Tag: New Year’s Eve

The new year never seems to live up to the Times Square excitement

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn magic, writing

People are still shooting each other, having sex, drinking too much wine, getting married, watching bad TV, dying of old age (so long  Glynis Johns at 100), and eating too much fast food. When will it end?

I’m more concerned about the mass shootings than the wine and the sex and the marriage–like the senseless attack at Iowa’s Perry High School. Shooters kill a bunch of people and then kill themselves. Why don’t they kill themselves first? That would reduce the amount of grief and paperwork.

We expect too much magic, it seems, with the changing of the year.  Or maybe we don’t expect enough. Or, worse yet, we expect the same old, same old. Speeding tickets, DUIs, getting fired, getting hired, texting too much, running into a tree while texting, being shot by the cops while breaking into a store, finding the Oak Island Treasure. Yes, when will it end?

I have high hopes for the human race, but low expectations. Perhaps you feel that way, too.

I don’t think “it” will end because it’s easier for all of us to sit back and watch “it” happen on TV without worrying about “it” (all the bad stuff) than figuring out how to fix “it.” Okay, most of us don’t know how to fix it, though one would think that by working on the problem as a group we could make progress with the changing of the years.

Then, New Year’s Eve would mean something.

–Malcolm

Black-Eyed Peas and Good Luck

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life2 Comments

When I was a kid, I hated black-eyed peas because the cooks at the high school cafeteria boiled them into a brown mush that was best used for various construction projects like mortaring bricks together. Or, low-grade library paste.

Does eating them bring good luck? The one year my mother fixed them the traditional Southern way (brown mush) something bad happened. It was so bad, I’ve blocked out what it was. I vowed to never again eat black-eyed peas that looked like mush.

Mother usually served them the way a Midwestern cook would serve regular peas. Those I liked. But nobody else in the Florida Panhandle cooked them that way. Unlike my parents, I liked a lot of traditional Southern foods: boiled peanuts, mullet, grits, rosin baked potatoes, collards, hush puppies, anything out of New Orleans, traditional Southern fried chicken, pan fry bread, sugar cane stalks to chew on, green beans cooked with bacon, plenty of gravy, catfish, and Apalachicola oysters.

Every new year, I see my Facebook friends showing pictures of their January 1 meals with heaping ladels of mushy black-eyed peas. Okay, so my parents came from the midwest and the northwest and didn’t boil peas into a road-tar like mess that could be used to resurface city streets.

No, I’m not totally Southern when it comes to black-eyed peas. Give me a sack of boiled peanuts any day.

—Malcolm