Happy, Happy, Happy (6 page)

Rule No. 3 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Learn to Cook (It’s Better than Eating Slop)

H
ere’s a fact: every human being on Earth has to eat or they will die. It’s called starvation. You have to eat if you’re a human being, whether you live in Monroe, Louisiana, or in some foreign land, like Los Angeles or New York. There has to be a food supply, and you have to consume food or you’re dead. It’s an undeniable fact—look it up.

Not everyone likes to eat. These little chicks today are starving themselves to death, which is kind of ironic, but it’s their choice. Since you have to eat to live, you’re left with a dilemma. You can choose not to learn how to cook and just eat slop, and you’ll stay alive. You can live off terrible cooking, which doesn’t taste very good, but you’ll somehow manage to survive. But my contention is that if you have to eat anyway, it just seems to me that you’re shortchanging yourself if you don’t
learn how to cook. If you have to eat, why not learn how to eat well?

Of course, the downside to eating well is that if you eat too much, you can’t get through the door. Well, if that happens, you might ought to cut back some. You can overdo anything, and when you can’t get through the door because you’re too rotund, you might ought to say, “I think I need to start eating a few salads.” I’m not saying you should just shovel it in. I’m just saying if you learn how to cook, your stay on Earth might be more enjoyable.

I learned to cook when I was young, and most of my meals started with something I killed. I have a God-given right to pursue happiness, and happiness to me is killing things, skinning them, plucking them, and then having a good meal. What makes me happy is going out and blowing a duck’s head off. As it says in Acts 10:13 (KJV), “And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.”

What makes me happy is going out and blowing a duck’s head off.

Rise, kill, and eat—that’s my modus operandi.

When I was young, heaven to me was hunting in the woods around our house or fishing on the nearby lakes and rivers. We hunted and threw lines into the Red River for catfish and white perch nearly every day. We didn’t have much of a choice; it’s where we got our next meal.

But when I was in high school, we were forced to move out of the log cabin where I grew up. My aunt Myrtle sold the farm, so we moved to the nearby town of Dixie, Louisiana. The town was a nice enough place; we lived on Main Street, just a stone’s throw from Stroud’s General Store, which was adjoined by a one-room post office. The general store and a cotton gin were the only businesses in town.

My father hoped the change of environment would help my mother, who had suffered a nervous breakdown and needed numerous trips to Schumpert hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, for treatment. Granny was diagnosed as manic-depressive and was twice confined to the Louisiana mental institute at Pineville, where she received electric-shock therapy, a treatment in vogue at the time. At times my mother was almost her old self, and Pa would bring her home to be reunited with us. But her condition didn’t stabilize until several years later, when it was discovered that lithium could control it. Fortunately, my mother went on to live a productive and venerated life until her death at ninety-five years old.

Granny’s illness couldn’t have come at a worse time for my family. A short time after we moved to Dixie, Pa fell eighteen feet off the floor of a drilling rig and landed on his head. The impact fractured two vertebrae in his back. As Pa collapsed forward, he was bent so severely that it burst his stomach. He also broke his
big toe, which slammed into the ground as he doubled up. Telling us about it later, Pa said with a wry smile, “I’ve heard of people getting hit on the head hard enough to break both ankles—but not their big toe.”

The vertebrae in Pa’s back were fused with bone from his hip; his stomach and big toe were repaired. But he was in a neck-to-hip, heavy plaster-of-Paris cast for two years; a round opening had been left only over his injured stomach.

As always, Pa met the situation in his own laid-back manner. Jimmy Frank and Harold were in college at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge at the time. They were sharing a GI Bill payment of $110 a month and supplementing their income by Harold’s work at the Hatcher Hall cafeteria and Jimmy Frank’s work on the LSU horse-and-sheep unit experimental farm. They wanted to drop out of school and come home to work to help support the family, but my daddy insisted they stay in school, remarking dryly over the phone, “We’ll make it.”

And we did—but not without hardship.

Pa’s disability payment from the state was thirty-five dollars a week. In the late 1950s, that money went a little further than it does today, but not nearly far enough. Somehow my family coped. With our mother sometimes away in the hospital, Pa was often left on his own, with five children under his care. He was
almost immobile at first, but within a few months, he was able to get around and help with the cooking.

My sister Judy was a rock and did much of the cooking, though all of us helped, and she saw that Silas and Jan got off to school in good order. Fortunately, the school bus stopped in front of our house.

To help make ends meet, Tommy and I gathered pecans and sold them for thirty-five cents a pound. In three hours, we could gather about a hundred pounds—equaling the weekly disability payment. Tommy also cleaned the church building each week in Blanchard, Louisiana, where we worshipped, for five dollars a week. With this money he was able to pay for our school meals, which were fifteen cents per day per child, thanks to Louisiana’s liberal school-lunch supplement.

Our food staples became rice and beans, which we bought by the hundred-pound sack. To this we added corn bread. Our meager diet made fresh game and fish doubly appreciated. Fortunately, vegetables were cheap in a farming area, and we purchased what we could with our scanty means from the Biondos, an Italian family that had a commercial truck farm a few miles down the road.

As I noted earlier, a real man can’t survive without meat, so it was up to Tommy and me to find some. It wasn’t easy, because
we no longer had acres and acres of bountiful land surrounding our home. There were plenty of farms around us, but the farmers in the area didn’t want anyone on their land. They depended on it for their living and were diligent in warning off what they considered intruders.

Tommy, Silas, and I often led the farmers on wild-goose chases through the woods surrounding their plowed land. When the ground was wet, the red clay in the plowed fields would cling to our shoes and build up to several inches in depth and pounds in weight. My only remedy was to stop occasionally, shake my leg vigorously to dislodge the mud, do the same with my other leg, and then continue on. Progression across the thick land was sometimes nothing more than three steps and a kick!

We never considered what we were doing as poaching on someone else’s land. We had our own code. We didn’t bother any equipment, crops, or anything on someone else’s farm. And I was always careful not to step on any young cotton or corn plants. But if it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it. I might have even picked up a ripe watermelon (there were thousands of them out there) every once in a while—wouldn’t have wanted it to be overlooked and get overripe!

I can still remember my first encounter with a game warden. I was squirrel-hunting out of season—my family had to eat—and I
had a mess of them. It happened before I repented and was one of the reasons I needed to repent. When I squirrel-hunted, I carried a big, metal safety pin, and I sharpened its end so it would run through the squirrels’ legs right above the joint. If I saw a game warden, I’d drop the squirrels, close up the pin, and then take off running like the wind. On this occasion, I was wearing two pairs of old men’s argyle socks without any shoes and had my pant legs taped so they wouldn’t flop when I was running. I was trying to be as quiet as possible. I was sitting there shooting squirrels when I sensed that someone was watching me. I couldn’t see anybody and couldn’t hear anybody, but I just had a feeling come over me that I was being stalked in the woods.

If it flew, grew wild, swam, or lived in trees, I figured that it belonged to whoever captured or gathered it.

Suddenly I heard a stick break behind me, and I turned and saw a man standing there with a gun in his hand. He was wearing a wide-rimmed cowboy hat and identified himself as a game warden. He was standing about twenty yards from me. When I heard the stick break, I dropped the squirrels and they hit the ground.

“Hold it, son,” he told me. “I’m a game warden.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said.

I was lean and mean and could run for miles. After the man identified himself as a game warden, I put it into high gear. For
the first one hundred yards, he was running with me. But I was grinning and thinking,
This guy doesn’t realize that he’s not in good enough shape to be running with me
. He was wearing cowboy boots and wasn’t properly dressed to keep up with me. A buddy who had dropped me off earlier picked me up on the other side of the woods.

When I was in high school, our basketball coach, Billy Wiggins, asked me if we were killing any squirrels. He said he wanted to go hunting with me, as long as we weren’t hunting on land that had been posted for no trespassing. “Of course not,” I told him. “You’ll be fine.”

Coach Wiggins and I went hunting right after daylight one morning, and it wasn’t long before I heard a truck coming at a pretty good rate of speed. It was coming across a pecan orchard right toward us. The last two words Coach Wiggins heard were, “Run, Coach!” I took off running in the other direction.

Moving to Dixie also introduced me to frog gigging. Some of the larger bullfrogs have legs bigger than chicken drumsticks and are delicious! We never ate frogs before moving to Dixie, but they were so abundant in the area that they eventually became part of our regular diet. In springtime, in less than an hour we could gather up a large enough bunch to make a meal, even for a family as big as ours. The slough behind our house was overrun
with frogs, as were many others just a short distance across the road.