Bean Soup and Sheer Madness

It’s getting close to being our turn to take food to the family we go to church with—the momwife is still in a rehab facility recovering from near fatal injuries in a car wreck—so we’ve been making sure dadhusband and daughter have been having some regular meals.

I got home last night and started fixing OUR supper which, due to the competing needs of getting the kids cleaned up and having to ignore the flats of pansies someone insisted we buy and plant, meant that supper was some thick potato and meat Campbell’s soup and ham sammiches. Fast enough to get everyone fed before they started gnawing on the couch cushions, yet just slow enough for the sun to set and preclude me having to go put on jeans and grab a trowel.

Didn’t stop me from having to go to the store, though.

As I said, we had a meal to do for our friends for Friday, and rather than waiting we decided to go ahead and knock it out last night…and what was it? Homemade soup. Go figure—we fix better for other folks than for ourselves.

Anyway, the plan was to fix this recipe from the good folks at Hurst’s. There’s really nothing like a big pot of their HamBeen Black-Eyed Peas and cornbread on a cold day. Except for maybe that bag of 15 Bean Cajun soup.

So, I loaded myself into the van while the kids started their nightly exercise in getting the floor soaking wet.

Then I made a detour.

I am a sick person. I need help.

Monday when I dropped the kids off at the school, I noticed down off in the parking lot of a row of shop buildings along Highway 11 a car. Not just any car, but an old one. And not just any old one, but some sort of ’39 or ’40 coupe. Couldn’t tell quite what it was because I was going too fast and it was too far away and dark colored, but it looked like maybe an Olds or a Buick. And it bugged me. It had the look of a barn car—old, but straight—and my suppressed desire for something to tinker with was bubbling up again. No place to work on something, no spare cash for elusive no-longer-manufactured parts, tiny little brain. But I just had to go see what it was.

Old car addiction really is a terrible sickness.

So, before I went and got the soup fixings, I just had to go see what it was. I drove down into the darkened parking lot and pulled up alongside, just figuring to shine the old Maglite on it, satisfy my curiosity, and be done. Ah. Buick. Special. Missing upper fender marker lights. Flat tire. Bit of surface rust on the roof. Rubber gone on running board. Chrome weak but all there. Body straight. Glass intact.

Oh, what would it hurt to get out?

So I did, which is probably a good thing, because the interior looked like it had been home to a pack of wolverines, and it looked like somebody thought they were going to make themselves a hot rod at some point because there was a little set of cheapo gauges hanging under the dash. Both of those drawbacks threw some water on the fire. Still, with a little wo…NO! Bad. Bad bad. Buying someone else’s problems is not good.

But, you know, being dain bramaged means that even when I got back in the van and went to the store, and picked up my soup mix and Italian sausage and onion and light bulb for Ashley’s bedroom and big box of detergent and took them all home, I still was on a pondering binge. ‘Cause, you know, I still didn’t know what year it was, and how much they might sell for in good shape, and such like.

So, while Miss Reba and Oldest browned the sausage and cut up the onion and mixed all the stuff together in the big stock pot, I disappeared upstairs. Ostensibly, this was to change the lightbulb, and after finishing that task, snuck into the bedroom and started Googling around.

Yes, I’m a sicko.

Anyway, I figured out pretty quickly it was a 1940 Buick Special business coupe, and then trotted over to Hemmings and eBay Motors and found some similar ones which further dissuaded me from contemplating every getting one, and then figured I had nothing to lose by looking to see what I could find under the GM tent, and found a really interesting Poncho (owned by the proverbial little old lady), and then looked over at the Henrys, because my dad’s first car was a ’41 Ford coupe, and then decided that I needed to cut that mess out before I got caught by my children. How could I ever explain such a disease to them?!

Oh, by the way, the whole house smells heavenly.
posted by Terry at 11:38:00 AM