Fried Bologna

So tonight for supper I was frying bologna. Mundane, but my son and I both love it. We had it with some canned sweet potatoes and with green beans my mother grew, picked, broke and canned. Good stuff.

And why am I writing about bologna? Because I never eat it without thinking of my father. When I was young, I forget how old, maybe 11 or 12, we went on vacation to Florida. We almost never stayed in motels, and at that point we didn't camp either. We would pull over when Daddy got sleepy and sleep in the car. On this trip we had gone to Isle of Palms for a day, then driven down through Florida. We stopped at Silver Springs, in Ocala, went on the glass bottom boat and the jungle cruise. The picture of us on the jungle cruise boat is still around somewhere. Anyway, we got to Cocoa Beach and Cape Canaveral and before we got a chance to sightsee at all it started pouring down rain. Daddy parked at a store and went inside, bought bread, cheese and unsliced bologna (first time I had seen that) and we ate sandwiches in the car, watching the rain.

We didn't spend a lot of money on these vacations, because I guess we didn't have a lot of extra money. By not staying in motels, we had money for the glass bottom boat. We had a camp stove, and we would stop at picnic areas and cook our meals, so we didn't spend money eating out.

When Matthew and Tracey were younger, and the grocery money had stretched as far as it would go, I would open a jar of tomatoes (grown by my father and canned by my mother), pour them in a pot and add rice and a little chili powder, and then open a jar of green beans (same source) and heat them, and feed my little family. They enjoyed it and didn't think it had anything to do with the empty cabinets in our house. And I knew, as long as my father and mother were alive and able, my children would never be hungry, no matter what happened to me.

My point with all this, which I really had a grasp on as I was frying that bologna tonight, is that money didn't matter then to the family relationships we had. Another thing--as long as my father was awake and driving the car, I slept peacefully in the back. But when he stopped to sleep, I woke up and couldn't sleep as long as we were still. Maybe I was keeping watch, I don't know. But I miss him every minute of every day, and wish I had him back, driving the car.