A lot of things got my mother flustered when I was growing up. She didn’t like it when we scuffed up her wood floors or slammed doors and made her cakes fall.
I understood the problems with the wood floors. We lived on a dirt and gravel road, and the red dirt we accumulated running around outside ended up on her floors and rugs.
So my mother spent a lot of time vacuuming and getting on her hands and knees to polish the floors with Johnson’s Wax.
The thing about the cakes falling always baffled me. She was convinced that if one of her cakes didn’t turn out right, it was because we had created some kind of jolt or impact to make the cake cave in while it was cooking.
That was important to my mother because of her reputation for making perfect cakes. Her coconut cakes and the chocolate cakes with the white stiff icing were always the first ones gone at bake sales and church dinners.
If my brother or I closed a door too hard or jumped off the bed and jarred the floor while a cake was cooking, we usually got whacked with a flyswatter or yardstick or whatever else my mother could get her hands on.
Regina and I both love to cook, and we bake cakes a good bit. My apple cakes are a bit hit at holiday dinners, and her pineapple upside down cakes are spectacular. I don’t remember any of them ever falling if we slammed a door or shook the floor.
To be fair to my mother, I grew up in a little frame house that was built up off the ground on brick pillars. So there probably were times when the floor quivered enough to mess up her cakes.
My brother and I reminisce about other things we did in our pre-teen years to get her stirred up and chasing after us with different weapons that stung a little but never really hurt us.
She hated it when we trampled her hydrangea bushes during football games, busted the streetlight with slingshots or nicked up her wallpaper in our plastic swordfights.
But the best way to upset my mother when we got a little older and started going to stores for her was to lose her S&H green stamps or forget to get them in the first place.
The décor in our house back in the 1950s was mid-century S&H green stamp. Lamps, picture frames, vases, pots and pans, ottomans, drinking glasses, tea pitchers, coasters and other stuff like that in the house came from the green stamp catalog.
Grocery stores, service stations and other places gave customers a certain number of green stamps for every dollar spent. The stamps were used to get things “free” from the green stamp catalog.
We had always gotten our groceries at a little neighborhood store where we had a charge account but changed to another store that started giving out green stamps. I think it was a Piggly Wiggly.
If I went there to pick up things for my mother and didn’t get the green stamps, all hell broke loose. If my dad filled up the car somewhere except the Gulf station that issued green stamps, he was in trouble.
My mother would stuff bundles of green stamps in a kitchen drawer until she found something in the catalog she wanted. Then my brother and I had to lick thousands of stamps and put them in booklets that were turned in to claim gifts.
I licked stamps several straight days for a new lava lamp when I noticed that I was losing my sense of taste. When my mother fried chicken, even the pulley bone I loved tasted like green stamp glue.
When the new S&H green stamp catalog arrived one year, my mother saw a hand-cranked ice cream freezer just like she had been wanting. I licked enough stamps to fill up the booklets she needed to get it.
The day it came in the mail, she mixed up a batch of homemade ice cream and even put some fresh figs in it from the tree in our back yard. I ate it but couldn’t taste it.
Later in life when I would get a bad cold and lose my taste, the doctor would narrow the diagnosis down to either the merthiolate my mother used to mop my tonsils when I had a sore throat or green stamp glue.