by Thelly Reahm Tidbits of Time
1953
It was Tuesday. Ever since I had been a child, Tuesday dinner was cornbread and beans, and it was a tradition or habit that I figured was well worth preserving. It meant that little or no real thought had to go into preparing dinner. Monday was washday....Tuesday we ironed and Tuesday night we ate cornbread and beans.
The steamy dishwater was fogging up my glasses as I finished up the dinner dishes. No leftovers. We ate it all. The glassware was the usual gunky mess of having had buttermilk and cornbread combined into a disgusting mush. That tradition came from my husband's side of the family....not mine. I considered dunking not quite polite.
I was checking my Tuesday list of chores mounted to the bulletin board....all done....I could relax and watch TV. Then the doorbell rang. Hmmm...I thought, we weren't expecting anyone. Who could this be?
I untied my apron as I glanced out the little kitchen window. It looked like Juke and Tee's car, but they weren't expected until Thursday. Floor waxing day. I always planned it that way so my house looked really good. Tee was an immaculate housekeeper. I was compulsive with my list making, but she was compulsive about her house.
The children answered the door and yelled "It's Juke and Tee!" Their kids and ours commingled into a noisy frenzy because they only got to see each other on planned occasions, as we did not live in near neighborhoods.
"What are you guys doing in this neck of the woods?" I asked as we hugged our hello's.
There was a rather stunned look on their faces as they said simultaneously, "Well....for dinner....what else?" Tee said noticing my confusion.
"Are we late or early, or what?" Juke asked.
"Only a couple days early," I said, "I'm expecting you Thursday," I kind of mumbled.
"Thursday?" she asked, "It's news to me!"
"You were the one who changed it," her husband said slipping unobtrusively into his grumpy mode. "Remember, you said last week at our house that your Mother was coming Thursday from Pine Valley and you'd have to change us to Tuesday."
That's the way with habits I thought. I was preconditioned to Tuesdays ironing and beans and cornbread! Thursdays was Juke and Tee's night for dinner, every other week. That's how it had been for years...not Mother on Thursday. Yikes! Did my Mother's impending visit give me that mental block, or was this friendship on shaky ground? I hadn't even included them in the quantity of beans that I'd cooked....I hadn't made dessert or anything that I would have done for a 'company supper'. Besides. I wouldn't have cooked beans and cornbread for guests. What a revoltin' development this was.
"Tee....I'm sorry. I don't know what to say. We've eaten supper and there aren't even any leftovers," I said helplessly. "I don't know how I forgot, except that I did. I'm terribly sorry. Can I fix sandwiches or......" my voice trailed off into the ice cold air that surrounded us. My dilemma was huge, because on the limited budget of our early marriage, I had no real 'extra's' in the house from which to scare up a meal. It was before freezers in every garage or super markets at every corner. There was no such thing as Jack in the Box to run out to, or the extra money with which to do it.
There stood two hungry adults and two hungrier kids, and their finances were about the same as ours. They were going to have to go clear home to eat.
As they walked out across the lawn I could hear Juke saying "With all those lists of hers you'd think she could get things straight."
He was right. I'd depended on habits to keep my life in order instead of writing down the changes. For sure, amends were up to me.
Cornbread and beans and mushy buttermilk glasses still remind me of that night and how very tenuous friendships can be.
That one didn't really survive. Oh we still saw each other at social functions through the years but we were never 'best friends' again.
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