Tales from Exit 22, by Al Batt

There are ghosts. I walk about a cemetery — St. Peter’s. There is a crowd. My parents, in-laws, friends and neighbors are buried there.

I see ghosts. My memory riles them up. I place a stone on the tombstone of my parents — a sign that I had visited and remembered. I remember mother asking me what kind of birthday cake I wanted. I wanted a birthday pie. I remember telling father, a lover of Allis-Chalmers tractors, that the school had changed its colors so that the boys could wear John Deere caps to graduation. Memories are ghosts that I’m pleased to contemplate.

Sour dreams

There is a dreamcatcher on the wall near our bed. It resembles a miniature basketball net. According to legend, good dreams pass through the net to comfort a sleeping person. Bad dreams become tangled in the net and remain trapped until dawn, when they perish.

I thought the dreamcatcher had slipped up. It was the middle of the night. I was sleeping the sleep of the innocent and uninformed.

Suddenly, something howling like a bad transmission interrupted my sleep. Someone had summoned the flying monkeys. It was no dream. It was the loud meowing of a cat.

“Shut your kibble-hole!” I growled in a kind and caring manner. I had run to the end of my chain and barked.

Back to sleep I went. I knew the path.

Once again, my sleep ended in noise. This time, it was that “hoopa” sound cats make before they cough up a hairball. I jumped from bed and searched for the feline. After stubbing a toe only once, I found the cat napping as if nothing had happened. That “hoopa” would make the perfect sound for an alarm clock. No one ever owned by a cat would be able to sleep through it.

 

Old time radio

A friend maintains that we share too much — thanks to cellphones, email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

We’ve always shared a great deal. When I was a boy, there were only three TV channels. You couldn’t tape a program to watch later or zap the commercials. There weren’t many varieties of breakfast cereals, so we shared TV channels and cereals. We shared plenty. Radio offered more choices. I missed the golden age of radio, but I’ve listened to replays. TV had taken most of the programs, but I could listen to the old radio shows in reruns.

I enjoyed listening to “Fibber McGee and Molly,” “Jack Benny,” “Fred Allen,” “Lum & Abner,” “The Great Gildersleeve,” “Pat Novak For Hire,” “Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy,” “Red Skelton,” “Bob Hope,” “Stan Freberg,” “Abbott & Costello,” etc.

I listened less intently to “The Green Hornet,” “Suspense,” “The Shadow,” “Gunsmoke,” “Boston Blackie,” “Inner Sanctum” and “The Lone Ranger.”

My mother spoke fondly of listening to “Art Linkletter’s House Party” in which Art asked kids from Los Angeles grammar schools questions like, “What does your mommy do?” and to Arthur Godfrey who strummed the ukulele, had “Seems Like Old Times” for a theme song,  and was sponsored by Lipton Tea. Mom told of marching around the breakfast table on orders from “Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club.”

The first radio I recall was a Philco console with a wooden cabinet stationed in our living room. It wasn’t steam-powered, but it was old. Photos or other prized possessions perched on top of a doily resting on the radio. The Philco had more knobs and dials than necessary. My first radio was a used Arvin, AM only with a shatterproof plastic cabinet, advertised as “Velvet Voice Radio.”

Later, I added a GE transistor radio to my stable. The old radio shows gave wings to my imagination.

Pasty

I ate a pasty in Meadowlands up in St. Louis County. It was delicious. A pasty is a pastry case filled with beef, sliced or diced potato, rutabaga (swede) and onion. It’s seasoned with salt and pepper. It’s made by placing the uncooked filling on a flat pastry circle, and folding it to wrap the filling, crimping the edge at the side or top to form a seal.

The result is a raised semicircular package that is then baked. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the pasty became popular with Cornish workers. Tin miners found it to be a complete meal that could be carried easily, eaten without cutlery, remained warm for several hours, and if it did get cold, it could be warmed on a shovel over a candle.

A pasty is a filling comfort food even if pasty rhymes with nasty and not tasty.

 

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.