A World Without Ketchup

William H Greenlee was in World War II.  He entered the service when he was 24, his friends had long before married and were having their families. Faye Emerson was in college at the start of the war.  The young men were all away at war.  The men on campus were not the ones she wanted to date so she concentrated on finishing college and starting her teaching career.They married in 1947 at the ages of 25 and 27, behind all their peers in getting married and starting a family.  And then, it was another five years, after they had long given up on being able to have children, that I was conceived.

As I started school I was acutely aware that my mother was 37 when all of my friends had grandmothers close to that age.  My mother’s interests were also more along the lines of what my friend’s grandmothers were doing as well.   While my friend’s mother’s were arranging play dates, going to the zoo and taking their kids for picnics on the beach, I was wearing gloves and going to teas with my mother.  There were no baseball games, or campouts in our backyard…my parents lives were long past those kinds of trivial activities.  The things I was involved in required acute attention to manners, learning and being as adult-like as possible.  As we drove out of the neighborhood to a tea, my nose was pressed against the backseat window of the Buick, watching all my friends playing tag in the yard across the street.  I had the perfect manners and social awareness of any forty year old at nine.

There were three distinctly “uncouth” things that were to never happen in the presence of my mother.  Number one, eating anything with your hands.  I do not remember ever going to drive-in for a hamburger or eating in the car.  Even on our vacations, driving to Washington State, we always stopped for lunch at a restaurant...no sandwiches.  A cookie was the only possible exception to the “No eating with you hands" rule….my mother never baked cookies....petit fours, perhaps but no cookies.....cookies were not served at teas.  

Number two was gum chewing. My father however, had a vice.  He smoked.  Smoking as well, was on my mother’s list, but he, being her peer, could get away with it.  He and I would pile into the Buick to go to the 7Eleven to buy smokes. And when he did, he always bought me chewing gum.   I got a five pack. We were like outlaws on the lam, he smoking cigarettes and me chewing gum. I had to have it chewed by the time we got back to the house…going home the long way. I still feel like I have to chew a 5 pack of gum in under fifteen minutes.

Number three was….you guessed it, using ketchup. Since there was virtually nothing, you ate with a fork that was good with ketchup on it, I grew up in a world without Ketchup.