Dearest Eliana and Gehrig,
Good morning, my sweethearts. I woke up thinking about you this morning and
hoping you are having a fun time with your Grandma Vicki back and getting to
meet your Aunt Ruthie. Ruthie is the
second oldest of the four children from your Great Grandfather Dan and Great
Grandmother Ruby and, of course, she is Grandma Vicki’s sister. Her actual name is Ruth Evelyn but, early on,
family and friends called her “Ruth E.” or Ruthie. Kind of sweet, isn’t it? One of those things from your childhood which
just carries on the rest of your life and will always stay with you. You will have lots of those, I am sure.
When I was not too much older than you, our kindergarten
class from Henley Elementary in Darien , CT
went on a field trip up to Norwalk ,
the adjacent town, and toured the local potato chip factory. It was the most amazing trip. The factory was nearly new and had all of this
huge, stainless steel equipment. There
were large tubs where potatoes were washed and scrubbed and mammoth drums which
tumbled the potatoes against a rough interior which removed the skins. The potatoes proceeded down a conveyor belt
and dumped into multi-head slicers which fed by gravity into giant colanders
beneath to catch the paper thin slices. There was a final washing and drying
stage before the potato slices were fed into huge vats of boiling oil for
cooking. It didn’t take long.
Then people with full-length white smocks and rubber gloves
used large, long-handled strainers to lift the cooked chips out of the cooking
oil and place them on a long conveyor where they were sorted, by hand, before
they went under a bar which dusted a fine salt onto the still warm chips. The smell of freshly cooked potato chips and
their pungent oil filled the air and made our mouth's water. The chips then went into a bagging machine
and down another conveyor to a packing station.
The chips that were sorted out were only those which had
remained in the cooking oil too long and were a medium to dark brown. “Overcooks”, they called them. They were thrown on narrow conveyor belts
running near the edge of the large conveyor that carried the “perfect”, crisp,
light yellow chips, and sent down a chute into a large, open holding bin
waiting to be discarded. When we passed
that bin with those thousands of “burnt” chips, we were allowed to eat as many
of them as we wanted. I remember to this
day the taste of those warm, crisp chips with their dark, robust flavor and
extra crunchiness and being able to have an unlimited helping. It was like being in potato chip heaven.
Years later some snack food marketing guru came up with the
brilliant idea of bagging those “unwanted” chips and selling them at a
premium. Of course, had they asked
anyone of those six-year olds on the field trip that day, we could have told
them they were missing a new product opportunity and “Kettle Style” would have
been launched forty years earlier. This
story leads me to my Fourth Pearl.
Fourth Pearl : Eat a
Potato Chip
Make sure that at some point in your life you stand at the
edge of an ocean and put a large seashell to your ear and hear the waves
crashing inside. Climb a tree and look
down on the world from a different perspective.
Walk in a Texas
meadow in the spring surrounded by the bluebonnets and Indian paint brush and
smell the sweetness of wildflowers that cover the countryside like a
multi-colored blanket. Float in your
life jacket on a hot summer’s day in a clear lake and debate with your family
the politics of the day, religion or the meaning of life. Fall on your face in a newly mowed lawn and
smell the fresh cut grass. Doze off
under a spreading live oak tree and dream of all the mountains you will climb
one day. Make an angel in the snow…no,
make ten angels, until even through your snow suit, it’s so cold you can’t feel
your butt. Look up on a cloudless night
and marvel at the planets and the stars and let your mind be stretched by the
vastness and the awesome power of the Universe and behold God’s perfect
creation. And most important, hold the
hand of your best friend and look into their eyes and, silently, know you will
forever be in love. And, occasionally,
eat a potato chip. The dark ones are the
best.
God bless you both, my darlings.
Grandpa Jud
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