Coming from a family with four children, our gatherings are loud, fun, and filled with our favorite foods and stories. The food includes my mom’s famous Kentucky Angel Biscuits, while the stories are usually about growing up and always end in uproarious laughter. Like the time when my brothers knocked over a ceiling-high display of baby formula, causing them and my mom to be kicked out of the store.
We tell the same stories again and again, and somehow they are just as funny as they were the first time we heard them. Most involve my brothers and their antics in the 1970s, when children were left to their own devices, weren’t allowed back inside until the streetlights came on, and considered bologna sandwiches with mustard on white bread a perfectly good lunch. But my favorite stories are the ones I remember from sleepovers at my grandparents’ house, where my maternal grandmother, Susie Howard, would tell me about her own childhood. My grandparents were farmers in mid-Missouri, and both came from large families.
One of my favorite stories was about how my grandmother and her siblings all rode the same paint horse, Puck, to school each day. They would pile onto his back, and he would carry them safely to school, wait there all day, and then take them home again. One day, my grandmother received a shiny new pink lunchbox, a very big event back then. There was no Amazon delivery, no nearby Target, and certainly not much extra money. She was so proud of that lunchbox and couldn’t wait to show it off to her friends at the tiny one-room schoolhouse.
She and her brothers and sisters climbed onto Puck’s back and headed to school as usual. Along the way, a motorcar drove past and startled their trusted horse. Puck would never buck off his precious cargo, so instead, he quickly sat down, directly on the brand-new pink lunchbox. It was devastating at the time. But here we are, still telling the story nearly 100 years later.
My grandmother was a ton of fun and the ultimate hostess. Every Sunday after church, she served fried chicken fresh from the henhouse beside the barn, along with sweet corn, tomatoes, and green beans picked from the garden just east of the house. She hosted the entire extended family for every holiday, when more than 50 people would somehow cram into their tiny farmhouse. But my favorite gatherings were the card parties.
Pitch was the game, and the goal was to compete your way to the head table. Even at six years old, I was expected to play proficiently alongside my grandmother and against two women who had recently had their hair done and set with copious amounts of Aqua Net and were most certainly wearing girdles. “Lead out, my Zingazoola,” Grandma would say after I made an outlandish bid in an attempt to prove myself. I would hastily throw down my strongest card, hoping against all odds that she had the “three.”
I don’t remember whether we even won one hand, but I remember the laughter, the crowded tables, the smell of fried chicken, and the feeling that I belonged right there among the grown-ups. Those moments became stories, just as surely as Puck and the pink lunchbox did.
That may be the real magic of family traditions. We gather around the same foods, play the same games, and tell the same stories, not because we have forgotten them, but because telling them again brings the people we love back to the table.
Someday, I hope another generation will laugh about the baby formula display, picture a paint horse sitting on a treasured pink lunchbox, and wonder what on earth a Zingazoola is. If they do, Grandma Susie, and all the love, laughter, and Aqua Net that came with her, will still be right there with us.
