If a sign of good, “honest” food can be determined by the number of calendars hanging on the walls of a back road’s diner, as William Least Heat-Moon attested in his bestselling travelogue, “Blue Highways: A Journey into America” (Little, Brown & Company; 1982), then my parents could have nailed a shingle on the door and opened their own cafe.
If one could not tell this just by coming through the back porch and meeting the lingering odors of chocolate cake, baking bread, pot roast and fried potatoes and onions — plus the fact that you would be fed, expected or not — proof could be found in at least three or four calendars hanging in the kitchen alone (including those tiny, magnetized ones stuck to the refrigerator door). Dangling from tiny nails throughout the rest of the house were even more — decorative calendars that had come from various sources, whether free from the grain mill where they got their chicken feed to the wildlife and hunting versions gifted by my grandmother, who had her own diner-level quota on her walls.
I would also annually give my parents calendars as New Year’s presents. They treated them like treasures, open and ready with all the pages of months yet to be turned, and certain places in the house remained reserved for special dog photo calendars, some from “The Old Farmer’s Almanac” and others featuring the work of such American artists as Charles Russell and Norman Rockwell.
Throughout the year, the calendar dates were marked up in pen, occasional notations making them like mini time capsules holding reminders of the mundane, like doctor’s appointments and due bills, to other matters: how many eggs gathered and when a hen’s un-gathered eggs would hatch; various garden plantings and progressions; and the births and deaths of dogs and other family members. My folks also kept little personal dated journals that marked the days in further detail with weather reports, good eats and logs sawed.
Though they were timekeepers who had (somewhat) a schedule, my parents were not hurriers. My dad would always get up at least a few hours before he had to go to work, lie on the couch in the morning darkness doing his barbering finger exercises, because he said he did not want to “rush.” And my mom was known to draw out her bathing and “putting on her war paint” so long that she may have been deliberately trying to delay a trip to the airport so my flight would be missed.
But at some point, my dad began to hasten things along a little bit, turning the calendar pages to the next month a week or so before the new month arrived. He would do this with the clocks, too, moving them an hour forward or backward a few days before the time change. These shifts of days and times would throw the whole household into a certain level of confusion that he compounded with his forecasting proclamations of what the time of day really meant: “Last week at this time, it was one,” he would remark, or “This time next week it’ll be seven.” And shuffling into the kitchen on the winter solstice from the dark living room, squinting into the feeble light over the kitchen sink to declare: “Well, the days are getting longer now.”
Despite this, my parents’ house was the one place where I never felt rushed. I knew I’d wake up slow, but early, with the sun, and be greeted with strong, black coffee and the smell of bacon or sausage or (on special days) creamy hamburger gravy and the unfolding of a time-slowing breakfast worthy of 100 calendars on the walls. And the great horned owl on the bird clock over the refrigerator (the one my dad could not reach) always called out his deep, cooing hoots at midday to announce that a good lunch was nearly ready and that “Gunsmoke” would be coming on.
It’s a funny thing about time — even if you try, you can’t hurry it and you can’t hold onto it. My time with my parents was forever and fleeting. And I’ll keep making their food, in my three-calendar kitchen, for as long as I can.
