It’s a rare traveler who can navigate through life without slamming into any potholes. Besides, I don’t know that such a trip would be worth taking.
My grandmother sat in a living room chair facing the sort of television that doubled as a serious piece of furniture. Surely the TV must have weighed most of a thousand pounds.
On screen, the Cubs were getting beaten up by one team or another and Harry Caray was doing his best to keep matters entertaining. We listened to him in the background, only half watching, while we shelled peas. Mark Grace, the Cubs’ first baseman, had just gotten a hit, and that made my grandmother happy.
Shelling purple hull peas is one of the great jobs in all of work-dom. It’s especially welcome when taken on the heels of an early morning’s picking. Picking peas, while not at all the worst job, includes plenty discomforts. It’s best done early in the day before the world gets hot and the peas get hotter, so it requires a hunting-morning-grade rollout, then a swim through the humidity and fire ants to brush among the dewey leaves of a pea patch, the better to evenly and fairly feed the mosquitoes. By mid-morning, several loosely-packed five gallon buckets of peas are a welcome reward to have achieved.
At home, we’d spread a bed sheet into a far corner and pour and scatter the peas onto it to cool.
Early and mid summer is the time to grow and freeze peas. Stacked in pint boxes, they’re a staple, good for the table all year round, and they’re best when handled properly. It was always my understanding that cooling, shelling and packing away peas and any other garden bean or grain product in a prompt manner made the ultimate table fare taste best — as opposed to dawdling about it while the corn or what-have-you turned to starch. We never tested this, so I don’t know for sure it is so, but the methods we used worked without fail and made testing unnecessary.
Sitting in the breeze of the fan-aided A/C, the feel of damp clothes cooling on the way to dry, we’d each take a large bowl or dish pan of peas and begin shelling. Shelled peas fell into the pan atop others waiting to be shelled, then filtered their way on down. Empty hulls were cast into a paper grocery sack whose top had been rolled outwardly down to make it stand up and stay open. What folks would shell into now that grocery bags are mostly irksome wisps of plastic I don’t know. I guess you could throw the hulls back into the emptied bucket, but that doesn’t seem as satisfying.
Shelling peas is the perfect summertime job — one that’s legitimately necessary, one that can’t really be done any other way, one that can’t be done while you’re also doing something else, and a perfectly plausible reason to sit in the air. It’s a job that’s a respite and a retreat.
I know there are mechanized shellers, but we liked to pick our peas before they were completely matured, and shellers turn our sort of product to pulp. By collecting the peas after they’ve filled out but before the pods are solidly purple, the results taste much better. I’ve always assumed people who say they hate vegetables were introduced to the flavorless, dried out kind. Besides, the fact our style of peas had to be shelled by hand was as much a bonus as anything.
Shelling peas is a muscle memory task, like riding a bicycle. Once warmed up, your attention is free to wander at will. Something that is not a muscle memory task is “looking” peas. This was something my grandmother reserved to herself. I don’t know that anyone else in the world ever undertook this, but it was something she did without fail.
A pan of shelled peas is a beautiful sight. Very light green, each with a little purple eye, they are a uniform thing of beauty. My grandmother would carefully go through the peas once shelled and remove any that had been “stung.” She called this “looking the peas.” Some of the peas would have some sort of spot damage from an insect that, I assume, had laid eggs in it. Tiny little punctures one would assume had admitted tiny, tiny little eggs. Once cooked, these damage spots would be quite invisible, so this had to be done before freezing. One might question the necessity of doing this at all — one of my mentors would certainly have said ‘Whoever eats the most peas eats the most stung,’ but my grandmother didn’t intend for anyone to eat anything of the kind, so she lovingly turned palmfuls through her hands, casting out a debauched one now and then.
We watched the Cubs, partly because they were what was available, but largely because my grandmother was a Harry Caray fan. In the days before television, the pea shelling task was entertained by the St. Louis Cardinals on the radio, and the broadcaster whose voice told the tale was Harry Caray. He used words to paint a picture so vivid, listeners were present as much at the intersection of Clark and South Broadway across from the Stan Musial statue as were those whose bodies were also there. He was interesting and colorful without being tedious or an obnoxious bore.
My grandmother thought him the best broadcaster of all time and said so, mentioning how sorry she had been when, in the late ’60s, the Cardinals had shown him the door.
“Why would they fire him?” I asked, and she danced around the rumor he had grown far more familiar with August Busch III’s wife than might have been necessary for describing strikes and balls.
“That had to be embarrassing for everyone,” I said. “The embarrassment of that would go on and on, too, I’d think. You’d have to think about it to some extent every day.”
As far as I knew, my grandmother was a blameless, Southern lady, a deeply committed Baptist who hadn’t missed a Sunday service in decades. She certainly lived her faith out loud. The fact she would be sympathetic to a beer-drinking philanderer hit me as far out of character.
“We all bounce along through embarrassments and mistakes,” she said. “Memories of those keep us on the right path.”
I pictured the game Plinko from The Price is Right. Bouncing along like a puck, ricocheting from one blunder to another before tumbling into a hole that defined its fate. I described this mental image to her.
“Life is not that random,” she said. “You can steer around most things and stop before you hit most others, and it’s certainly not all about where you wind up. But, if you’re moving forward, you’ll hit some things you should have missed. Some of those will be things you saw coming and decided to hit anyway. These are the ones that make the most noise. Most folks have a path they can stay on, but the paths aren’t ever straight for long.”
She picked a damaged pea out of her pan and flicked it into her shell bag.
“Some lessons are more jarring than others,” she said. “Just make sure to look at what you hit once you’re past it. That’ll help you decide to miss it the next time.”
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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