Category: Written Word

Happy birthday, oh fan most loyal…

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As I am trying to stay focused on other writing projects, my blog posts are few and far between.

Not that anyone has been complaining.

Not surprisingly, readership has tapered off dramatically.

Except for my fan most loyal.

No matter how stale the posts are, this follower returns again and again. So frequent are those visits, WordPress tries to block them to keep its internet arteries unclogged.

But he is persistent, slipping through the second WordPress lets its guard down.

I knew little about him, so today I decided to learn more.

He turned 75 this year. And he must be well-educated.

Well, not that well-educated. Admittedly, his grammar is poor. In fact, his favorite post appears to be a photo with a spelling error in its title: “sandwish board.” This also means he has poor taste, as the photo is of an illegal, tacky sign plopped in the middle of a sidewalk on Alamo Plaza.

He speaks some Japanese, I think. And he appears fluent in Russian, at least as far as I can tell from trying to read his comments. Even though I rudely never respond to his comments – one of my numerous excuses being my ignorance of the Russian language – he never wavers in his loyalty.

With only a little research, I found out why he speaks Russian:

“Without Spam, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.”

Nikita Khrushchev, ‘Khrushchev Remembers’ (1970)

According to www.spam.com, more than 100 million cans of Spam were shipped out to feed the Allied troops during World War II, which, under the lend-lease program, included those of the USSR.

Yes, Spam the man is my number one fan (Sorry, Hormel, I just don’t get the all-caps thing.).

So, here’s Spammy, as Hormel affectionately calls him >

The one-billionth can of Spam was produced in 1959.

I thought Spam disappeared from the shelves as soon as babyboomers entered adolescence.

Until today, I assumed a can of Spam was like the tin of fruitcake described by Johnny Carson:

There is only one fruitcake in the world, and people keep sending it to each other.

But I was so mistaken. I underestimated Spam’s resiliency. According to this frightening statistic on foodreference.com, 3.6 cans of Spam are consumed every second.

I also underestimated his versatility. Spam is oh so much more than something served simply sliced straight out of the can.

According to the official website, Spam has taken on an international flair to suit our changing palates. The combinations are beyond your wildest dreams (or worst nightmares?). Do you like green eggs and Spam?

I will spare you the glossy photos of the outcomes, but a few recipes Hormel proudly shares are polenta topped with Spam and black bean salsa, Spam wontons, Spam musubi and huevos Spamcheros. But come November, you probably just want to rely on that all-American favorite, “Spamsgiving Day Delight.”

Oh, please, spare us, Sam. Put that Spam back in the can.

The most amazing thing I found out about my fan Spam today is why he has a layer of jiggly jelly. I assumed it was for long-term preservation so he could be stored in bomb shelters. But the preservative in Spam is simply sodium nitrate, about which Hormel strives to make you feel good:

Small amounts of sodium nitrate are found in delicious meats like hot dogs…. It helps preserve the pink color of meat. And no one likes gray meat.

No, the real reason is Spam actually is cooked directly in the can. So naturally his fat rises to the top. Cooking and cooling a can of Spam is as time-consuming as cooking a turkey; it takes Hormel three hours.

So, Spam, my fan. It was good to get to know more about you today. I think it’s wise wordpress.com screens out thousands of your clicks on my blog. The sheer numbers might go to my head, encouraging me to post more often.

And happy birthday, you old-75-year-old you. You don’t look a day older than the day you were first canned.

Just please, don’t wear your birthday suit around me. Keep your can about you. I want to have something to pass down to my grandchildren.

 

Haunting the graveyard to unearth the past

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The pains of death are past.

Labor and sorrow cease.

And life’s long warfare closed at last.

His soul is found in peace.

Headstone of Joseph Coker, 1799-1881

One day I found myself, sitting in the middle of the carpet surrounded by boxes stacked in an attorney’s office on the 30th floor, rooting through another woman’s purse.

This really was not a planned direction for my career, but, undisciplined, I have always let it take numerous unscheduled detours.

I wanted the vintage pocketbook to spill the story of Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker out on the floor in front of me. Although its contents provided tiny glimpses of her personality, it was going to take a lot more time and effort to flesh out her and husband Max. Thanks to the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund, I devoted two years to getting acquainted with the two hardworking dairy farmers who reside in the Coker Cemetery, resulting in the publication of The Last Farm Standing on Buttermilk Hill: Voelcker Roots Run Deep in Hardberger Park.

The Voelckers’ farm was part of a community of dairy farmers clustered together just north of Loop 410 in San Antonio. These families were unified by school, church and graveyard into a tightly knit community – the Coker settlement, and the Coker Cemetery Association plans to reunite these families in a book.

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Farewell, my wife

and children all,

From you a Father

Christ doth call.

Headstone of James J. Tomerlin, 1858-1896

As the Voelckers did, many of these hardworking farmers retired to the Coker Cemetery. I went to visit them recently, hoping they would whisper tales to me.

The jarring sounds of bulldozers working on the new portion of Wurzbach Parkway crashing through the former farms at first spoiled the peacefulness. But the spirits in this bucolic setting gradually quashed the intrusive noise, leaving me and several deer free to wander in the past.

The hours spent in the Coker Cemetery revealed some of the names of the farming families populating the settlement: Coker, Gerfers, Hampton, Harrison, Jones, Marmon, Smith, Tomerlin, Autry, Dekunder, Gulick, Harper, Isom, Maltsberger, Pipes, Tomasini and Voelcker. While their dairies in the area known as Buttermilk Hill were swallowed by behemoth San Antonio, the nonprofit association maintaining this historical cemetery knows their stories merit preservation.

As families dispersed from farms, remnants of the area’s history scattered with them. The Coker Cemetery Association asked me to bring these back together as a gift to the descendents of all who rest under the tombstones behind the old Coker church.

Charged with weaving bits of historical information together to illuminate this oft-forgotten portion of San Antonio’s rural heritage, I find myself again looking for chards. A page recording births and weddings in a family Bible. A brand registration from the late 1800s. A class photo from the old Coker schoolhouse. A tax return from the 1920s. A long-forgotten diary or letters tucked away in a shoebox. Memories grandparents shared about families’ arrivals in San Antonio or life on the farm.

I am asking descendants to introduce me to their ancestors from the Coker community, to search their studies, basements and attics and dust off the cobwebs in their minds to share memories and artifacts for this project. To ensure their ancestors are:

Gone but not forgotten.

Headstone of Rebecca Ford, 1823-1881

Thank goodness for detours, always full of unexpected opportunities and discoveries.

The sex life of garlic

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Face it. We’ve been eating clones. And not just recent clones, but clones of clones of clones. Generations of us have been eating generation upon generation of clones for possibly thousands of years.

Bob Anderson, Texas’ “garlicmeister,” dropped hints about the importance of the sex life of garlic in a phone interview I had with him for the April-May issue of San Antonio Taste Magazine.

Little did I know that great garlic requires some sex in the wild, or at least some wild sex in the last few decades. But finding proper propagating partners for garlic was impossible in this part of the world until Gorbachev and GW Bush officially thawed the Cold War at Malta in 1989.

Once the two leaders decided to finally melt the ice, the door opened to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the only places where garlic still grew wild, freely engaging in unbridled cross-pollination.

I gleaned this from reading Phillip Simon’s research for the USDA. Simon went on the 1989 expedition to what I call the “Four Stans” (because I clumsily stumble over their full names) to collect all kinds of new hardneck garlics capable of producing “true garlic seed,” unlike the Dolly-like clones we have been consuming.

Anderson passionately gushes about some of the distinctive flavors of the resulting children of these newly available types of garlic on page after page of his website.

The above information represents only a few of the titillating facts I learned about garlic for San Antonio Taste.

garlic goes topless

I’m sure my feature on garlic would have been the magazine’s cover story if the garlic had not posed topless. The editors probably feared highlighting such a steamy topic would mean some outlets would require a brown paper outer wrapper or only be willing to sell the magazine from under the counter.

Note added on April 10, 2012: Totally missed that April is National Garlic Month.