Home Grown

A Diamette a Dozen

Dialect, diamond chips and decadent desserts

By Cynthia Adams

“There’s someone on the phone saying you won a free Diamette!” Don exclaimed from the kitchen. Grabbing a towel, I clambered out of the tub as he uttered:

“We just need to order a year’s worth of vitamins.”

My South African hubby pronounced this, “VIT-ah-mins.”

He appeared at the bathroom door, a new cordless Radio Shack phone in hand. “She’s on the phone now!” 

Clamping his palm over the receiver he whispered, “What’s a Diamette?”

Slick with bathwater, I visualized a pin-sized diamond chip and mouthed, “NO! Don’t do it!” Did it matter that there was no such thing as a Diamette — it was probably just a clever workaround for some trademark like Diamanté?

Deeply enamored of telephones and TVs, Don emigrated from South Africa, where required government permits for either were challenging. Channeling Elvis, he now wanted them throughout our tiny cottage — so small we could have used cans and strings.

In South Africa, local calls, too, were billed by the minute, so telemarketing was unknown territory.

There were many landmines in the Land of Free Markets. And Don was a total innocent when it came to bogus giveaways and promotions.

“In this country, everything is legal until you’re told it’s not,” he solemnly noted.

I never got the Diamette, whatever it was purported to be.

There was a lot for me to learn, too. Sometimes, our separate realities were exactly as George Bernard Shaw once said: countries divided by a common language.

One evening, we returned from work to a frigid house. The irritable oil furnace, normally belching and rumbling, had gone silent. 

Being handy, Don figured he could fix it. From beneath the house, he shouted, “Bring me a torch!”

I blanched. Wasn’t he from Johannesburg — not the wilds of Borneo?

“That may be something you use back home,” I retorted, “but I would not bring you a lighted torch even if I had one!”

He reappeared upstairs, face smudged, looking annoyed. “I cannot see without a torch!”

We stared, both incredulous.

Don pantomimed, clicking with his thumb: “A torch! A light?”   

A flashlight.

There were more such moments.  “Al-YOU-minium” is his word for foil, the stuff you wrap around baking potatoes.

Born in a land of abundant seafood, Don explained at the market that prawns are a specific crustacean.

“Shrimp differs.” 

The checkout woman bet I “married him for his accent.” I glowered at her.

Afterward, we placed our groceries in the boot (trunk). He patiently explained the bonnet (the hood) and cubbyhole (glove box) as we parsed out automobiles. 

When our furnace died that famous night, Don went in search of a jersey (sweater). My sweatshirt, it turns out, is his sweater. 

“One of those things with a logo on it! Part of a tracksuit,” he explained.  Which I knew, at least then, as a jogging suit. 

Those, I believe, have gone the way of the dodo bird.

We spent months in linguistic bafflement. Just when we were progressing, we visited South Africa for Christmas. Now the tables were turned.

The only snow Don had ever seen was in the Drakensberg Mountains during winter — our summer.  But it seemed South Africans liked nothing better than decorating windows with fake snow and cavorting snowmen as vibrant yellow acacias and tree-sized poinsettias bloomed.   

The family Christmas tree reminded me of Charlie Brown. A pitiable, sorrowful thing.

I resisted snapping a shot to show folks back home, mesmerized by a line of ducks walking a plank into the swimming pool to escape the sweltering heat, while awaiting my first South African holiday dinner. 

For dessert, the tour de force: fruitcake encased in a shell of marzipan, and a flambéed Christmas pudding. Unbeknownst to me, silver heirlooms, lucky tokens, were baked inside. 

I swallowed mine before noting others raking through each morsel.  Mortified, I concealed all evidence and prepared to walk the plank. The Diamette, like the silver token, was a lost cause, and it appeared that in the culture wars between a South African and an overly smug American, so was I.  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Home Grown

Chalk and Cheese

A tale of Dutch — and Southern — hospitality

By Cynthia Adams

There I was, in the Netherlands, shivering in the attic room that a university contact (who called it an “apartment”) had found for me. Hardly an apartment, its highlights were a sink and a tiny window. And it was winter . . . so cold I looked up the meaning of chilblains.

My refuge from the cold room was either the university or the living room, which was also the refuge of my landlady, a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, cat-loving chain smoker who was rather thick in the middle, and favored sensible low heels and navy skirts. I’ll call her Anke. The uniform was a throwback to Anke’s KLM air hostess days, which were the highlight of her life. Laid off long ago, most of Anke’s forays were daily shopping for ciggies, cat food, wine and cheese. 

As time wore on, we began to forge a tenuous relationship. She had resisted at first, given I was, in Anke’s words, “a stupid tourist” renting an overpriced, unheated attic. I needed proximity to Leiden and she needed cash.  Yet the very idea of my presence galled her.

The Dutch are blunt. 

She was astonished I had been hired to teach writing at a local university. How could I possibly take a job away from a good Dutch instructor, she wondered aloud?

Then there were the strict household rules: when to use the kitchen and fridge; when to bathe, and in which bathroom; daily airing of the duvet because a detested prior tenant had “sweat feets.” No matter how cold, the garret window was to be left opened in daytime. Ditto for the bathroom window.

As winter progressed, I shivered in bed with a couple of hot water bottles and the duvet tucked under me. It was impossible to get warm. She alone controlled the thermostat.

Yet I learned that Anke loved and knew good wines. Eventually, she agreed to join me for a nightcap of delicious wine after work. Slowly, we came to a rapport — of necessity. Briefly warm, I pretended I didn’t mind endless episodes of Neighbors, the Australian sitcom, or the wreaths of smoke encircling her cropped hair. 

“Chalk and Cheese,” she called us, as in the Dutch expression “as different as chalk and cheese.” I presumed I was the chalk . . . and she was her favorite, Gouda.

Ultimately, Anke would invite me to share dinners. I learned to bring good chocolates, flowers, or wine home.

Anke thawed, and introduced me to her Jewish family. Few males had survived the Holocaust.

This explained the ubiquitous picture windows, pointedly left uncovered after years in hiding. And the ever-present bicycles, which the Nazis had confiscated.

She took me on shopping forays for “more premium” toilet paper in Belgium. I went with Anke to source white asparagus, pannekoek — a pancake smothered in thick syrup — and mussels.

When my semester ended, we parted as friends, although inscrutable to one another. 

Months later, Anke called to say she was coming to the states. On arrival, she wanted use of my car. This wasn’t possible, I explained. Upset, she settled on my driving her wherever asked. I took her to IHOP for pancakes, which she bluntly and loudly declared “shit!” Our many churches troubled her. “There’s one on every corner!”

Anke hated every meal and found Greensboro was a total washout until I took her to a big box store.

Delighted, Anke found a staggering bag of cheese puffs — at least 2 feet high — to lug home. She visited McDonald’s and adored the Big Mac.

Anke, seafood and wine connoisseur, approved of American fast food and snacks.

This time when we parted, she hinted at a future visit. I smiled, unnerved, yet confident I could find enough snacks and bad food to please her. Certain that America would deliver, I gave “Cheese” a thumbs up as she ambled down the concourse in her squatty heels. 

Still baffled yet grinning, “Chalk and Cheese” had reached an international accord.  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

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.