Butter Beans for the Soul

By Joe Adams

"I know a lot of people swear by the mysterious healing power of chicken soup. But I think they are mainly Yankees. Here in the South, a mess of butter beans is what we look to for physical and spiritual rejuvenation. They're a sure cure for the blues."

Joe Adams is a columnist for the prestigious North Carolina newspaper, The Gaston Gazette. Butter Beans for the Soul is a collection of his hilarious editorials for people with small-town hearts.

A sampling of butter bean substitutes for the weary spirit include: RC Cola and Moonpies Singing, even if you stink Touring families of midgets And, especially for fans of Dr. Atkins, the pig-eating diet.

Butter Beans for the Soul also clears up some of life's most problematical questions. Wondering how to fast from fast food? Concerned about growing hair like a man? What dogs are best for the deaf? Joe Adams has the answers in one convenient location.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 4, 2004
• ISBN: 9780595750696

Joe Adams

Joe Adams has been a Christian and Expositor of the Bible for over fifty years. He is the author of such books as The Scriptures, A Verse-by-Verse Commentary of the New Testament; Journey Into Eternity, a biblical exposition into the future; and Parable By Parable, a study of the parables spoken by Jesus. Joe presents a unique writing style that is in-depth yet easy to understand by people of all ages and educational levels. He is a member of Big Valley Grace Community Church in Modesto, California.

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Butter Beans for the Soul

Joe Adams

iUniverse Star

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Butter Beans for the Soul

All Rights Reserved © 2002, 2004 by Joe Adams

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

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For all my family members and many dear friends who keep me laughing

Contents

Introduction

Taste Buds Never Forget

America’s First Convenience Store

Some Things Don’t Travel Well

Beware of Hollywood Midgets

Sing, Even If You Stink

Silence is Golden

The Youngest Gigolo

Comfort Foods

When it’s O.K. to Lie

The Pig-Eating Diet

When I Get to Heaven

Birds of the Feather

Our First Car

The Summer Visitor

The Arrival of TV (and Lava Lamps)

Teachers Whose Lessons Stayed with Me

Where Barbecue is a Noun

Which Twin Has the Toni?

Yearning to Drive a Big Rig

Give My Regards to Main Street

No Business Like Show Business

Chicken Every Sunday

The Prince of Gastonia

I’m Glad to be A Senior

On a Blue Highway Going Anyplace But Home

Visiting the King

Cotton in My Blood

Nap Time

Proud to be A Linthead

Great Grandfatherhood

Mean People

When Dallas Had More

Churches Than Stores

Singing the Praises of Unsung Heroes

Dogs for the Deaf

How do Airplanes Fly Anyway?

California People Just aren’t Like Us

Undertaking A Career

Fasting from Fast-food

Growing Hair Like a Man

A Boy and His Toys

Introduction

I know a lot of people swear by the mysterious healing power of chicken soup. But I think they are mainly Yankees. Here in the South, a mess of butter beans is what we look to for physical and spiritual rejuvenation. They’re uplifting. They’re a sure cure for the blues.

It is my hope that the stories you find in these pages will be uplifting, too. They are short for sure because they first appeared as a series of newspaper columns in The Gaston Gazette in North Carolina. People clamored to have them as a book. (Did you just laugh out loud? Two of my cousins clamored. Besides, you haven’t gotten to the good part yet. And let me remind you that The Gaston Gazette is a well-respected newspaper. True, it’s not The New York Times. But the Gazette prints a regional edition of The New York Times on the very same press they use for the Gazette. That ought to count for something.)

I started writing the columns to amuse my cousins in North Carolina. To my pleasant surprise, they amused a number of other people who grew up in small towns or wished they had. I think we all have small-town hearts, so I hope this collection will amuse you wherever you may be.

Joe Adams

Taste Buds Never Forget

I ‘m not bragging about this, but I have eaten in some truly fine restaurants. Mighty fine indeed.

But if you haven’t had the opportunity to experience fine cuisine, I wouldn’t worry about it because the things that my taste buds always bring me back to are things you’ve probably enjoyed.

I just don’t think there is anything better than a bowl of butter beans, unless it’s a bowl of pinto beans with some diced up onions on top. Or maybe some crumbled-up cornbread mixed in with them.

Almost anything in the bean family satisfies my buds, including pork and beans, although I would never actually eat those little squares of white fat except by accident. Big fat butter beans, served hot or cold. Navy beans, too. And all the bean family members are filled with healthy protein.

Greens are sort of like beans. You can name some that are better than other kinds, but you can’t name any that aren’t good. I like collards, spinach, turnip greens, and I like them with or without vinegar.

I love creamed corn. I don’t ever remember eating corn on the cob when I was growing up. My mother said, Pigs eat corn on the cob, not people. My job was to shuck the corn and brush it good. Then she would cut the kernels off the cob and scrape the cobs to get all the juice. My wife claims my mother spoiled me, but as best I remember, everybody ate their corn that way-except for my grandfather’s pigs, who preferred it on the cob.

A day without grits was like a day without sunshine. There was always a pot of grits on the stove in the morning when I got up. I can still hear my father’s daily greeting: Get out of bed and come in here and get yourself a bowl of grits, son. You don’t want to blow away today. He never tired of saying that, and I never blew away.

We didn’t eat a lot of meat, I suspect that it’s because we didn’t have a lot of money. We ate chickens out of our own backyard, plus we had bacon and sausage thanks to my grandfather’s farm, where my cousins and I used to help him at butchering time. You would think this experience might have changed my mind about pork, but there’s hardly a part of a pig I wouldn’t eat if it were dressed properly. And I don’t recall that there were any parts of the pig that didn’t get eaten or go into making something that looked presentable.

We ate bologna sandwiches, when we could afford bologna. But if we couldn’t afford it, we were just as happy with a big slice of fresh tomato and mayonnaise between slices of white bread. And if we didn’t have bologna or tomatoes, we sometimes had a Duke’s mayonnaise sandwich. When we moved away from the area, we couldn’t find Duke’s in the grocery store. So when we would came back to visit, we would get a whole case of it to take home.

We ate canned meats, and I still like them. Spam Vienna sausages, potted meat. However, I would strongly advise you not to read the labels on any of these products.

In the fruit family, we ate mainly peaches—fresh off the tree in season, then canned with syrup once the peach season had passed. There is nothing better than a fresh ripe peach, the juice running down your arm and dripping off your elbow. You had to go out in the yard to eat them or stand over the sink.

Blackberries are a favorite, too. I suspect that I loved blackberries so much because of the effort involved in picking them. You would get scratches all over your arms and legs, and every time you would reach deep into a big clump of bushes to get a cluster of berries, you’d be sure a snake was going to bite you. By the time you were ready to eat blackberry cobbler, you felt like you truly deserved it. The same was true for homemade ice cream. All that cranking! I was always ready to pull up the dasher at the slightest resistance, but my father would make me keep cranking until no human could turn it. Then we had to let it sit. That was the hardest part—knowing there was ice cream waiting inside but having to wait and wait before we could dig in.

I hardly remember us having store-bought desserts, except for those oatmeal pies with white filling. But we sure had plenty of homemade stuff that my taste buds fondly remember: banana pudding, coconut pies and cakes, chocolate pies with meringue.

They say that taste buds die as you get older. Sometimes I feel so fat I think I should kill them off myself. But I’m sure even if they were all dead, they would still remember: white gravy, biscuits, chicken and dumplings, and all the rest of the good stuff.

America’s First Convenience Store

Fats’ Shack sat over in the woods on a knoll near Ranlo Mill. Fats spelled his name like it was plural, and he was big enough to be plural.

There were three or four well-worn dirt paths from various parts of the mill village and they all converged at Fats’ front door. There was a dirt road over there too, but not too many people drove over.

Fats’ was inhabited by men. No self-respecting woman would ever be caught inside, nor any girl over 14. If the women needed something badly, they would send a boy or their husbands. As I grew older, I came to realize that Fats’ Shack was also the social scene for certain people in the village. My mother called them good-for-nothings and no-gooders. Fats could have gotten rich if he had known about franchising. He could have become the Colonel Sanders of convenience stores if he had cleaned himself up a bit.

Fats’ was the kind of place that didn’t carry anything that was good for you—probably the reason it was so popular, I suspect. He had snuff, cigarettes, chewing tobacco, Vienna sausage, potted meat, Spam and a wide variety of dopes. That’s what we called sodas back then, dopes. Everybody believed they were addictive, thus the name. Fats didn’t sell beer because it was against the law back then, although I’m not at all sure something wasn’t sold from under the counter to certain people.

Fats had an ice box full of all kinds of dopes-Coca-Cola, Double Cola (twice as much for your money, and only a nickel at that), Pepsi-Cola, Nehi, RC. In the South we were always noted for consuming RC Colas, and Moon Pies. These two went together like salt and pepper. A friend from Up North was visiting me once and we went over to Fats’ Shack for a Moon Pie and RC Cola. He said he only wanted a Moon Pie. He had never had one, so I explained that you had to buy a Moon Pie and an RC Cola because there was no way in the world a human being could swallow a bit of Moon Pie without having a swig of RC Cola to wash it down. Sometimes it took two swigs.

To be honest, when I was young I wasn’t crazy about going over to Fats’ Shack. The men who hung around over there, chewing tobacco and spitting, loved to see me coming. In the summertime, they sat out on the porch or hunkered in the yard. In the wintertime they were inside around a pot-bellied stove. They teased me unmercifully. Probably because they knew it made me mad. I can’t even remember what they said, but they taunted me from the time I got there until I left.

I wasn’t a sissy, but I probably looked worth teasing. My mother made a lot of my clothes, especially my shirts. She made them out of colorful, patterned flour sacks. Bags of flour came in sacks back then, so women would be tempted to buy the flour