Kernels of Wisdom

I have no idea who decided to throw hard corn kernels in a pan and pop them, but I am eternally grateful.  

Popcorn is the stuff of heaven. It's cheap, easily made, and you can hear angels sing when it's done right. I grew up in a frugal home with modest surroundings. Popcorn was the snack of choice. Hot, buttery, crunchy, salty. Dangerous. Then there was ice cream, the perfect counterpoint to it. Cold, creamy, silky, sweet. Our growing up years were cycles of salty to sweet. Our Daddy who was tall and willow, with arms long enough to reach all the way around people, a snack-eating enigma. He loved to eat, should have weighed 500 pounds considering the amounts, but didn't. He worked hard but never "worked out" that I remember. He kept our big yard, dug a garden most years, would play ball with us kids, and walked and lifted a lot of heavy packages at his job at the Postal Service. But I never saw anything approximating a barbell in our home. He loved popcorn, ice cream, pickles, cottage cheese and peaches, fried pecans, chips and garlic cream cheese dip and oh yeah, Stuckey's pecan rolls. He'd switch from savory to sweet and back again. But the winner-winner-chicken-dinner was the popcorn. The day he died, he asked Mama for some. She made a batch in the kitchen, handed him his bowl (he said "thank you"), stepped to the kitchen to get hers...when she turned back to him, he had already gone to Jesus. With some popcorn kernels on his lips! He figured he'd just head on up after all that goodness. 

I came to marriage with opinions about the stuff. I didn't know how to cook anything useful, but I knew how to make a proper batch of popcorn (as well as rightly fell a large tree). I remember boxing out people when they tried to interfere with the proper salting and buttering of it. Basketball definitely interfered with my proper domestic training. Ken and I's first "fight" was over a big bowl of popcorn. We were very good friends, not dating yet, but were sharing a bowl at one of our singles gatherings after church. It was especially good, with lots of butter and Old Maids at the bottom. For those who don't know what Old Maids are...they are the half-popped, kinda burnt kernels that you find at the bottom of the bowl. They are the Goody. There are also Old Maids who are young ladies who are almost not young anymore and who are not married.  But I don't think they're called that anymore...they're just called Successful Career Women? I am not sure and will cease talking about it. I tend to get in trouble when talking about women for some reason, even though I am one. I thought I was almost an Old Maid when I got married at 21. Now we call a woman that young a baby or teenager or something. But I digress... Ken and I got to the lowest dregs of the bowl and started digging for Old Maids. He slapped my hand and told me that I had to wait until all the popped kernels were eaten. I grabbed the bowl and said watch me. We did some wrestling and I think some of the bounty was lost in the melee. Who makes up rules about popcorn, anyway? Little did we know that this was a pretty good harbinger of our future fights. Not the physical part, but the nature of it. That might have been put down to some kind of underlying tension, but I'm not sure. The temperature definitely went up in any room I found myself in with Ken Norton, but don't tell him that.

Our decades of popcorn love included us and everyone who visited and then our progeny who followed. I have perfected the making of it. For a few years, we bought that chemical-filled product you throw in a microwave. But why? When I found out about how toxic that stuff is as well as the dangers of GMO foods, I chased down some regular ole popcorn, raised on Amish farms and without hybridized genes, hormone-disrupting chemicals or alien DNA. It was heavenly, crunchy, coma-inducing. And then I discovered the real, real butter. Irish butter, that requires you to sell your first-born child to buy. I only use that particular kind on special occasions, which happens, well, maybe weekly. You get a big Dutch oven, heat up a mess of coconut oil til hot. Then pour in these precious nuggets, keeping the pan moving until everything seems popped (please don't remove the lid until done). Then pour it into a gigantic farm bowl, if you have any integrity. Melt a hunk of Irish butter in same pan, then pour it over the corn, stirring it all around. Then salt, not too much, not too little. This is more art than science and I can't help you until you experiment for at least a decade or two. Bring bowls and several bar towels to the living room, along with your beverages of choice. Don't wait. It's still hot and needs to be consumed and now. We are known, however, for leaving leftover popcorn on the kitchen counter with a towel over it, and will commence to snacking on that until it's gone. Heaven forbid you would ever throw any of it away.

Tonight, I'm having a big pile of ladies from church over for movie and game night (we invited all of them) and my contribution is as much popcorn as I can muster up (til the butter runs out). They don't know what's about to go down. I can see Daddy with a grin and a thumbs up. Like I said, that's some heaven right there. And also maybe a 12-step program...