Saturday, April 11, 2020 @ 11:58 AM
Hopalong Cassidy Trail
Streator, Illinois
Grandpa Stanley loved the homemade chicken soup his wife, Stella, made for her family. You could say he loved homemade soup because he was named for it. I have never successfully memorized the spelling of his last name. I merely have googled “Polish Beet Soup” or “Polish Borscht” to find the spelling Barszcz. He was, literally, Stanley Barszcz, Stanley Beet Soup.
Grandma Stella and Grandpa Stanley would drive out to our farm for a long weekend, and Stanley would arrive with grocery bags of food scraps to feed the chickens. He wanted us to save on chicken feed. We allowed our chickens to peck and scratch in a fenced-in yard where grubs, worms, crickets and aphids couldn’t escape their active beaks. They loved salad too. When I threw handfuls of the rotted cabbage and dry, shrunken apples into the yard, the chickens would flock and fight to peck at the garbage.
I caught for him the chickens he slaughtered on the chopping block. I carried a victim by the yellow stick legs upside down until he took it from me, put its neck on the stump and chopped off the head. Chickens really do run around with their heads chopped off. The heads still gaping he tossed into the weeds of the chicken yard. The cruelty of being a carnivore wasn’t hidden from me from an early age. We let the blood run, wasting the main ingredient of chicken blood soup.
We ate chicken soup all the long weekend made with noodles made by Grandma Stella on our kitchen table. She would roll out her dough on the table and slice the noodles long and thick. When the chicken had turned the water to yellow stock with fat globules floating on top, she would immerse her noodles into the broth.
Served up in deep bowls, the soup made a delicious meal. I remember coming home from a Halloween celebration at our elementary school and Grandmother served us a late dinner of soup with fresh baked bread on the side. How lucky I considered myself. I hadn’t spoiled my appetite with Halloween Candy, following my mother's advice. Outside, a cold night wind rattled our windows. Inside, we gathered around my mother's table, eating soup hot straight from the pot.
Stanley took me on his rounds, showing me where he went around back to the gondolas. Call them skiffs, call them dumpsters, call them what you will. Stanley called them gondolas. A fruit store on the corner of Ten Mile and Ryan made a good stop on the way out. Pick the moldy oranges out of a box, and you have oranges to eat, oranges to juice. Cut the brown spots out of a head of lettuce and make yourself a salad. He found a box of tomatoes and picked out half, tossed them aside. “Look at those tomatoes, Billy. Why let them go to waste”? The food a person couldn’t eat went to the chickens. The owner saw him all the time, so he just waved and said hello.
We would head out to where the builders were putting up houses in Sterling Heights. The aluminum siding scraps left over from a house went onto a scrap pile at the curb. We threw it into the back of his station wagon. Nobody asked. We were saving the garbage collectors the trouble of picking it up. When we had a full station wagon, he lit a cigar and we drove to Eight Mile near Oak Park. We were going to the junkyard to turn our aluminum siding in for cash.
The junkyard had a sign on the outside of the low, flat building, one of the many industrial buildings made of cinder block along Eight Mile Road. “We Buy Scrap Metal”. We drove into the building, the floor dark from decades of oil and dirt absorbed into the cement. A man watched as we loaded a skiff on a scale. The man already knew the weight of the skiff, the tare weight. When the skiff was full of aluminum siding and our station wagon empty, I stepped on the scale.
I couldn’t even apply pressure with my foot, and the man saw the needle wavering. “Take your foot off the scale, please”. The needle settled, and the man paid my grandfather in cash. He gave me five dollars for helping, a fortune for a kid my age. The rest he gave to his wife.
He had retired from his job in the shop at General Motors, working in the same building as my father. He added to his retirement check with a “little side money” to take Grandmother out to eat or pay for a cruise to the Bahamas once a year. The rest went up in the cupboard, stashed away in US Savings Bonds. I heard a story of cash stashed around the house, under beds, in cleverly hidden coffee cans.They had lived through the Depression, after all.
Looking back, I realize Stanley practiced extreme recycling. The Freegans, vegans who love to live freely, publish an email newsletter telling young people how to find buildings to squat in and dumpsters to visit for groceries. On the way to my office today, I saw a man hauling away two wooden chairs from a pile of rubbish set out at the shopping plaza. I felt a small tinge of envy. What a find. Those chairs would fetch a good price after a coat of varnish.
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