One of the big expected events around my Okie home growing up was the daily delivery of the mail.  From the time I had started sleeping in a shoebox, as an infant, and up until both my parents passed from this life the mail delivery was still anticipated and was delivered at my mom and dad’s house.  The mail delivery was expected and received daily as was any noontime lunch of beans and cornbread.  Yes, it was that regular.  It was a daily mile marker that all was normal and on schedule.  Mail delivered come rain sleet or snow.  Well, maybe there wasn’t much snow or sleet in East Los Angeles back then.  Wait a minute, I take that back.  Once it did snow about a half inch and quickly went away by noon.  But that was only one day out of the past 60-years.  Certainly not impeding any mail delivery.

 

What kept the mail interesting for my mom and dad back then was actual hand written letters from folks back in the motherland of Oklahoma.  Almost as informant and entertaining as news from Lake Woebegone.  Perhaps even more entertaining.  Letters written in a local parochial narrative.  Folksy and down to earth.  Leaving out nothing for the imagination to play with.  Simple, frank, and written on paper stained with cooking lard and corn meal.  Certainly a multimedia postal dispatch.  You could read it as well as smell it.

 

But, here is what I am getting at.  We, here at Okie Without Borders, also receive mail in our mailbag (see mailbag above).  Not only do we receive your E-mail, we also anticipate your thoughts and comments.  Yes, we love the incoming mail.  However, in this case it comes electronically and not stained with greasy lard and corn meal.  It makes it easier to read and reply.  We love your mail.  It makes all of us feel good all over.  Please, keep sending your E-mail to:

mail@chuckayers.com

We’ll be standing at the mailbox waiting for the good news.  Keep it coming and thanks very much.  And most of all, click on mailbag above and read what was in our mailbox.  It’s your mail.  Your response.  And the best part of this whole web site.  Once again, thanks.  Chuck Ayers

As I had mentioned before, it wasn’t easy growing up Okie in Los Angeles.  For my parents and myself, we all had a different set of expectations than the typical Californian.  To say the least, there was clash of cultures.  Ours was red dirt plainsmen with a touch of Third-worldness rooted to our redneck ancestral DNA.  We believed in sweat blood and fried chicken.  It was sort of the Beverly Hill Billies never got to Beverly Hills but rather East L. A.

 

And on the other hand and for those who considered themselves vetted and certified Californians, time was best-spent tanning and drinking fresh squeezed orange juice.  Spending most of their time reading the L A Times and speaking through clinched teeth.  All the while barely making the rent and existing on crab dip and saltine crackers.  Certainly a life style far above our own.  They had Siamese cats.  We had Rhode Island Red chickens.  Their dogs were named Champion or Suzette.  Our dogs were named Boy or mostly just called dog.

 

My California guy friends at school were mostly involved with the Cub or Boy Scouts.  My Okie brother and I spent most of our time digging holes in the backyard or collecting pop bottles.  The aboriginal teen girls in our neighborhood wore argyle sweaters and saddle oxfords.  My Okie sisters wore my brother’s holy jeans and my dad’s white dress shirts and with tails out.

 

Yes, surely a clash of cultures.  However, the only difference between we misfit Okie kids and the socially accepted California natives were, our mom and dad had recently migrated from Oklahoma.  Our California friend’s parents had the presents of mind to move away from Oklahoma decades ago.  So, they are native.  We were the ignored and sometimes invisible aliens.

 

All in all we got use to it.  We too looked away when encountering folks we knew.  When spoken to we never said anything except nope and yep.  A ploy used to not disclose our place of origin.  Finally, if we ever met on the street an Okie cousin, we would cross the street to avoid saying Howdy.  Yep, it’s been a mighty struggle being Okie in California.

It wasn’t until the last remaining years of my Okie born and bred dad’s life that I discovered he called “Square Dancing” as a young lad.  Yes, when he was about sixteen or seventeen years old he was often invited to other folk’s homes in the red dirt territory to organize and call square dances.  And to remind you, he was from southern rural Oklahoma.  A place of strong, conservative convictions.  And, I am almost sure not too far from where Pretty Boy Floyd was roaming and just a little north from Bonnie and Clyde.  For sure a hot bed of ornery and surreptitious square dancers.  Round up a few fiddle players, find someone to blow on a jug, and then bark out direction which way a square dance participant is to move.  “Bow to your partner, turn to your left, promenade with your partner, step back, put your right foot in, put your left foot back, or something like that.  Nonetheless it was dancing.  Yes, touching and holding hands with a square dance partner.

 

What made this revelation about my dad so shocking was, as I grew up, both my parents’ poo poo’d the immoral idea of dancing.  They called dancing works of the devil.  A sure ticket to damnation.  “If you touch a girl, your skin will erupt in boils and quickly peal off.”  Well, almost.

 

Never the less, the little congregation where my family and I attended and grew up spoke fervently against the notion of dancing.  It was railed against from the pulpit.  It was condemned in Sunday school.  My parents forbade me and my siblings from ever dancing with music and merrily cavorting with the opposite sex on a dance floor or even on a hardwood gymnasium floor while in your socks.  All of which twisted my brain in to thinking never ever go to a basketball game when girls were present.  Who knows what might erupt.  So, if rock and roll music suddenly starts, hold your ears and tightly close your eyes.

 

So, with this parochial mindset and as I entered junior high, I occasionally was caught between a rock and a hard place during gym class.  Normally during our gym period we dressed in our shorts and T-shirts and ran and jumped outside.  The trouble came when it rained.  When rain came we boys were asked to keep our street clothes on and directed to go in to the adjacent gymnasium for a special class.  Yes, a class in ballroom dancing as I quickly discovered.  You know the Fox trot and waltz.  Remember, this is Los Angeles, California.  Social networking capital of the world.  Well what followed was the girl’s gym class also filed in to the same gymnasium.  Wow, what an awkward moment for a thirteen year old non-dancing inhibited pimple faced Okie boy. 

 

While the girls were up against one wall and the boys up against the opposite, it was explained to us that on rainy days we would always assemble in the gym with our clothes on and begin dance lessons.  And, what good is a bunch of junior high boys and girls who can’t dance.  And for sure we are not going to give lessons in Chess or ping-pong.  Creates too much sweat and calculation.  Everybody must learn to dance.  It’s what parents expect their children to learn in junior high school.  Right?

 

Well, once I explained this pressing moral dilemma to my mom, she without hesitation quickly grabbed pen and paper.  And she wrote out a scribbled document to excuse Charles from dance lessons.  “Do not allow my boy to touch any shuffling footed fox-trotting girl.  No-siree!  Charles will not dance. 

 

Now, you can see why it was such a surprise to discover my Dad had called square dances as a teenager.  He told me it was lots of fun and the neighbors loved to square dance in their living room.  So, I guess he was the designated caller and all the rest danced.  But for me and my siblings when growing up, we practiced our wallflower routine.  “No girl, I don’t know how to dance” 

 

So, somehow all through junior high and high school I somehow managed to avoid going to a dance and dancing.  Fortunately for me back then, girls never asked boys to go with them to a school dance.  And, who knows, maybe they never would have ask me anyway.  I’ll never know. 

Growing up Okie in East Los Angeles helped formulate my somewhat limited sociological way of looking at things.  Shaping up expectations and drawing rational comparisons.  For example, it was my firm belief everybody in the world had a wringer washer.  My mom had a wringer washer so it would only make sense everybody in the world had an old Maytag wringer washer.  Right?  Made perfect sense to my 10-year old brain.

 

We also had a bathtub and a toilet just down the hall.  Therefore, everybody in the world must have a tub and toilet just down the hall.  Right?  Well, it again made reasonable sense to me that everybody had these domestic things.  After all how would you ever discover if Ivory soap would floats without a tub and toilet?  Certainly Empirical science at it’s best.

 

When I was about five or six years old, my family and me jumped in our old 1942 Buick along with a trunk full of suitcases and food boxes and left for the old country.  Heading off with great expectations.  We headed out down the southern California central desert, then on to Yuma, Tucson, Las Cruces, Lubbock and finally crossed the Red River heading north to Wilson, Oklahoma to my folk’s old stomping grounds, as they called it.  A wide swath of red prairie dirt and dotted with scrub oak and broken down windmills.

 

Shortly after arriving and settling in at relatives homes, I made it known to my mom I needed to go pee pee.  “Where is the bathroom,” I whispered.  She quickly fetched my older brother and told him to take me outside.  “Outside,” I responded to myself.  Do they pee outside in this part of the world?  And possibly have to pee behind a bush maybe?  Just like we did on our summer camp hikes?  Is someone else presently using the toilet down the hall?  Is this what you do here in Oklahoma?  Outside?

 

But, anyway my brother took me outside, walked up a worn footpath, and pointed me in the direction to a tiny wooden chicken coop looking phone booth with several holes up high in the door.  “There,” my brother said while pointing in a matter of fact tone of voice.  Go in there and be sure to hit the hole and if you need it, there is a Sears and Roebuck catalog for your basic necessities.  Sears catalogue?  Is this where they do all their mail order?  Why would I want that?  Maybe it just for reading or entertainment.  Well, you know, looking closely at electric fence chargers and some pictures of girls and boys in their underwear.  Yikes!  How embarrassing!

 

Once inside, it was mostly dark with no light switch on the wall or no bulb overhead.  Wasps were buzzing and getting dangerously close.  Before I could construct any more thoughts about this place, a strong odor burned up into my nostrils.  Holy Cow!  Someone forgot to flush.  Hmm?  Where’s the flush handle?  Good gosh all mighty, look down that hole. 

 

I turned around quickly and pushed the door outward, ran as fast as I could, and found the nearest tree and did my business.  Surely this can’t be true.  I must be having a bad dream.  My goodness gracious.  Is this what they did in 1950s modern Oklahoma.  I must admit this has crushed all my expectations.  I suddenly realized my folks and I came from a much more advanced society than I witnessed outside rural Wilson.  Were we Martians from Mars?

 

Somebody is tricking me for sure aren’t they?  What is this anyway?  Mom!  Dad!  When do we go back home?  This is not what I expected.  Where is my American Standard white porcelain toilet?  Where is the T P?  Please, please take me home!  I need to go to the bathroom.

So how did we Okies survive growing up in East Los Angeles?  Well, let me tell you.  My mom and dad were long time jam and preserve canners from rural southern Oklahoma.  An inherent trait they brought with them and continued after they left their parched red dirt farm during the dust bowl years.  Certainly, a depression era practice they never abandoned as long as they were physically able.  Once they settled in southern California, they canned every possible eatable item they grew or bought and canned in to those quart size clear glass Ball jars.  Those square jars with the brass looking ring and flat lid.  They canned almost everything they could grow and  pick from the vine or tree.  Tomatoes, figs, peaches, grapes, strawberries, apricots, green beans, etc.  Whatever came out of theirs or somebody else’s vegetable garden or orchard.  Pickled.  Preserved.  And smartly canned.  Stored away for the next big feast.

 

For my dad, all this canning thing all started when he was just a pup growing up in south central Oklahoma.  Out on his family’s sharecropper farm near Wilson, Oklahoma.  Not too far north from the Red River.  His mother and his plentiful brothers and sisters all shared in raising, feeding, planting, harvesting and canning and processing everything from Sorghum to sausage.  All hands were busy and productive.  It is what you had to do to survive in the 1920s and 1930s.  A proven process that kept my dad’s and his family fed and mostly self-sustaining.  No one went hungry.  All this done long before organic farming became the responsible thing to do for the environment.  They were the first to practiced farming that recycled the plant and animal by products .  They were the original model for green farming and sustainability.  And again, long before cutesy “Farmer’s Markets” began showing up in the artsy smartsie district near downtown.

 

However, I first noticed my Ma and Pa’s approach to food preservation when I was a wee little foody muncher back in the early 1950s.  It seemed to start when my dad and brother starting to plow up our back lot into a vegetable garden.  My dad had an antique plow with metal blade mounted on a metal wheel and guided by two wooden handles fastened to the wheel.  It was the kind my dad had when he plowed with a mule back in Oklahoma.  Except this time he used my 12-year old older brother as the mule.  Better him than little fragile me.  My brother really didn’t care for that arrangement at all.  The East Los Angeles hard dry clay dirt was not easy to till and turn over and my dad was a bit demanding of the whole plow and boy rig.  Nonetheless, together they managed to set up a garden for the spring.  But, as it turned out the garden yielded little and that was the end of that.  So much for Okie style farming.  My dad would have made a good Amish farmer.

 

Then Okie luck cast it’s red fairy dust over my folks.  Shortly there after, my dad had befriended an older couple out near the fringes of the suburbs.  Truck farms were scattered here and there.  .  A place where the older couple had two or three acres of prime gardening dirt.  One acre that already was full of grape vines filled to capacity with large plump purple grapes and visiting bees.  The back of the old guys property has at least a quarter acre in strawberries.  The rest of the back lot had rows of tomatoes, corn, head lettuce and more.  However, the old couple had poor mobility and couldn’t easily harvest their bounty by themselves.  So, my dad and mom pitched in a plucked and picked and loaded up many wooden produce crates full.  I was there as well and licked off a few berries and grapes.  But, I was not excited about the large number of swarming bees.  But, the bees lived in several hives in the back lot and that too we had partaken from.  First time I had ever seen honey in a jar with the wax comb inside.

 

Anyway, the bottom line was my folks had more fruits and vegetables than they could possibly can and preserve.  Many days after, we were laboring over a hot stove stirring, pouring, capping, and steaming.  Lots of really good strawberry jam and peach preserves.  And, we certainly had many canned jars of plump stewed tomatoes. 

 

The result of this partnering, the old couple became very good friends and my mom and dad continued to have a cornucopia of garden produce for some time to come.  I can vividly remember the old couples faces.  He had a big square face, heavy features with bushy eyebrows but managed a smile now and then.  His wife was round, jolly, and always chirping with an uncontrollable smirk.  Nonetheless, the suburban farmer couple was always appreciative of my mom and dad helping with the harvest.  And, of course my folks were glad to receive the bounty.  A bounty that sustained we 4-kids for several years as well as keep my mom and dad’s involved in their annual canning ritual.