Wine..my first memory of wine is my father telling my mother that my grandmother’s jam cake had caused a knot to form on his tongue. Wine was an ingredient in the cake and the cake was soaked in wine. My grandmother had used her homemade grape wine. Seems like that year, the wine had a high alcohol content…a really high alcohol content. That’s why she was slicing the jam cake in wafer thin slices. Obviously, someone else had complained.
So, there was the homemade grape wine in the jam cake. My grandmother also made wild cherry wine. There was homemade potato wine made by a second or third cousin. That was her specialty. It was very dry…not my favorite. My great-grandmother gave me a taste of her beer…yuck!!! My grandfather was known for his corncob whiskey. I never tasted any…just that I’ve heard his whiskey was quite good. My sister made some corncob whiskey…don’t know if it was from his recipe…it was gross looking and tasting. An aside…there was no alcohol in our house.
In college…I was introduced to what I called soda pop wine. The Annie Greensprings and the Boone’s Farm. I don’t remember even getting a buzz from them. There was apple, strawberry, peach, and other fruit flavors. The wine was cheap and along with takeout fish and shrimp dinners on Friday night…we had a good time socializing.
I paid for college with loans and scholarships and work study. (I don’t know about my bothers or sister, but my father did not spend one penny on my college education or provide any spending money. He didn’t offer and I didn’t ask.) You would think that I would be against loan forgiveness, but I am not. This government that is supposed to be for, by, and of the people is not and has not been, maybe from inception. This government has facilitated and advocated for the wealth transfer from the middle class to corporations and super wealthy individuals. There was a recent situation where government money meant for the widows and orphans (euphemism for the intended recipients) was somehow appropriated by a wealthy person to build a recreation center that I don’t think was actually built. The money, my tax dollars, was not used for the benefit of the people for whom it was intended, but to overfeed the obese (the wealthy).
Want to place a limitation on the amount of loan forgiveness? I think it should be the amount required to attend the premier publicly funded university in the state in which the person resided. That would be equitable and, if one went to an in-state school, all school loans would be forgiven. This would encourage an educated population and maybe an educated population would make better decisions than those that are currently being made. That may be a pipedream as we have seen a degree does not confer education or knowledge or the ability to critically think. But if this country is to survive, the majority of the populace must learn to think critically and rationally debate the difficult issues facing any group(s) of people that sincerely want to live in peace in a shared space.
We have elected officials whose sole agenda is wealth appropriation. These elected officials have no care for their constituents and consider their constituents fools. So, if loan forgiveness puts a few cents back into the pockets of the middle class…I have no problem with it. Yes, I repaid my loans, but I have seen my income decrease year after year–all to feed the greed of the corporations and the wealthy. While schools, infrastructure, things tax dollars should be used for, deteriorate or are non-existent. I have never understood why corporations are worthy of a bailout, but we the people are not.
I worked in the library which I enjoyed. One summer, I decided to read as many books by Black authors as I could find. I don’t think the library had the books in a separate section, but I managed to find Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and more. I will never forget a book…don’t remember the name or author…but its premise was that there was a shot of some substance that could turn Black people white and Black people were lining up to get their shot. There were a few…one was a woman…who refused the shot. I wondered if I had the courage to be an outlier like her. I think that’s why I remember that book.
It was disheartening reading these books. I am Black and I did not know any Black people who were like the characters in the books. None of them resonated; none of them spoke to me. That’s when I realized that the norm in America was the Urban Black. I read all of Toni Morrison’s books up to The Bluest Eye. After that book, I couldn’t read her version of Black. I liked Langston Hughes Simple stories and his poetry. I read Native Son and some more books by Richard Wright, including his autobiography. I could relate to his autobiography, but not to his fictional characters.
I didn’t read that much fiction in college. I do remember staying up all night to read The Exorcist. I decided that night not to read books like that at night.
By happenstance, I was assigned one of the older residence halls on campus. It had no air conditioning and had only two or three floors. We had a curfew. I had a white roommate who turned out to be a born again Christian. Needless to say, we did not get along and she moved out and, after that, I rarely had a roommate. I wasn’t a R.A., but I worked on campus during the summer and I had no roommate and I wasn’t assigned one in the fall or spring.
One good that came out of being assigned to an older residence hall was that I met D who lived on the first floor and we became friends. We got to talking one day and found out that we were both born in the same hospital in H’ville.
Over a semester and a summer, I did an internship. During that internship, I visited a penal institution, camped out in the mountains and got to see the sun rise in the mountains, saw trailers perched on mountain ledges, saw the consequences of strip mining, saw the beginning of land reclamation. I thought I knew what poor looked like and then I saw poorer.
I wish I had been self-aware enough at that time to take a step back to actually figure out what I wanted to do…who I wanted to be. I think I believed that everything would just happen organically.
I was good at taking standardized tests. I had no idea what I wanted to do after four years of college, so I continued my education.
After I graduated, I went on a graduation trip to Atlanta with D. My first airplane flight. We went to a club in the Underground which was at one of its nadirs and the Dells were singing. That was the highlight of that trip. I still listen to the Dells and, before that night, the Dells weren’t really on my radar. In C’ville, the local radio stations played sixties rock and roll, with very little Soul mixed in. I would listen to Chicago’s WLS on my little transistor radio at night and there was more of a mix of music. For some reason, WLAC did not come in clearly. I was so surprised when I found out the Hossman was white.
Do you think the picture is a decent representation of trompe l’oeil art? I was surprised at how the picture turned out. I like it.
To this day, I have no taste for wine…Red, White, Rosé, etc. I will cook with wine, but that’s the only use I have for wine. Maybe it’s an acquired taste. I also have no taste for the hard liquors.
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