My Old Man and Emergency Food Preparation

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You would not call my father a worry wart. The future did not exist for him, and present stress and anxiety had no hold on him.

Some might call this serenity and wisdom.

My mother called it lapping up the sauce.

Which was true. Dad was a bartender and never lacked for a companionable glass with his free-handed customers.

Still, he remained just this side of sobriety and managed to carry out his fatherly duties at home -- which consisted of napping on the couch, eating dinner, and watching Gun Smoke while cleaning his fingernails with a cheap pocketknife.

My mother was worry wart enough for the both of them.

"Oh, those Russians are going to get us with an H Bomb!" she'd wail after listening to Walter Cronkite intone the evening news. "Can you imagine what those Red Chinese hordes will do to us when they overrun the country?" she would speculate to no one in particular as dad belched contentedly and lit up another Salem.

Her efforts to have dad dig up a bomb shelter in the backyard proved futile. Dad and tools got along like Senator Joe McCarthy and Joseph Stalin.

She was not reassured by the ancient shotgun he kept in their bedroom closet; a rusty trinket from his days growing up on a South Dakota dry farm, it was more like a blunderbuss that would explode in your face if you were foolish enough to load it with live ammunition.

But she struck a chord with him when it came to emergency food storage.

When she pointed out that a sneak attack on the country might leave us without enough to eat, he swung into action. He brought home a case of pork and beans from the Railroad Salvage store -- where damaged canned goods were sold for mere pennies. As she looked over the dented cans, my mother shook her head and queried "How long do you think you'll be able to stand this stuff?"

I was surprised to see him actually take her words under advisement. His normal reaction would be to tell her she didn't know nothin' from nothin' and to shut up, which would then lead to a shouting match that would rattle the dried putty off the window panes.

"I'll talk to Pickle Joe" he told her thoughtfully.

Being a pourer of suds in a tawdry gin mill, dad was familiar with a host of colorful characters. One of them was a derelict who went by the moniker of Pickle Joe. He made a meager livelihood by swiping garden produce from backyards in the summer and bottling it at his shack near the rail yards on Central Avenue. The consensus was that Pickle Joe was not overly concerned with hygiene.

That summer dad brought home bottles of various vegetables. Carrots. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Even a bottle of rhubarb stalks that appeared to be molting. Mom stuck them in the basement, muttering dire predictions under her breath. But at least her husband was doing SOMETHING.

The bottles began exploding just after Halloween. First the rhubarb detonated; followed by the cukes and tomatoes. The carrots, apparently, contained a stable isotope and never erupted.

After mom got through cleaning up the vegetarian carnage she told dad in no uncertain terms NOT to bring home anything else from Pickle Joe. Ever.

He complied, and lapsed back into his Schlitz-fueled Zen philosophy of letting tomorrow take care of itself.

At least we had that case of pork and beans, should Khrushchev ever make good on his threats.

About the Author:

Tim Torkildson is a noted humor blogger. His work has appeared in the Huffington Post and the New York Times.