Sing it Lyle ...

At the Sunday morning church service, when I was a girl in Oklahoma, our Southern Baptist minister would have us sing about 30 verses of the invitational hymn, sure someone was going to walk down that aisle and get saved, Praise the Lord. I think sometimes he was waiting for someone in particular... whom he deemed to be in special peril on that given Sunday morning. I used to look surreptitiously around, with my head still bowed, curious eyes darting, wondering who the fallen backslider was this morning.

And since it was right around noon, all of our stomaches would be rumbling. By verse 20 of Just as I Am from the Baptist Hymnal, all I could think about was food. And with good reason.

My mom would have a big Sunday dinner cooking in the oven at home. A big pot roast or fried chicken, gravy, new potatoes with bacon, corn bread or homemade yeast bread or buttermilk biscuits, fried okra, slick green beans, fried green tomatoes or fresh cherry red tomatoes, cantaloupe sprinkled with pepper, and some kind of pie with a flakey crust of flour and lard. Occasionally, there was a pineapple upside down cake. It weighed about five pounds.

We knew how to eat in the 1960s in Oklahoma.

Or, there'd be platters of equally aromatic and delicious food in a big spread in the community room at the back of the church where the entire congregation would gather together afterwards to break some bread.

My mother would be all smug about having brought the very best this or that and outcooking the other church women by a mile. (Maybe the preacher's invitational was for her on church supper days...) I always enjoyed the most that green bean casserole some other mom had made. (A secret pleasure.) You know, the one with the canned mushroom soup, the canned french greanbeans, and those canned deep-fried onion thingies sprinkled on the top with a whole bunch of canned breadcrumbs and baked to perfection? That dish wasn't home-made enough for my mom, the epicurean purist, the then Martha Stewart of Oklahoma (and still reigning, but in a different part of the country now).

This was way before any of us were thinking about low-fat food. You can bet that pot roast wasn't 95% fat free. More like 120% +++ of all the good stuff, if I remember correctly. For you uninitiated, slick green beans are swimming in bacon or ham fat. Our bread was slathered with butter. The okra was fried fried fried and fried.

I wonder how I didn't grow up to be one of those fat kids CNN loves to tell us about on a regular basis, the ones who look the Pillsbury Dough Boy at age seven and who are destined to a lifetime of Big Macs and wearing Wal-Mart stretch pants.

Well, we usually ran wild in the woods after dinner, or rode a horse down to the creek where we waded and caught all manner of slippery, slimy things, instead of sitting in front of a computer game.

Oh, the good old days.

Related: See the incomparable Tim Boucher's post on Tent Show Revivalism.