Hayter article for June 21, 2020

Father’s Day 

            Father’s Day snuck up on me this year. Over the last few weeks, I didn’t recognize a single advertisement urging me to buy something for Father’s Day. I’m not saying there weren’t any ads. I just didn’t recognize any. I don’t get out much.

            Even though my dad passed away in 1980, I often think about him, as I’m sure you do your father. Only, I doubt many of you call your dad, “Father.” To my knowledge, only “Jim Anderson” from “Father Knows Best” was greeted as “Father” by his kids. Personally, I just wouldn’t want a Father for a Dad.

            I actually called my dad, “Daddy”, until I started college. Then he became “Dad”. His name was Faris, an unusual spelling of an unusual name. I called Mom, “Mother” when I was young, but later referred to her by the Comanche name, “Cheecatchawa”, translated, “Stands with a Belt.” I only got three spankings from Faris, but probably three a week from Elsie. On occasion, three a day.

            Without question, Dad is easier for me to write about than Mom. That sounds weird because I was so much closer to Mom than Dad. While Mom screamed, spanked, and threatened us a lot, Dad never screamed or threatened. He never once told me what would happen if I disobeyed him. I just assumed he would kill me. A few months after Dad told Dennis and me not to leave our bicycles in the driveway, he came home from work to find  Dennis’ bike blocking his path to the garage.

            Well, when Dad came into the kitchen, he slapped his lunch box on the table and got after me for leaving my bicycle on the driveway. I was surprised he didn’t recognize that my bicycle was smaller and the fenders were different than Dennis’. I thought he should’ve known that. After all, he’s the one who put it together.

            Regardless, Dad had established that it was my bike and he was obviously not in a mood to be challenged. I was almost certain he was going to whip me, so I tried unsuccessfully to hold back my tears while apologizing and promising never to do it again, I don’t know if it was the tears that calmed him down or what, but he just said, “Okay,” and left it at that. In truth, it wasn’t the fear of getting whipped by dad that set me off, it was the realization that he was disappointed in me…  for something Dennis had done! I always wanted to please that man, but have little recollection of ever doing that.

            I should mention that Faris Hayter was an only child. When he was about six, his mother (Pearl) left. Apparently, she did not enjoy the thought of being poor. Who does? So, Dad was raised by his Dad with some help from his Dad’s old maid sister, Aunt Mary. I didn’t know what “old maid” meant, but I assumed it an honorable title because Aunt Mary was so sweet to us when we visited. During the Great Depression, Grandpa Ed was a sharecropper on an elderly widow’s farm. Dad was 12 at the beginning of the Depression and helped Grandpa on the farm.

            About six years later Dad met Elsie Teegarden, the finest woman in the history of womanhood. The two of them raised seven kids with whatever money dad could bring home. The only job Faris ever enjoyed was being the joint-owner of “390 Well Servicing Company”. His old business card is in a frame to my left. -- By the way, “390” was not only the name of the company but the company’s phone number. Pretty nifty, you ask me.

            I’ve told you a couple of times how Dad lost his share in the company as a result of a coin toss. A coin toss that caused Dad to bring the family to Texas, where their fifth child was born. (He’s the guy writing this thing.)  Along with his brief stint as a business owner, dad was a roughneck, a carpenter, and a craftsman. He was a Stillman in a refinery, up until the time he retired in ‘79. I wish I had known what a Still-man was, because in elementary school when the teacher asked me what my father did, I could’ve said, “My daddy, runs one of the units at a catalytic cracking structure that breaks up crude oil into its different petroleum products.” All I knew was that he worked on the “Cat-Cracker” at Crown Refinery.

            I’ve told the story several times about Dad making me a desk, but I think I’ll share the abbreviated portion right now. It was back in ’72 when I decided to quit my job as a forester and go back to college to get a degree in history so I could be a teacher. Some family members thought it stupid to give up a job as an outdoorsman just so I could stand in front of a bunch of kids in a classroom.

            Well, I had just started college at Sam Houston State, when Kay and I came back one weekend to Pasadena to see our parents. After hugging Mom and greeting Dad, I was escorted into the garage where I saw what Dad had built for me. He said, “Well, since you were going back to college, I thought you might need a desk.” While I was proud of the desk, I was especially proud that my returning to school had met with Dad’s approval. It was also the beginning of the time Dad and I would hug. That thought does bring tears to my eyes. 

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hayter.mark@gmail.com

Coffee talk

Hayter article for June 14, 2020

“Coffee Talk”

            A time or two I’ve made fun of people who drink cold-brew or iced-coffee. I mean, what’s the point? When coffee gets cold, you warm it up, you don’t make it colder. Only the Siberian Yakuts drink cold coffee, but that’s because they have to. The whole concept goes against everything that’s American. So we can just add it to the list.

            I tell you that to tell you this, I’ve been drinking cold coffee.“What happened to me?” -- Pretend you asked. I found that I seldom finished a cup of coffee. It would be 71 degrees in the house, but drinking hot coffee made me sweat like a bad dog. (Only bad dogs sweat. Look it up.)  That’s when I put my cup of leftover hot-brewed coffee in the fridge. The next morning, I took a sip of the cold coffee and, son of a gun, I didn’t care for it. -- “Is this what people are going gaga over?” I asked myself. (Not audibly. I seldom do that anymore.) 

            That’s when I set about researching the cold coffee phenomena. I learned so much. Here, let me test you. -- What is the difference between cold-brew and iced-coffee? -- Whoa, half of you know your coffee. Yes, iced-coffee is brewed hot and you chunk ice in it or stick it in the fridge. Cold-brew is when you throw ground coffee into a pitcher, jar, or cup of water and steep it in the fridge or just leave it on the counter overnight. That way it never meets the heat. Without the heat, it’s going to be smoother tasting, which some people prefer.

            I see I just lost several of you who don’t drink coffee. ,lop0 Tell you what, skip down to the part where I start talking about aluminum foil. I’ll get back to you in a minute. -- Okay, that leaves only you, Shelby. So, hang with me here. When heat is introduced to the coffee bean or ground coffee beans, it makes coffee taste bitter. “Bitter” is a flavor natural to coffee. But, you don’t want too much bitter. If your brewing temp is over 205 degrees your coffee is going to be really bitter, good only for lumberjacks. I’d tell you how heat makes coffee bitter, but the explanation involves chemistry. What do you think, Shelby? Right, let’s forget it.

            Regular brewed coffee has a great aroma, even for people who don’t like coffee. Cold-brew is absent of aroma. That’s because it takes heat to make the coffee grounds give off that wonderful coffee smell. It has to do with chemistry. The advantage of cold brew is that it is much smoother, less bitter, and less acidic. And, it doesn’t make you sweat as much. Of course, good dogs can drink all they want and still not sweat. I’ve already established that.

            The only significant difference between cold-brew coffee grounds and hot-brew coffee is that cold-brew has coarser grounds. Scientifically speaking, a canister of large-ground coffee beans should cost less than an equal-sized canister of fine ground, because it takes more beans to turn coffee into a powder. The finer the ground, the stronger the cup of coffee, because of, uh, chemistry. If customers think that cold-brew coffee has special beans with expensive additives to make it brew without heat, they’re willing to pay more for it.  If something is more expensive, it’s likely a better product. It’s an economic acumen. (Shelby, I’m confident I won’t use that word again for the rest of the year.)

            Which brings us to aluminum. YouTube is ripe with “life” hack videos. A life hack is “an efficient method for doing or managing a day-to-day task or activity.” You’ll see an example of one in my kitchen. Follow me. -- Okay, look at these bananas. Yes, that’s aluminum foil wrapped around the stems. It’s a hack. The foil is supposed to slow the rotting of your bananas. I’ll let you know if it works. -- Sure, grab a banana. I’ll finish the experiment another time.  

            I learned about aluminum while researching cold brew coffee. Each time Google sends me to a place, the margins of the site are full of interesting photos. Each represents a place where you can find fascinating stuff. It might be movie star impersonators, or a combination of the greatest catches in NFL football, or a picture of someone with aluminum foil wrapped around the tips of each finger. I had already seen the impersonators and football catches, so I went with the foil. Three percent of the earth’s crust has aluminum in it. The crust is 18 miles deep, so some of the aluminum is hard to get to. It’s not much of a problem with Reynolds because they’re spending money to have people make aluminum hacks and put them on YouTube.

            I got to see 30 hacks for aluminum foil. None of them involved foil on fingertips. That was just to draw me to the site. I did see stuff about putting foil behind your router to boost your connection. I haven’t tried that yet. We’re low on foil, but now the bananas are gone I can use banana foil for my router experiment.  

            I ended up going all over the place to find the hidden mystery of coffee bean grounds. That’s when all of the hacks started popping up. Speaking of which, if you have a sore throat eat marshmallows. That’s my favorite. I can’t wait until I get sick.

            Do you see how researching something on the internet can increase your intelligence a lot. Hey, look it up on the Internet if you don’t believe me. Tell you what. When we finish reading the paper, let’s all go to Google and key in“Siberian Yakuts” and see where we end up.  We’ll meet back and compare notes over coffee. The kind lumberjacks drink.

 

 

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hayter.mark@gmail.com

Bad Ju Ju

Hayter article for June 7, 2020

“The Mysterious Pie Day”

           

            The fifth greatest feeling a suburbanite can have occurs immediately after he or she has mowed the lawn, weeded around everything that’s been stationary for over a month, and edged along the sidewalk, driveway, and porch. I just finished doing all of that. Ask me how I feel.

            Before I get carried away, I must confess that Kay is the one who mows the lawn. Hey, she enjoys doing it. We’ve got a good self-propelled mower that will be even better when Amazon sends me the air filter and spark plug I ordered back in April. I’d go to Home Depot and get ‘em myself, but as soon as I did, my order would mysteriously show up. While I don’t believe in fate, I do believe in bad juju. That stuff is all over the place.

            Take Kay’s rolling pin. Yesterday, Kay decided to make a combo cherry and peach pie. I didn’t know it was possible, but I was on board. Kay gets in a pie-making mood in early June every four years. I do not fault her one bit. Marie Calender’s Razzleberry Pie is my preference, but Kay was all gung-ho to pie-bake, so I was the encourager. Kay had cherries, peaches, and Pilsbury’s refrigerated crust. What she didn’t have was her rolling pin. I couldn’t be bothered, because I was busy using a narrow, plastic straw to de-pit cherries. You ought to try that someday.

            After the cherry pit massacre, I hid in my study. I was working on a project when I heard Kay ask me if I knew where her “shisipim” was. -- Do you remember me telling you that Kay can’t yell. She’s incapable of screaming, hollering, or even raising her voice more than a quarter octave. (In physics, a quarter octave is called -- “not much”.) That’s a good thing… until Kay tries to communicate with me from another part of our modest-sized home. When she has something to tell me, she verbalizes it with no apparent concern as to where I might be located. I would get after her for that, but I’ve been told I’ve got my own foibles.

            So, I left my computer and went to the kitchen to ask Kay to repeat herself. -- “Oh, I didn’t mean for you to come in here.” -- I get a twitch on the right side of my face when she says stuff like that. -- She then asked me where I put her rolling pin. Where I put it? -- I asked her if she was looking for the plastic one or the hand-crafted wooden one. She said the wooden one, which was good because I had tossed her plastic one into the recycle bin back in November of 2018. It’s now near the bottom of the recyclable landfill.

            I summoned up all my courage and told her that I had moved her wooden rolling pin because it was always rolling around in the cabinet. I put it in a place that was easy to remember, only I couldn’t remember where the place was. Not to worry. I would find it.

             I looked all over the house. Got out a step ladder to look above the cabinets in the kitchen and in each closet. I even looked in the box where she keeps the Christmas wrapping paper, thinking I might have stuffed it inside one of the cardboard rolls. (I kid you not.)

            May I remind you that Kay will go four years without needing a rolling pin? Still, she made sure to remind me that the pin was made by Gene Gore, our friend at church, the greatest wood craftsman there ever was and ever will be. (I borrowed that from “The Natural”.)  After a couple of tedious hours, Kay gave me a strained smile and told me that she wasn’t mad, she was just upset. There’s apparently a slight difference between the two. I assured her that I would get up early and look in the garage and storage shed for the pin. She told me not to worry, that it would show up when it was ready. I had trouble sleeping that night. The last time I looked at the clock it was 3:30 in the a.m.

            When I woke up I went to the kitchen for toast. I wanted to have something on my stomach before attacking the garage.  After I got out a piece of bread, I opened the drawer to get a new twist tie -- because the one that’s on the bread disappears every single, blab-spitting’ time I get out a piece of bread. -- I apologize for that outburst. -- When I opened the drawer, I had to move the rolling pin out of the way to get to the twist ties. I’m not joking! The rolling pin was in plain sight looking right at me. Not only that, but it appeared to be smirking.

            I don’t know how many times Kay and I had looked in that drawer the previous day. And there is absolutely no telling how many times we had been in the drawer during the 13 months since I “hid” the rolling pin there.

            You won’t believe this, but I occasionally exaggerate. It happens, but not very often. -- What? No, I heard something. -- Anyway, I am not making this rolling pin story up. There were some mysterious goings-on in our last house, and it’s apparently followed us here. It doesn’t frighten me, but, just once, it would be nice if whatever it is would prank me by weeding, edging, and mowing the lawn. -- But noooo! I get the “bad” juju.

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hayter.mark@gmail.com