Bread: Theme Thursday

This week's Theme Thursday topic is "Bread".   There's a great group of writers participating in Theme Thursday each week so be sure to go check them out. You'll be glad you did!  In the meantime, here's my humble offering.

I grew up in the 1950's in rural Iowa.   It was a great place to be a kid.  My mom would send us out to play in the morning and we'd roam all over kingdom come until we were called in to eat.  Meals back then included plenty of home cooking... heavy on the meat and potatoes, with vegetables from the garden.  And every meal included bread and butter.  For those who didn't do their own baking, Wonder Bread was all the rage.

Our closest neighbor to the east was Old George, an elderly bachelor who kept pigs.  My brother Waldo (the archer) and I used to visit George to look in on the new piglets when the sows gave birth.  Our favorite we named "Half-Pint".  We'd wander over regularly to watch Half-Pint wallow in the mud and totter on his tiny feet.   Old George knew how much we enjoyed watching him and even let us feed him.

Being thrifty, Old George would make a weekly trip into town, where he'd load up the back seat of his car with prime pickings from the Wonder day-old bread store to feed to the pigs.  He told us we were always welcome to get a loaf out of the car to feed to Half-Pint.  So we made it a regular habit for awhile... at least until Half-Pint outgrew his cuteness.  Then one day we hit the mother load... there in the back seat of Old George's car was something we coveted.  It was a package of "brown and serve" rolls.

We had "brown and serve" rolls at our grandma's house once before and we thought they were the ultimate in fine eating.  Waldo and I looked at the package of rolls, looked at each other and nodded our heads. Oh, yeah!  Score!  We took off down the road with the "brown and serve" rolls, proudly offering them up to our mother to brown and serve to us for dinner that night.

But what was this?  It didn't make her happy that we were bringing home the proverbial bacon?  Why on earth was she so upset with us?  After all, Old George said we could get any of the bread we wanted out of the car to feed to the pigs.  Why would he care if we ate the bread instead?

Mom may have been embarrassed and humiliated by our desire to eat stale bread designated for swine, but we were in hog heaven!   Pig food rocks!