Home Grown

Picture This

Adventures in leveling up a home

 

By Cynthia Adams

As the homeowners run errands, a TV Land remodeling team sneaks in and transforms their grubby home.

Junk is hurled out and carpet ripped up! But guess what else? Someone eventually has to hang the damn artwork.

Inspired, I launched our own home refresh, reorienting furniture, dragging sofas and chairs from one room to another.

Which eventually necessitated moving artwork. Picture hanging inevitably involves hammering nails into our plaster walls, something that hasn’t always gone well in the past.

Nails are trouble with a capital T.

Trouble, as when a construction worker consulted a dentist, who found a six-inch nail in the roof of his mouth, shot clear into his brain. (No doubt, he had been farting away with a nail gun.) 

The dentist – also male – congratulated him that if you had to have a nail in the brain, his was lodged in the ideal place.

Strangely, picture rehanging seemed to suddenly interest my husband for one reason: a new laser level. He ripped it from the package, casting a glowing red line, like Star Wars weaponry. I wanted to rehang the pair of pictures, not destroy them. 

He hung the first. “’Bout right?”  he muttered manly, nails held in his mouth, eyeing the second. 

Then he placed the fist-sized gizmo onto the wall. The red line snaked around the corner, leading into the hallway. 

Grunting slightly, he held the second picture wire by yet another gadget. 

“Now,” he announced, squinting appraisingly, “I will align the next picture.”

The red laser was so mesmerizing I fell to thinking of ways to harness its powers. Before suggesting things that required aligning, like the washing machine, my husband commanded, “Now!”

“Now what?!”

“Now you must help me determine if the second frame aligns properly with the first.”

Well, duh! It suddenly seemed that the project was tipping unfairly from he who possessed fancy tools to me, who possessed only naked vision.

As I spied with my little eyes, the pictures appeared altogether wonky.

“Why aren’t you helping?” he complained.

“Helping how?”

“Can’t you make sure the pictures are STRAIGHT?” He perched on the top of a chair, dangling the second picture from the picture hanging tool. “Look, I can’t hold this much longer,” he panted.

“Hmm,” I said uncertainly.

“Hmm – what?” he shouted. “Is it STRAIGHT?”

“Isn’t that what the laser thingy is for?” I retorted. 

He climbed down from the chair, fixing me with a stare.  “It probably IS. But…” he floundered. “I didn’t . . .”

A long pause. 

“. . . read the instructions before I hung the first picture.”

Taking the picture from his hands, I gave him a dirty look.

He shot the laser around the room, taking aim at a sleeping schnauzer.

“Stop it!”  I commanded.

Sheepishly turning off the laser, he chewed his lip. 

“What good is that thing?” I scoffed.

“Well. It’s a great tool,” he retorted.

With our bare eyes and hands, heaving and fussing, we managed to get the heavy pictures reasonably realigned.

After which, I noticed a series of braille-like puncture marks in the wall.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

“Uh, that’s where I affixed the laser level to the wall,” he replied.

“You mean it makes holes in the wall!?” 

“That’s the only thing I don’t like about it,” he answered. Dead serious. 

“Well, I never!” I huffed, before suggesting we plug the holes with toothpaste, a trick I’d read somewhere. He scowled and retreated to the basement. As I repaired to the bathroom for toothpaste, I grabbed my sonic toothbrush, too. I returned to find my husband swiping paint across the puncture holes. 

Removing the pulsing toothbrush, I gurgled through the froth, “Look!”

“What now?”

The paint he’d dabbed over the puncture marks was a different shade.

Next year, I swear, he’s getting the Handyman Paint Matcher for his birthday. OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Home Grown

Cooking Up Mischief

Stewing over the last laugh

By Cynthia Adams

There was much joking in my childhood home, mostly inspired by our father, a trickster of the first order.

Little — certainly not religion nor politics — was off limits but for an unfunny gray area: Ted Koppel and food. 

Newsman Ted Koppel was my father’s unassailable source. After Koppel reported on sex trafficking, my father was apoplectic when a younger sister and I booked a trip to Cancun. Our refusal to cancel our trip, belittling Koppel’s reportage, outraged Dad.

Another untouchable? To even slightly malign our mother’s cooking, caused Dad to swiftly veer from ha-ha to oh hell no! 

My father also held sacrosanct the Old Hickory House, a dimly-lit Charlotte roadhouse on North Tryon serving cue and, to my sister and I, decent Brunswick stew. 

A Yelp reviewer wrote, “Looks like the kind of place your parents’ doctor/lawyer/accountant met his receptionist for ‘overtime’ work back in the ’60s.’”

It was unwittingly campy, untouched by market research or a decorator’s hand, with an unchanging atmosphere that no one would mistake for a chain. After an hour spent inside one of its cave-like booths, emerging into the light of day was nearly blinding. 

One Saturday, Dad called saying he was coming through Greensboro en route to his farm in Rogersville, Tennessee. My older sister happened to be visiting, and I was warming stew for her, knowing our shared passion for Hickory House’s smoky, perfectly cornmeal-thickened stew.

I quickly thawed another quart for our Dad, telling my sister I was going to have some fun.

On arrival, he strode directly to the stove.

“Mmmmm! Is that what I think it is?”

I grinned.

Dad gave a weak smile. I lacked cooking cred.

He warned, “You know I will have to be honest with you.”

I nodded, handing him a generous bowlful. He raised a small spoonful to his lips, hesitated, then ate heartily.

He shook his dark, full hair, proudly styled into an Elvis Presley tidal wave effect. “Old girl, you’ve done it! It’s as good as Hickory House’s!”

Seriously? I was stunned into silence. My sister earnestly studied the tabletop as if ancient runes lay there.

“How did you do it?” he pressed.

“Beginner’s luck, I guess,” muttering a lie that caused me to flush red.

My sister’s eyes were huge as he ate two bowls. My sister and father, sharing our table without our extended, large family, was a first.

Unbeknownst to us that day, it was also a last.

Dad would not survive another year, suffering a fatal heart attack at 61.

My sister cornered me at our father’s casket as I weepily marveled at his shocking gray hair. 

“The funeral home washed out the Grecian Formula,” I whispered. She swatted me, hissing, “Shut up!”   

Her face darkened. “You are unreal!  You never owned up, did you?”

“To what?”

“Lying to Daddy. You let him die thinking you made that damn stew!”

She was always the good cook — not me.

I nodded sheepishly. 

“I thought he would know I can’t cook!” I protested.

My sister was unconvinced. “Face it,” she said. “You loved it. You really and truly got him.”

I leaned in, whispering to his now expressionless face, “Daddy, I’m sorry I lied about the stew.”

My sister’s big heart failed too, and she would follow him to an early grave. Other doors closed to the past. The Old Hickory House ceased operating its open pit after 60 years of roadhouse wonderment.

And somewhere in the Great Hereafter, my father believes his lying daughter learned to cook — unless my sister set him straight.  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Home Grown

Pop-Tarts for Turfnauts

The Space Age breakfast pastry continues to orbit

By Cynthia Adams

Jerry Seinfeld is making a movie about Pop-Tarts.

What took him so long?

Since they first hit grocery shelves in 1964, Pop-Tarts remain a smash Kellogg’s hit. In the brand’s own words, they were the original “breakfast treat!”

Who doesn’t like a treat?

Flavors, mind you, frequently rotated. As American Frankenfood rose to prominence, the product soared. Because, well, you toast Pop-Tarts (or not) and that’s it! Pop them straight into your mouth or lunch box. It was a hybrid pastry/cookie, which, as Seinfeld says, couldn’t be stale, because it had never actually been fresh.

Fresh-ish would suffice.

Americans were going places — like the moon!

Heading into new frontiers, astronauts needed transportable food-like things that would hold up another 10 lightyears. So did we land-locked turfnauts (a word I just invented), who might have to hit the fallout shelters if the Russians dropped the big one.

1964 was a seminal year for the power of design and expediency. Things in tubes (Pringles!) populated grocery shelves, along with Ruffles potato chips, Doritos and Bugles.

A sugary cereal with marshmallow bits and colored charms, Lucky Charms, debuted, branded by a daft Leprechaun.

But Pop-Tarts lofted itself into the public consciousness, rocketing off shelves with spacey je ne sais quoi. As Seinfeld said in The New York Times, they expanded possibilities from toast, cereal and frozen-orange-juice-in-a-can. (OJ was passé once Tang hit.)

Revert to a childlike POV: Loosened from a space-race inspired wrapper, Pop-Tarts looked like something you could breakfast on while orbiting the cosmos, washed down with a squirt of Tang!

Nobody knew what was actually in it, but that stopped no one from eating it — ever.

Pop-Tarts, brought to you by the health-nut founded Kellogg’s, grasped that youthful desire to start the morning the way any child in the world likes best: sugary dough stuffed with a corn-syrup filling.

When Kellogg’s execs heard that Post, their main rival, had a toaster pastry ready for market, they hustled. (Post got lost in the weeds testing names with the lamest focus group ever. Country Squares won.)

Kellogg’s understood the stakes, and drew inspiration from Andy Warhol, the king of pop culture. Some say he even consulted on name and packaging.

If Warhol did for Kellogg’s pastry-in-a-box what he did for Campbell’s tomato soup, “Why just think!” Kellogg’s people whispered.

Country Squares beat Pop-Tarts to the market, and should have beaten the cinnamon-sugar stuffing out of them.

But Post’s stodgy name had less panache than Country Crock butter.

Post rebranded Country Squares as Toast ’Ems. But too little, too late.

Within two weeks Pop-Tarts sold out, and Kellogg’s ran super apologetic ads. “Oops! We Goofed,” read its ads. The breakfast brand had underestimated the power of food with an unlimited shelf life paired with a Pop Art icon’s influence.

Kellogg’s later tested a Pop-Tarts cereal.

To this day, Kellogg’s sells “billions of Pop-Tarts a year,” according to Andrew Smith in Fast Food and Junk Food: An Encyclopedia of What We Love to Eat. Its best seller? Cinnamon brown sugar, one of four original flavors.

In 2001, the U.S. rained free Pop-Tarts and herb rice on Afghanistan by air — a PR effort. The Pop-Tarts? A show of what good will and ingenuity looks like from people who have loved that food-thingy forever.

“Sales still soar,” writes Huffington Post.

And Warhol? He endures, too, like Pop-Tarts. “Marilyn” just sold for a hot $195 mil. OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.