Wasted Bread

I loved to spend the night over at a friend’s house as a kid, and I also loved having a friend stay overnight as the anticipation of the following day made for a sleepless night of fitful giggle attacks that usually followed the most incredulously laid plans for the day’s activities. Eight-year-old boys can have vivid imagination, and when you combine two kids that are a mixture of home-field bravado and visiting team politeness there is an increased chance for the probability of mischief and mayhem. Toss in a night filled with sugary breakfast cereal for dinner and a “Six Million Dollar Man/Planet Of The Apes” double feature following the slurping of cereal backwash from our bowls and the trouble meter hovered at 100% for the following twenty four hours.

Jimmy Linder had invited me over for a “Spend-The-Night-Party” as good ole Moms called them, sometime in 1975 as they had not long moved into the house on Lakeshore Drive that I thought was the most awesome house I had ever been in. It had a well-lit entrance with a sunken den that was filled with windows on the right, the kitchen, office and back den were down a slight run of stairs on the left and a large flight of steps led to the second level of the pseudo A-frame structure where the bedrooms were located along with what is now referred to as a “FROG”…a finished room over the garage that was the Linder kid’s “play room”. Although Jim and I had matured a full two years from the silly year that was 1973 we were still kids and at ten years old and with a few seasons of Bennettsville Youth Football League under our belts we possessed an enhanced version of the eight year old imagination and tough, supple bodies that were constantly absorbing abuse. We sneered at the “play room” designation and it became a C-47 Dakota, which is known in the civilian world as the Douglas DC-3, the type of plane that some enterprising drug smugglers stole and flew into the Marlboro County Airport at about the same time. The story of the drug smugglers is as comical as the story of the abduction of the Chavis Clan…good tales both, but best reserved for a later date.

Jimmy informed me that he had made the leap from the window of the room, and that it was quite the thrill if executed properly and with the mindset of a Paratrooper being dropped twenty miles inland of the Normandy beaches in June, 1944. He patiently explained that the proper technique to maximize the excitement of free fall and minimize the potential for injury was to keep your focus on a spot across the street, flex your feet skyward so that your heels hit first and somersault forward upon impact with the ground to absorb the energy of the fall and convert it to forward motion that was easily recovered from with a sprint. Jimmy was quite wise and knowledgeable on a wide variety of subjects at the ripe old age of ten years. He was as well-read as anyone and I had oft encountered him in the library at Bennettsville Intermediate School browsing the “630” section and the fine selection of CB Colby picture books, and we shared a love for anything that flew…or fell, in this case!

I cautiously eased over to the opened “California” style window that cranked out instead of a typical sash-style window that raised and the Cali window was hinged along one side such that it opened beyond 90 degrees and offered unfettered access through the huge opening. Apparently, the person that designed such windows never intended them to be installed on an upper floor, but the error in judgement proved to be a boon for our exciting afternoon. As I peered out, I felt an unsettling lurch deep within the center part of my abdomen as every nerve along my developing neural network sprang into full alert as my pulse quickened and my heart rose up my esophagus until it was stuck in the back of my throat. The ether that lay in expanse before me was as enormous as the entire sky as viewed from the vast Lynch cotton fields East of Bennettsville and the ten-foot drop to the Linder front yard was enough to unsettle the nerve of even the most devoted fan of that die-hard daredevil, Evel Kneivel.

I sucked in my breath, offered a quick prayer and launched myself into space, expecting to hang motionless for a moment before plummeting to the ground like poor Wile E. Coyote would in the Looney Tunes cartoons that were our introduction, albeit not entirely factual in representation, to physics and Newton’s Law of Motion and the Conservation of Energy. I was overwhelmed with the rate of acceleration which is 32 feet per second squared and since the drop was ten feet the flight time was around 300 milliseconds; and with little more than ¼ of a second to accelerate the calculated velocity at impact would be somewhere around 24 mph so the only hope I had was the application of Reynold’s Number, which is the ratio of the relative density of air to surface area, and a high number results in more drag which is the square of the component of lift. To make it clearer, Reynold’s Number explains mathematically how a parachute works to lower 250 lbs. of soldier and gear to a fairly manageable crash landing. Unfortunately, my ten-year-old “airframe” with a potential kinetic energy of 800-foot pounds of force far exceeded the available surface area to induce drag and its effect on acceleration and I dropped like a rock!

What astounded my ten-year-old self was the speed into which my mind kicked when stoked with a shot of dopamine autonomously administered by the Hypothalamus when presented with panic. Much the same as Danny seeing “Burma Shave” signs in The Shining (the book details it, and the movie left out that backstory on Danny) I saw flash before my eyes in rapid, stroboscopic scenes a series of Burma Shave signs with Jimmy’s instructions for properly sticking the landing printed on them. “Toes Up…” read the first, “Heels Down” read the second, both with comical caricatures of feet, positioned to highlight the proper podial positioning. The third sign flashed “Eyes on Point” with an illustration of the Masonic All-Seeing Eye and the fourth said “Roll Into The Ground. Burma Shave.” I compiled the results of logic operations involving sensory inputs and trajectory-correcting musculoskeletal outputs, integrated that data with the execute files that were flashed into a programmable read-only module that constitutes the mind’s eye via the previously mentioned Burma Shave signs and hit the spot I had deemed the softest possible, a deep, lush green patch of grass that was not at all like the sparse, meager tendrils of crabgrass that looked like insects when the grass dried and died during the drought that came about each August and left us in disgust of the dust that would be disturbed and set adrift, bereft of consequence as it begins to lift above the fence and moves away without evidence of it’s very existence until it is a mere memory of an instance.

Upon impact, I immediately rolled forward into a somersault and since I already had velocity thanks to my 300 millisecond fall the somersault was incredibly easy and soaked up the bulk of kinetic force of the trip. There was an added feature to the flip in that when the somersault had gone the full 360 degrees you were in the correct posture for a sprint and could easily run out of the somersault, which I did. Absolutely astonished to find myself fully intact and still operable I looked back in time to see Jimmy launch from the window, leg high in a Bruce Lee pose complete with one fist to the chest, the other clenched angrily and held high for the world to see as he let out his war cry: “Yeeeaaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhhh!” all the way until he hit and rolled. We raced through the garage, in the house and I was stopped dead in my tracks when I reached the Kitchen.

Jimmy’s mother, Mrs. Suzanne Cameron Linder (now Dr. Hurley) was in the kitchen, mixing dough and the most incredible, warm and inviting aroma permeated the atmosphere. It was the unmistakably pleasing aroma of fresh bread, baking to golden flaky perfection and the thought of a fat fresh slice of warm, homemade bread dripping with butter and a glass of iced tea got my mouth to water with the notion. I smiled and commented how nice it smelled in there and Mrs. Linder smiled back and said she thought it did as well. Mrs. Linder was very talented. She sang, played guitar and autoharp and was my guitar teacher just two years from that moment. I have held her in the highest esteem for fifty years, and am proud to say that she was such a formative figure in my early years but that day left me puzzled.

During our many trips racing through the kitchen and up the stairs to recreate our feat of daring I had watched with keen interest the preparation, baking and cooling of the four golden loaves now residing on a large sheet of parchment paper on the kitchen counter and my mind was racing with supposition: Suppose she offered us some soon? Suppose she wraps up a loaf for me to take home? Suppose I do get a loaf, do I keep it for myself or do I share with Matt and Wallace? Suppose I do get one and suppose I do keep it for myself, do you suppose I am going “Down There” because of my greed and deceit? That is what is supposed to happen to bad people according to Miss Katie Tucker, our Sunday School Teacher and local Old Maid. I tossed the logic around as we made our rounds, bailing out the window and bounding back around when I witnessed the sight that truly stopped a ten year old boy dead in his tracks.

As I hurtled through the kitchen I glanced over and saw the unbelievable…there was Mrs. Linder, paint brush in one hand and can of Bull’s Eye Shellac in the other, and she was slapping the shellac on the bread! How dare she? That beautiful and flaky golden risen flour, yeast, milk and shortening being subjected to a humiliatingly sticky shell of lac and rendered inedible, far beyond the desire of hungry preteens to rip away the gummy exterior and feast upon the heart of the loaf. How dare she? Has she gone bonkers? Curiosity had overwhelmed me by this point, and swelled high enough to jar my mouth into operation. “Mrs. Suzanne”, I began, “What are you doing?” She turned, put down her brush onto the parchment paper and carefully set the Bull’s-Eye yellow can with the bull’s-eye target on the label down and said “Oh, these loaves are not for eating. These are going to be a part of a table setting decoration for the Marlboro County Museum. I’m going to cover them with shellac, let it dry, pluck most of the bread out from inside and then shellac the inside. That way they will not get moldy and will look shiny and fresh for a long time”. I felt as if my world had caved in and four elephants were concentrating every fiber of their being on one spot on the nail of my left big toe, but even in my vulnerable emotional state I had to admire the ingenuity of this smart woman, and I took that skill home to Mama and we went crazy, baking everything from biscuits to foot-shaped loaves of inedible but shellac-accepting bread that we turned into Christmas ornaments, gag gifts and even a trophy for Matt that was an arm in a cast shaped biscuit that Mama had made two of…one for consumption and one for shellac and posterity. Unfortunately, the shellac arm was lost years later in a wild night when Matt and I had the house to ourselves when Mama and Daddy left for the weekend and the shellac arm was part of a bet.

Even with the serendipity of discovering that it is indeed fun to make lemonade out of life lemons I still had to endure not only the lingering aroma of that wonderful quartet of loaves but for several years following the agony of having to revisit the anguish of wasted bread whenever we visited the Museum and saw those loaves openly mock me. I swear that I saw a wrinkle on one loaf turn into a mouth and I read it as it mouthed “Jubal”, then smiled as sweet as a grandmother offering you fresh bread.

Have a Rice day, y’all!