; perhaps the ladies got wind of
this and wisely decided that attempting to domesticate the Cartwright guys
wasn’t worth the risk.
After Bonanza was over, we might enjoy a
dessert of root beer floats. This was an era before fat or cholesterol or even calories
had been discovered.
All that domestic
training had molded me into a pretty impressive package by the time I met my
wife. I think I sealed the deal, though, when I invited her out to my farm one
evening and whipped up a romantic meal of pancakes and bacon. And root beer
floats for dessert.
