Thankful for Cream of Wheat and Other Tests of Character

This week Jean found herself traveling from Dickensian orphanages to Appalachian foster homes, with a detour through a bowl of Cream of Wheat and a Mahjong Mixer she somehow survived as chief organizer. Along the way she discovered that good books can make modern comforts seem miraculous, and that running an event is mostly an exercise in pretending not to notice the few things that almost went wrong. In the end, both experiences left her grateful for resilience, whether found in the pages of a novel or around a table full of determined Mahjong players….AI

I’ve been reading Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. Or I should say I’ve been listening to this month’s book club selection. Listening rather than reading for the club is something I started doing a year or more ago because I can multitask at the same time. (Question for grammar nerds: is it redundant to add “at the same time” after the word multitask? I suppose it is.) Either way, I do have the hard copy version of the book and the inside cover says, “Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society.” It goes on to say the problems haven’t been solved in all these years since 1850 when he wrote that book.

I found Demon Copperhead a spell-bounding, fast-paced story about the foster care and opioid addiction crisis in Southern Appalachia. One negative reviewer said it was a book “filled with metaphors after metaphors” as if that was bad thing. But the metaphors were one of the things I loved about the way the story unfolded as it follows the timeline of a boy born in a single-wide trailer to a teenage, single mother who died from an overdose. A lot of dark humor comes from those metaphors. This 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning book is written in first-person using an often witty and warm voice of the boy, Demon, as he goes from one foster care place to another, used and abused, to a brief success in high school as football player to addiction. One reviewer called it “an epic tale of survival” and I would agree wholeheartedly with that.

There’s a line written by Dickens that describes the orphans in his time as getting "three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week and half a roll on Sunday." Demon also didn’t get enough to eat. While reading Demon Copperhead I ran across that quote while googling the word “gruel” which I did because I was wondering if gruel was the same thing as Cream of Wheat. Since I’ve been on a high protein diet I’ve been eating Cream of Wheat Instead Protein for breakfast until it threatens to come out my ears. Gruel, in case anyone else is curious, is a watery porridge made by “boiling coarsely ground oats, wheat, rye, rice, barley, millet, or hemp.” Even acorns in times of scarcity. This morning when I emptied my pouch of Cream of Wheat in a bowl with 2/3 cup of water and popped in the microwave for 25 seconds—not 30 seconds as the directions call for so it wouldn’t boil over—I thanked the gods of good luck that I wasn’t eating grounded-up acorns. That’s one of the super powers that comes with reading good books...you get to “experience” living a different kind of life without actually having to suffer living through the hardships of others who were born into different circumstances.

Change of topic: Last week I promised a report on the Mahjong Mixer I planned between my campus and our sister campus. We had twenty-four in attendance and all but one person seems happy with the experience. The woman was not happy to be playing at a table with a man from her campus because, she said, “He should be playing at the novice table and I should be at an intermediate play table.” I said, “I’m sorry, but we had to change some things around.” But the kicker is that it was the other campus’s counterpart to me who rated the playing style of their players, not me. So I can’t claim that as a mistake on my part that they both got rated as playing at the same speed.

The two other hiccups we had were also not my fault. (Right or wrong I’m not claiming them even though I suppose ‘the buck stops here’ rule should apply since I was in charge. But in my defense, all the committees had their responsibilities outlined in writing.) Hiccup number one happened because the woman in charge of the cookies and water forgot to get the bottled water so we ended up at the last minute having to have pitchers of ice water and glasses. Not ideal to use on tables where players can accidentally knock over a water container. We might not have had any water at the event if I hadn't checked the refrigerator and found it empty several hours before the event. But no one but she and I knew about the slip-up so I told myself to put my control freak in a box and don’t let her out for fear I'd say something that would embarrass us both.

The other hiccup came when it was time for the MC to do a short reading at the end of the event where she was to name the committee members, to thank them. (I had written her script for both the opening and closing, printed them out for her on two sheets of paper, and gave them to her four days ahead.) But when it was time for her to do the wrap up, she didn’t. So I reminded her it was time and she said, “Oh, I never saw the second sheet!” that was still paper-clipped to the first. But I picked her for MC for a reason and she carried it off without anyone but the two of us knowing that it was her first read through of the closing remarks.

God save me from being in charge of any future committees. I spent too much of my work life depending on just myself, and trusting others was freaking scary. Especially senior citizens who have a built-in excuse for not doing what they didn’t do. But I told myself that the people who played in the Mixer didn’t see the slip-ups that I saw. “All’s well that ends well” ran through my head as well as other platitudes to make excuses for the Mixer not going perfectly. But everyone seemed to have a good time, liked the prizes they won, and I even won two games. ©