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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
June 13, 2021
Published as Family History
in a Gramma Letter dated
September 19, 1995.
© 1995 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Light Lunch, 2002
© 2002 by Bud Grossmann
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WITH THANKS TO CALVIN N. KEENEY
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Author’s Note: I have three good reasons, maybe more, for offering you this particular story today, even though some readers may be aware I already published it twice before, maybe more. BG
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Tuesday, September 19, 1995
Dear Gramma,
My grandfather—your husband, Earl Grossmann—peppered his speech with Midwesternisms. He routinely produced proverbs, aphorisms, and figures of speech representative of the region of his residency.
Commenting on the value of child labor on his Wisconsin farm, Grampa more than once remarked to my cousin Terry, my brother Bruce, and me, “One boy, that’s a boy. Two boys is half a boy. Put three boys on a job, and, by God, you got nothin’!”
“This item is useless as teats on a bull.” “You dassn’t jerk that fishpole too soon.” “So-and-so never amounted to a hill of beans.” This last image, a hill of beans, seemed, from the time when I was very young, wonderfully vivid and apt.
Green beans, prepared in a fashion popular when I was a child, were pressure-cooked at a cannery and then vigorously boiled once more in a covered pot on a kitchen stove. The result was something easy to chew but not so easy to swallow.
Having been coerced to consume this supposedly vitamin-rich substance at many a meal in my little lifetime, I had no trouble comprehending what Grampa meant when he suggested that something or someone “doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.”
In my little-boy’s mind, a city boy’s mind, I imagined green beans heaped high as a barn, steam rising toward the blue summer sky. And no matter how high a hill of beans might be, I would judge it to have no value whatsoever.
But then, one summer, I was introduced to green beans grown and cooked by my father’s sister, Doris Tarpley, and I began to wonder about Grampa’s choice of words. Aunt Dorie’s beans were good! A hill of those things might be worth thousands of dollars.
When I recall long-ago visits to the little town of Rio, Wisconsin, my mind’s eye sees clearly the mid-summer glory of Aunt Dorie’s garden, and my mind’s mouth perfectly recalls fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and the sweet, buttery, slightly salted crunch of cooked, but barely cooked, green beans.
Part of the pleasure of those meals came from participating in the preparation. Through the picture window in the Tarpleys’ kitchen, my auntie kept tabs on her own three kids and us visiting cousins when she sent us out into the garden to harvest produce for supper. She would holler out the back door, “Be gentle with those tomato vines!”
When we had gathered a bucket of beans, we sat on the steps of the back porch and pinched the stem end off each pod. Then, over a bowl, we snapped what remained into proper-sized lengths. The aroma of fresh-baked cookies, cooling in the kitchen, drifted out to us. Oh, those summer days!
Today, Gramma, I am writing you, forty-some summers later, at my desk in my home in Hawaii, missing those summers in Wisconsin. By now, in mid-September, this year’s beans, I suppose, are all gone except the few whose crunch Aunt Dorie has saved in relish jars. I imagine her tomato vines are brown and bare, her lettuce and her onions have gone to seed. Pumpkins, perhaps, remain on the ground, fearless of frost but apprehensive of the carver’s knife.
At some time in the past four decades, someone made me understand that a hill of beans is nowhere near as enormous as a barn. And also in those passing years, I learned to appreciate the enduring worth of my elders’ words and the incalculable treasure of my Aunt Dorie’s cooking.
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Button your sweater, Granny. The autumn is arriving.
Love,
Buddy
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I would welcome your thoughts on this page (or any of my
others). Write to me at the following address. Please
be sure to spell Grossmann with two n’s and
mention what page you are writing about.
Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
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