Saint Cook
November 2020
It wasn’t, and that was a good thing because the chime on my radio signaled it was straight-up noon, and as the newscaster began his first story, I knew lunch was already on the table.
From different directions, Robert Shoemyer and I arrived at the table at the same time. We exchanged greetings as we sat down to the glorious task of absorbing a 15-course meal. Robert is a family friend—and my hero. He farms for a living. And like most folks who toil the whole time the sun is watching, he stays young behind his weather-beaten face that looks all the more leathery as he sits hatless across the table from me, his balding pate a pasty white above a tan line as stark as the rustline in a porcelain tub. That tan line is testament to five dozen seasons on the seat of a tractor, sowing soybeans and feeding cattle. Robert has the energy and the enthusiasm of a kid despite his eighty-some years. He owes his stamina to early rising and hard work and clean living, but mostly to his companion for 60-plus years.
Dorothy Shoemyer’s kitchen table looks like a Grandma Moses painting. Everything is on it. Everything. Her face would be on the label of the grocery-store package that says “grandma’s home cooking,” if there was such a package. Robert and I dug into a home-grown, sit-down, all-you-can-eat, family-style, “don’t stop now because there’s only a spoonful of cottage cheese left and finish up those peaches ‘cause I can’t keep up with ’em fallin’ off the trees and here, have some more fried chicken ‘cause there’s not enough room to put all this stuff back in the fridge” dinner from Dorothy Shoemyer’s kitchen table, featuring beef and gravy and new potatoes with green beans from the garden and sliced home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden, too, and corn and relish and pickled beets and bread and butter.
Robert watched me coax the last drops of chocolate syrup out of a Hershey’s squirt bottle onto a dish of vanilla ice cream. I worked the squeeze bottle like a bellows, violently expelling a few drops of syrup in a flatulent whoosh, then waited as the air wheezed back into the plastic bottle.
“Give it here,” Robert said. He grabbed the squeeze bottle and decapitated it, held it in one hand and a gallon milk jug in the other. He poured milk into the syrup bottle.
“Chocolate milk,” he explained, “and I don’t even have to dirty a glass.” Dorothy Shoemyer chuckled as she flitted like a hummingbird from stove to table to sink.
“More ice cream?” she asked.
“No, thanks,” I demurred, as I watched Robert shake his squirt bottle to make his chocolate milk. I was stuffed. It’s rare that a weary road traveler gets a home-cooked meal, especially for lunch.
Robert’s work ethic is impressive, and he’s married to Saint Cook. But that’s not why he’s my hero. Robert finds a use for everything. Or a short cut. And I knew that as soon as he finished his chocolate milk, the squeeze bottle would find the recycling bin. This lunch was a refreshing oasis in my sojourn through this big, throwaway world.
From “A Road Trip Into America’s Hidden Heart,” the perfect stocking stuffer. Visit JohnDrakeRobinson.com to learn more.