Not Eating Oatmeal

Bob sat down next to me at the breakfast table. He looked at the menu and said, “I hate grits.” He ordered oatmeal.

I said, “I hate oatmeal.” I ordered two poached eggs on toast.

Different strokes for different folks. What a dull World this would be, if we all liked the same things.

I would not eat oatmeal, but I cooked oatmeal for my kids. As it boiled, I stirred and stirred until it was smooth and creamy. Until the morning that Karl complained. He said, “You didn’t leave any lumps in my oatmeal.” I never cooked oatmeal again.

When my father was a teenager, his brother, who was twelve years older, bought a ranch in far West Texas. Uncle Dick didn’t have much money, and land was cheap out there. One summer Daddy went to help on the ranch. The family was so poor that all they had to eat was oatmeal.

At the end of summer Daddy went to Kansas City and got a job in a bank. He never ate another bowl of oatmeal for the rest of his life.

Our family went to visit Uncle Dick a couple of times a year. The lanscape I saw from the front yard was absolutely flat. I slowly turned around and saw sand stretching out into a bowl, no trees or houses interrupting the perfect circle of the horizon. The only thing growing in that sand was sage brush, which Uncle Duck called “shinnery” because it didn’t grow higher than his shins. Hereford cattle spread out to find forage in that stuff.

In the evening Uncle Dick saddled his horse and rode out to find the cattle. He let my brother and ride beside him For Lyle riding horses on Uncle Dick’s ranch was almost as good as dying and going to heaven. They rounded the cows up and drove them towards the windmill behind the house. There are no creeks or natural ponds on the plains. The only place the cattle could drink was from the “tank”, a small pond fed by the windmill. The windmill pumped up water day and night.

Aunt Verna went to the windmill and brought in buckets of water for cooking and washing dishes. The ramshackle frame house had no running water, no electricity, no indoor plumbing. No convenient shopping either – the nearest town was 40 miles away. It was impossible to clean house. The whole house was covered in a thin layer of sand, drifted in under the loose-fitting window frames.

Aunt Verna wore out and died young. Life was easier for Uncle Dick’s second wife, Aunt Allie. The REA stretched electrical lines across many miles of prairie, all the way to the ranch house. Uncle Dick brought water lines to the kitchen and even installed an indoor bathroom – although he continued to use the outhouse.

The one thing our family looked forward to was the home-made biscuits which my aunt baked every morning for breakfast. We arrived one night, dusty and tired after the long drive from Fort Worth in my father’s old Hudson. After Aunt Allie greeted us, she told us she and Uncle Dick had been to town the day before especially to buy treats for us during our visit. She proudly showed us the big loaf of “store-bought” bread.

Even with modern conveniences, in many ways the ranch remained the same. When I went to bed, my face chaffed against gritty sand on my pillow. I drifted off to sleep listening to the metal arms of the windmill turning in the wind, and the clank of the pump bringing up water from far under ground.

Land remained cheap. Uncle Dick bought more and more acreage. After World War II, I overheard him tell my father he bought 10,000 acres for $1 an acre without the mineral rights.

Uncle Dick retained the mineral rights on the rest of the land, Oil companies offered to lease, not the land on which the cattle grazed, but the right to drill for oil which may or may not lie far underneath the surface. Uncle Dick leased thousands of acres for $100 per acre per year.

As an old man, Uncle Dick became rich. Very rich. He and Aunt Allie moved to town. As they breakfasted in that handsome new brick house, I wondered: did they eat oatmeal and toasted “store-bought” bread?