Light on the politics, heavy on the grits

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November 22, 2008

Dwain Walden The Moultrie Observer Sat Nov 22, 2008, 09:28 PM EST

The older we get, the more we tend to talk about how things were. I think it’s gravitational. We are drawn back to our roots. I speak metaphorically. It has nothing to do with Isaac Newton’s Law of Gravity. I’m pretty sure, though, that we all remember a few people who seemed to have fallen out of that tree along with Newton’s apple. And they landed upon their heads.

At our breakfast club, there is much reminiscing.

On this particular morning, I purposely changed the subject because I was getting beaten up on politics. I can only run this gauntlet so many times without feeling the need for gauze and ointment. So I changed the subject to food, something close to my heart and based on my last physical, something lodged in my left ventricle.

Food is neither Democrat nor Republican. It can be liberal or conservative, depending on whether you are on a diet and whether you were trained from childhood to leave a clean plate. Both parties have been known to belly up to the trough.

Speaking of clean plates, we all had heard the “starving children in China” scenario. The irony now is that our bank accounts are clean, and we owe China lots of money. I’m not sure what we tell the kids now.

Everyone had a food story. Several of us recalled our first pizza. Bill Smith said he had heard early on of “pizza pie” and recalled the old Dean Martin tune “when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore.” So in his first adventure, he anticipated a “sweet pie.” He was quite surprised, and it had to grow on him. Food will grow on you, literally.

I was grown before I had my first taste of pizza. But it was love at first bite.

Now there are some things that I didn’t like when I was young that I dearly love now. For instance, when I was 14, two sumo-wrestlers couldn’t have forced a raw oyster down my throat. There would have been lard and diapers flying everywhere. But now, I consider oysters on the half-shell a delicacy. I’m not sure what caused the change. It could have been mind over matter. The first time one was offered to me as a child, someone called it a “horse booger.” It could be that later I became more enlightened, and I stayed away from horses.

One fellow mentioned the economy and wondered if we might be back to eating sawmill gravy and fried sweet potatoes for breakfast. Well, I never left that ... didn’t I already mention my left ventricle?

And someone brought up hog killings and the fact that we didn’t throw anything away but the squeal in those days. I told them we didn’t even throw away the squeal — that we made “oinkment” out of it.

It was a good morning — light on politics and heavy on food. It was almost Biblical. In the Bible folks were always “breaking bread” together. Of course being the deep thinker I am and having applied Biblical connotation, I got to measuring the cholesterol at that table, and I left hoping it wasn’t “The Last Supper.”

Now we didn’t leave singing “Bless Be The Tie That Binds,” but I think some of us appreciate the moral of that story. There’s more that binds us than separates us.

(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer, 985-4545. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com.)

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