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From the Middle Ages until the 18th century the local barber\'s duties included dentistry, blood letting, minor operations and bone-setting. The barber\'s striped red pole originates from when patients would grip the pole during an operation.
And Now You Do
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23:32, At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder.
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The old Thompson place was our home when I was about four years old. It was a big wooden two-story house right in the middle of nowhere out in Elm Flat. We were almost a mile off the main road, and even that was just a graded dirt road, and in the winter it was an ungraded mud road complete with deep ruts. The house came complete with a water well and outhouse—no pump for the well, no electricity, no telephone. Our nearest neighbors, about one-half mile south of us, were the Lancasters (Denver and Marvene and their children).
The front door of the Thompson place looked east right into the back of the 100-acre Houston place, a fertile blackland place that Daddy rented several years later and farmed for Mr. Houston. The back of the Houston place was low lying, and always collected water during the winter time, looked in fact like a small lake right across the road from our house. As such, it was a perfect landing place for Canadian geese when they made their annual pilgrimage from Canada and the northern United States to enjoy their usual southern winter vacation.
We were not very well off at the time, and we were always on the watch for something to fill the pot! Seeing the geese across the road from us, Dad brought up the idea of borrowing a gun and shooting one of them for food. Mom told him she had never cooked a goose, and had no idea how to prepare it. That did not phase Dad—when he got an idea into his head, he usually went straight ahead, and it was better to just get out of his way! He told us that a goose was just another big bird like a chicken, so we would just cook it like a roasting hen.
He did borrow a gun--though who he borrowed it from, I have no idea, maybe from Denver Lancaster, Doug Walker, Cecil Johnston, Grover or M. J. Crawford, Beren Benet, or some other neighbor out in the Flat. As an interesting aside, Dad never owned a gun. He said they were unsafe to keep around the house, and he refused to allow us boys as teenagers to have a gun. Whenever he needed a firearm for any reason, he always knew where he could borrow one. (We were not allowed to have a horse either, but that is another story!) He would use the borrowed weapon for the required purpose, and immediately return it to the owner.
Anyway, one blast from the shotgun and the goose was ours, feathers and all. We heated water, dipped and scalded the goose to loosen the feathers, and picked it clean. According to plan, Mom stoked up the old wood cook stove, and she baked the goose just as if it were a roasting hen. She kept a close watch on the goose and took it out when it looked brown enough.
I have no idea what else we had on the table that day, but I definitely remember the goose. What I remember is this. You can cook a goose like a chicken, but that does not make it into a chicken!
That goose was literally floating in grease, and the meat had a stronger, wilder taste than chicken. It only took one or two bites of the goose to satisfy any longing any of us might have for goose meat! I suppose there is probably a correct way to cook a goose, but that way was unknown to us at the time.
I can recall this goose dinner referred to within our family several times after that. Mom might say, “Steve there’s nothing to cook, maybe you can go shoot us a goose.” Dad’s reply might be,
“Well, I guess I could, but I am not quite that hungry yet.” None of the rest of us ever felt quite that hungry either, and I for one certainly hope never to be that hungry ever again!
Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
ivernon-ohio@att.net
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Average Score: 5
Votes: 1
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