Some of y'all might think this post is too long, but it had to be and I'm just sorry! If you do, just hurry down to the one below I call "You Danged Ole Fusspot!"!!!
Okay, everybody. Before I pick up the Parade of Pans and tell all what I've found out about our good friend O'Clara who has turned green and has gone potty, I have to hurry up and tell you all that there is a whole lot more to come about the yam/sweet potato controversy that those two California people got started--the ones who sent me an email and asked the question "what's the difference between a sweet potato and a yam?"--and didn't stay around for the answer.
For all we know, those two disappeared into one of those parallel planes you hear about. Or else they got saved and went home with God like Enoch in the Bible, and if they did, I hope they hopped a camel with plenty of water in its hump and sturdy legs because the journey from here to there is long and hard and uncertain.
Now, back to the pans. And pots. This one's about a pot. I know I started out saying this was all about pans, but then y'all started sending me some pictures of pots you seemed mighty partial to, so here we are. O'Clara's who sent the picture in to be in running for the prize.
(And if anybody is jumping in on my blog right about here, I need to tell you that I've invited everybody to send in a picture of their crummiest, crustiest, blackest, and most disgusting pan they still cook with, and the winner will get a prize.)
First off, take a good look at that pot up there. If it wasn't sitting on a white Frigidaire gas stove, I'd think it was the prized possession of a witch, wouldn't you? Go on and lift the lid, pretend to, I mean. Be sure and grab a pot holder! Looks like something's been simmering for a while. What do you see in there? Little newt eyes swimming around in some disgusting broth, a chicken head, little curled up chicken feet? Put the lid down and go on! You've got way too much imagination. You don't know what's in that pot, and O'Clara's not a witch, anyhow.
The truth is that the truth of the situation is worse than anything you can imagine. Here's the story:
If y'all recall, O'Clara was the one who jumped my tail when I put up that picture down there of my daughter Lou Ann's oven and made the simple suggestion--though I never went right out and said it because y'all know how delicate I try to be-that Lou Ann ought to add a little bit of elbow grease to the baked-on grease in her oven. All this took place in the comments under the previous pan posts.
Well, O'Clara took up for Lou Ann! O'Clara said maybe Lou Ann, unlike me, Lou Ann's mama, cared too much about what she calls "the fate of the earth" to use Easy-Off.
As if Lou Ann's not using Easy Off will keep the earth from warming like a meatball in sauce the way they say it is. As if I burn too many lights and take too many trips to the store and like to keep a clean oven and that's why ski slopes are shutting down due to lack of snow and bears are floating around on ice rafts at the North Pole and why that Vice President we had that time, that Al Gore, has to spend all his life flying all over the world in jets to show that movie he made instead of getting to stay home all snug and warm in his 100,000 square foot house.
I have said it here on this blog before, and I'll say it here again:
I come from people who come from people who believe the earth is the Lord's, and every single one of us is obliged to trash it up according to the dictates of our own personal conscience.
But I was moved to try to understand O'Clara when that girl who wrote that book about my life and helps me out some told me that O'Clara was talking that way only because she had gone and turned green!
I've got a sneaking suspiscion she's always been green. But now I have found out O'Clara has"gone potty." She's standing in the need of prayer.
"Gone potty" is what they call it on those TV shows from over in England where they have butlers and maids going up and down stairs, talking through their nostrils.
She's"gone off her head." That's another way they say it over there. That's the way the Queen of England would say it. She'd say O'Clara had "gone off her head," or she could say "Off with her head!" which is what I felt like saying when O'Clara jumped me about my Easy Off oven cleaner.
They'd say she's gone potty. I'd say she took off her head and left it in the pantry.
What else would you say about a woman who confesses to the whole world that she's fond of fondling her pot?
And she did say that. She did. I want y'all to know that O'Clara has called her pot, that Dutch Oven in the picture up there, "my main squeeze."
When I read that, I ran over to the recliner and near about passed out but that girl who helps me out came running with the smelling salts and told me O'Clara didn't mean it exactly like I took it.
"Trixie," she said to me, "O'Clara has anthropomorphized that pot."
I hollered out when she said that. I didn't want to even think about what that meant, but then that girl explained to me that "anthropomorphize" is what you do when you talk about something like it's a man or a woman.
I'm trying to cut back on my cussing, but can you tell me why in the hell anybody would want to do that?
And that was worse than anything I could have thought of, so I kicked off my slippers and lay in the recliner for a good while with a cold cloth across my head, wondering how O'Clara was brought up, that she could come to such a pass.
Then I jumped up and came back here to read what else O'Clara said about her pot. O'Clara says that she (that damn pot!) doesn't like to take a bath and is not a snob.
It gets worse, y'all. You ready? Lock up the kids. They ought not to hear this:
She says that pot has a three-legged cousin who likes to lay out in the backyard under a pile of burning coals.
I've heard there're drugs you can take to fix that kind of thinking. And drugs you can take that'll get you thinking that way. Don't know much about either one, but you're never too old to learn, I guess.
It takes all kinds. If love is the answer, the way the hippies and the liberals say, then I reckon you might as well snuggle up to a kitchen utensil as to a hairy old man with B.O. and dirty feet.
But the long and the short of it is this: The more I opened up my mind to the relationship between O'Clara and her pot, the more I became partial to that pot, which O'Clara says cooks onions, garlic, spaghetti sauce, stir-fry, stroganoff, mushrooms, brocooli, chili peppers, tortillas, roasts, chickens, and beef and pork roasts with rosemary, yams with garlic and red sweet peppers, sweet potatoes with kale and ginger, African-Pineapple-Peanut stew and curries, chicken and dumplings, pot pie, every kind of bean you can think of, squashes, and just about anything else you can think of except canned soup.
Now, y'all can call the men with the white coats on O'Clara, but I feel like I'd like to get to know that pot better, myself. I might could go potty myself over a pot like that. I might get misty-eyed over it, like I did over that cut-glass bowl of Ollie Pearl's the day I dropped and broke it. She always served up her potato salad in it, and I'm not ashamed to say I bawled my fool eyes out when I swept up the broken up pieces of that bowl.
It was as if I was sweeping up Ollie Pearl.
A thing is hardly ever just a thing, like I've said.
I bet when they lock up O'Clara, her two sons'll get in a knock-down, drag-out over who gets that pot, or maybe since they've got O'Clara for a mama, they'll shake hands and one'll take the pot and the other the lid. Wouldn't surprise me. Since their mama's green and potty, she might as well be one of those peace nuts, too.
Now, whether that pot's up for the prize is another story, and one I might have to tell when I've got Christmas over with and have shoved all my kids out the door, cleaned out the refrigerator, and thrown away all those presents they'll give me that I don't want.
I can't wait til then, truth be told. I'll see you back here at the end of the most wonderful time of year, if not before, and we'll keep on with our parade of pans and helping the world realize the benefits of general dirt and disorder.
We'll keep on spreading the filth around.
Stay tuned.
