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Saturday Morning Tuna & Shopping
by Janet Elaine Smith
When I was in 7th grade, our family moved from the small
southern Minnesota town of St. Peter to the miniscule northern
Minnesota town of Spring Lake. They used to laugh about the
size of the town. “50 people, if you count the dogs and
cats,” they would say. The sad truth of the matter is that
it was pretty close to the truth.
It was a “fur piece,” as my dad used to say, to school
after we moved “up north.” That meant getting up early in
the morning, especially when I started attending high school.
It was 36 miles to Deer River, which meant the bus left at
6:30 in the morning and we got home about 5:30 in the
afternoon. Once winter hit, it was dark when we left and dark
when we came home.
This did afford me the pleasure of “sleeping in” on
Saturday mornings. Once I would get up, Mother and I had a
regular ritual. My dad hated tuna fish, and he insisted that
he had to have pancakes every morning. If he missed his
pancakes, he claimed he had a migraine headache. (He had
migraine headaches many days when he ate pancakes, so I never
quite figured that one out.)
Anyway, on Saturday morning, when I got up—which was usually
around 10 o’clock—Mother and I would have tuna salad
sandwiches. It was best on her homemade white bread. She had
her own little added touch: celery seed. She hated the celery
some people put in it, as her teeth weren’t the best any
more. But she loved the taste of the celery. She had high
blood pressure, which eliminated adding celery salt. The day
she discovered celery seeds, you would have thought she had
discovered a new continent! From that day onward, the celery
seeds were a “must.”
As we sat and ate our tuna sandwiches and drank our coffee, we
would pull out the catalogs. It didn’t matter how many times
we had been through the same catalog, we always pointed out
the ones we liked the best.
We had the Sears Roebuck catalog, of course. And there was the
“Monkey Wards” catalog. These had fairly good stuff to
look at, but they were what Mother called “farmer’s
fare.” They had “house dresses.” One time Hank Wadman, a
neighboring bachelor, was there when we were wandering through
the aisles of the catalog, when we hit the lingerie section.
“Wow! Braless evening straps!” he said excitedly, nearly
panting at the page after page of offerings he drooled over.
But the real thrill came when we got to the Alden’s catalog.
It was “uptown city stuff,” Mother would say, as we
pointed to our favorites on each page, dreaming of the days
when we lived in St. Peter and could get on the bus and go to
visit her brother and his family in Minneapolis. They had
high-heels—spikes—that we wondered how people could walk
in. There were “real formals”; the strapless,
full-skirted, crinoline supported ones. The suits were “just
like Mamie (Eisenhower) wore,” Mother said, neither of us
ever dreaming that one day I would actually meet Mamie
Eisenhower, and even spend an afternoon at their Gettysburg
farm.
Occasionally, when the money was good enough, I would get to
actually order something from Alden’s. It was usually a
practical something-or-other. Like the beige car coat with the
Norwegian-type braid and the toggle buttons. Or the reversible
skirt that was lavender on one side and lavender-and-white
checked on the other side. Or the high heels, which Mother
insisted were “much better for your feet”—with the sort
of clunky heels, while I dreamed about the white spikes!
Yes, they are fond memories. My mother died in December 1996.
Her funeral was on our anniversary, Dec. 18th. We couldn’t
go. It was a blizzard, and the roads were all closed. The
state police would not let anyone leave town, not even for
their mother’s funeral.
I can’t explain how this happened. It makes no sense, but
then sometimes life is just like that. The morning of
Mother’s funeral I got up and went to fix breakfast for our
family. I opened the refrigerator door, and there inside was a
bowl of tuna salad—complete with the celery seeds. Yes, I
always kept them on hand. But I hadn’t made any tuna salad.
I questioned everybody in the house. Nobody had made the tuna
salad. As I sat there with my own daughter and ate a tuna
salad sandwich, Mother-style, I knew she understood why I
wasn’t there with her.
Saturday
Morning Sandwiches
By Janet Elaine Smith
1 can tuna fish
1/2 small onion, chopped very fine
mayonnaise to moisten to your liking
1 tablespoon celery seed
Blend together well. Spread on bread or toast. Cut into
fourths, diagonally. Enjoy!
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