I wrote in another post about the aftereffects of my sister
and i going to Girl Scout Camp. This is
possibly something that happened while I was there, or it might have happened
another year, when I went, but S-2 didn't.
I suspect that it was the year that I went to the
"primitive" camp. By primitive
they meant that we had to pitch tents instead of sleeping in permanent half
tents with raised wooden floors and demi-sides. We had to dig our own latrine
instead of using the permanent toilets.
We had to rig a camp shower instead of . . . You get the idea.
Oh, and we cooked food over a campfire and prepped at a
table we lashed together ourselves. The
camp provided the twine. It was, you
know, camping instead of going to camp.
I had been camping before and was an introvert raised by hermits, so it
was right up my alley.
The other campers ate in a mess hall, with the regular
amount of Girl Scout singing before and after meals. The cooks liked us because they didn't have
to cook for us. All they had to do was
pack up boxes of food cans and boxes and packets for us to pick up. One night
there were a few big, square trays of cheesecake left over from dinner, and
they slipped them to out councilors, who were up at the main camp for
something.
It was my first experience with cheesecake. It was probably from a mix. We didn't care.
It was grub.
My Dad wouldn't let us buy cheesecake for dessert. He
proclaimed that it was too rich, in a voice that implied that therefor people
with unjaded taste buds would find it vile.
Out taste buds were definitely unjaded. We usually weren't allowed to order dessert
at all. Milk with dinner was compulsory
and soda was frowned on.
The cheesecake that night was sweet and had a nice graham
cracker bottom. I provisionally considered
that maybe it wasn't real cheesecake and that maybe it was just impossible for
a jello pudding type mix to be too rich. I'd have to test real cheesecake some
day. Meantime, I think I had five
pieces. There was enough that everyone could.
Later, after I had gone away to college, I tried real
cheesecake. I went on to try many
different types of cheesecake. I can
state definitively that I never found one that was too rich.
But that wasn't what this post was meant to talk about. It also wasn't meant to share the fact that
my father went to his grave never having tasted real maple syrup.
It was a conscience choice on his part. We always used home made syrup. I learned to make it pretty young. You put a cup of sugar in a pan. Then add a half cup of brown sugar. Pour in a cup of water and bring it to a
boil. Stir occasionally as the sugar
dissolves, then turn it off and let it cool.
When it's cool, stir in a teaspoon of vanilla and a quarter
teaspoon of maple flavoring. Put it in
the Tupperware syrup holder. Put the
extra in a small mason jar. Or in our
house, an old peanut butter jar.
That was the syrup that Dad used. Even Mrs. Butterworths was
a corporate trick to fool you into paying more money for an inferior product,
just to show off that you used store bought syrup.
Maple syrup, on the other hand, was a different sort of
trap. It was a good product, but it wasn't anything that anyone really
needed. If a person were to taste it,
and find it to be good, forever after they would remember the taste whenever
they used any kind of syrup. The home
made syrup that was sweet and tasty and economical would become that stuff that
wasn't quite maple syrup.
So he decided to never taste maple syrup, in case he should
like it. That way his regular syrup would
remain a happy treat, complete in itself.
Sorry to digress, but Dad was a pontificator and believed in
the efficacy of repeating certain lessons to impress them on young minds. Must of my memories aren't far from a memory
of Dad going on about something, and the generous pontificating is easier on
the memory than the angry ranting.
But on to the point of the post.
On some occasion, when I was at camp, I got a letter from
home. Dad was the one who wrote the
letters in our family, so it was no surprise that it was from him. It said, "I'm sitting here with pen and
paper. Your mother thinks I'm writing you a letter. She doesn't know, does
she?"
He ranted and pontificated, but he also had a sense of
humor.
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