Farm Boy: A Memoir with Recipes

By Mark Abramson

In this prequel to MINNESOTA BOY, his "coming out" memoir of his college years, Mark Abramson reaches further back to write about growing up gay in rural America. Stories of farm life through blazing hot summers and icy winters are interspersed with old recipes and commentary on Minnesota foods. He explores his love of music and cooking as well as his earliest awakenings of his interest in other farm boys and yes, he really did raise a pet fox.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Abramson
• Release date: Oct 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463850077

Mark Abramson

Mark Abramson is the author of the best-selling Beach Reading mystery series published by Lethe Press. He has also written the non-fiction books "For My Brothers," an AIDS Memoir, and "Sex, Drugs & Disco - San Francisco Diaries from the pre-AIDS Era" and its sequel, "MORE Sex, Drugs & Disco." His next book "Minnesota Boy" is a memoir about his coming out years while in college in Minneapolis.

Book preview

Prologue

While I was writing Minnesota Boy , I restricted myself to stories that took place between my eighteenth birthday and my leaving Minnesota for San Francisco in 1975 . As I thought about my earlier life , growing up on the farm , I always knew I was different , but I didn ’ t have a word for it . Memories of childhood came flooding back , all jumbled up with memories of music and memories of food .

With that in mind, I decided in this book to tell how I figured out what that difference was and to include some recipes to illustrate the stories. Some are actual family recipes. Some I found in old church cook books and faded copies of magazines like Taste of Home and Country Living. Others were recommended by friends and friends of friends, but most of them have some tenuous link to my growing up in rural Minnesota

My mother and I agreed that we could sit down with almost any cookbook and read it like a novel from beginning to end. The difference between the two of us was that I would be marking pages, making notes and writing a shopping list. Mom would close the book, put it back on the shelf, and not cook anything. She didn’t like to cook as much as I do, but that might have been the result of years of having to feed two men and four kids and many harvest seasons of hungry thrashing crews.

In Minnesota Boy I told lots of stories about my Mom. Farm Boy focuses a bit more on my Dad, but both of them were pretty interesting and loveable characters.

Murray-County

Iimagine that the first few moments of my life must have been a lot like my first acid trip. The world was brand new, wide open, filled with magic and sunlight. Actually, I was born at about 4am, so there wouldn’t have been any sunlight in Slayton, Minnesota that early in the morning.

Years later, when I asked my mother about it, she told me she went into labor the night before I was born and my dad was at a school board meeting at the one-room country schoolhouse a couple of miles from our farm. My sister Ann was the oldest, so she had to saddle up a horse and ride through thunder and lightning and hail to get him to come home and drive Mom to the hospital. When I heard about my twelve-year-old sister riding horseback through the storm, I figured I must have been the reason she never much cared for boys. She liked horses better, but then, I never much cared for girls, so we were even. It was nothing personal.

I don’t remember my birth or my circumcision, thank God. We were Presbyterian—I would later discover—not Jewish, so why not leave well enough alone? I swore I would never do that to any son of mine. Since I turned out gay, I wasn’t apt to have any sons of my own, but if I did, I would never have them circumcised. I think it is barbaric! The subject only came up once, years later again, when my mother had just returned from visiting a friend in the hospital with a new baby girl. They had the baby’s ears pierced the day she was born! Couldn’t they have waited? What if she doesn’t want pierced ears when she grows up?

I said, You had me circumcised. Pierced ears can grow shut!

They brought the newborn and newly circumcised me home from the hospital to the farm seven miles east of town, where I would live until the day I turned eighteen and left for Europe. For my three older sisters, I might have been a novelty for a while, and then just a chore, a bundle of baby noises and smells or even a pest, as far as three little girls were concerned.

I remember my face being buried in the shoulders of a sea of females. My mother held me the most, but I had plenty of sisters, cousins, aunts, and neighbor ladies from miles around and they all wanted to take turns holding the new baby boy.

I don’t remember men holding me. Men lived in the outside world and only came indoors for meals and to sleep at night. Living in our farm house, there was my dad, our old hired man named Cardy, a distant cousin of my Dad’s, and now me, a third male in a world that was mostly inhabited by women.

I remember sitting on the dining room floor surrounded by piles of laundry, sorted by texture and color, sour-smelling in the summer heat. My mother washed load after load in the same soapy water, first handkerchiefs and underwear, then socks and shirts and blouses, ending with Dad’s and Cardy’s dirty overalls.

The clothesline in the back yard ran between the vegetable garden and a long row of rhubarb with leaves so big I could hide under them. Mom made rhubarb pies with eggs from our chickens and pie crusts made with lard she rendered from hogs we raised on the farm. Only the sugar and flour and spices had to come from Nordin’s Super-Valu in Slayton or the little grocery store in Avoca.

I remember standing at the screen door looking out at the shimmering waves of heat across the driveway, one hand on the doorframe and the other hand inside my diaper, holding onto my little cock, already forming a life-long fascination with it. Our driveway led to a mile-long gravel road with no other houses or driveways on it. The countryside was broken by gravel roads, each one mile apart, into a checkerboard pattern. Each square mile usually held four farms, a quarter section each or 160 acres.

Looking out the screen door, I could see the garage with my dad’s old blue Plymouth, to be replaced later by a 1957 Desoto with chrome tail fins and push-button everything. How I loved that car! Long before I was old enough to drive, I loved to sit in it when nobody was looking. I’d make the whole front seat go up and down, tilt back and forth, and play with all the buttons and knobs. When Dad would catch me, he’d complain that I was going to kill the battery. By the time I was in high school, he was buying Chevrolet Impalas, trading them in every couple of years for a newer one.

The garage also held his workbench and tools. Dad liked woodworking as a hobby, but he never had much time for it until he retired and moved to town. Outside the garage stood a gasoline tank mounted on a tall wooden platform so that gravity pushed the gas down the hose to the nozzle to fill up the car and the pick-up truck and tractors and the lawn mower.

Beyond the garage was the granary, a rectangular building with three huge bins for storing oats and soybeans and shelled corn. Next was the barn, even bigger than the house, both of which were over a hundred years old before I was even born. The barn held two rows of stanchions for milking cows and wooden pallets Dad could move around to create pens of various sizes. A ladder on one wall led to the hay loft, a great place to play when I got a little older. It was full of cats but they weren’t pets at all. You could never catch them except when they were tiny kittens and they were no fun anyway. Like most things on the farm, the cats had a practical purpose. Theirs was to keep down the rodent population.

North of the barn was the hog house with the big hog lot where they wallowed in mud. A couple of corn cribs stood beyond that and a short driveway that led downhill to the cornfield and another vegetable garden. That was where we grew bigger things than in the kitchen garden, sweet corn and popcorn, potatoes, pumpkins, melons and squash. My dad called cantaloupe muskmelon and we grew delicious watermelons, too. Some years we planted Indian corn and gourds, which had little purpose but as decorations in an autumn cornucopia. My parents taught me that it was okay to do some things just for fun, to sew impractical seeds in the garden. It was a lesson that I took to heart, far beyond what they intended.

The chicken coop was connected to the machine shed, where Cardy kept his car. The tractors usually spent the nights there too or maybe the pickup truck. Attached to the chicken coop was a big yard, fenced in on top and three sides so the chickens could go in and out, especially on sunny days. They slept and laid their eggs indoors in little cubby holes lining the walls.

The farm air was a raging river of smells from all the flowers and fruit trees, animals and gasoline, the lawn when it was freshly mowed, or alfalfa during baling season. I loved crawling through the tall blades of grass in the ditches that lined our driveway. I don’t remember my first few winters, but my first memory of snow was when I played in those same ditches where the tall grass grew in summer. Dressed in a hooded parka, mittens and scarves and boots, I loved digging tunnels through the soft deep powdery whiteness.

A creek ran through our pasture, the water always moving and cold, even at its lowest point in the summer. It eventually fed into Plum Creek near Walnut Grove. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote a book about pioneer life called On the Banks of Plum Creek where her family lived in a dugout home in 1870. My parents read the Little House on the Prairie books out loud to us on cold winter nights beside the oil-burning stove in the living room.

My parents told me that I sleepwalked one time when I was just a little kid of about three or four years old. It was a hot summer night under a clear starry sky. One of the things I miss most about the farm in Minnesota is the night skies. I loved to lie in the grass on the lawn and stare up into the huge bowl of stars inverted over me. I learned how to find the North Star and the Big Dipper by the time I could talk and I remember Dad pointing out the Russian satellite called Sputnik as it moved across the Milky Way. The Russians were still considered the enemy in those days.

That night when I sleepwalked, they told me I came downstairs and entered their bedroom and woke up both of my parents. Come on, I said to them. Come with me. I need to show you something.

They were so startled to be awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of the night that they did what I asked. Dad in his summer pajamas and Mom in a short filmy nightgown followed me to the kitchen and out the back door where I took each of them by the hand and walked out onto the front lawn. I let go of their hands and pointed east and said, Look at the sigh-locks. They told me that was how I pronounced this made up word. Mom said they figured I had somehow connected silo and lilacs because both our silo and the lilac bushes were east of the house.

Then I took them both by the hand again and led them back to their bed to say goodnight before I went back upstairs to my own bed and remembered nothing about it the next morning when they asked me. Parents have to put up with a lot, I guess. I am somewhat in awe of people who choose to raise children. Do they know what they are getting themselves into? It seems to me that a lot of young straight couples these days are mere children themselves.

My parents were older—32 and 42—by the time I was born and had already raised three girls. A boy shouldn’t have been too much for them. They weren’t counting on a gay boy, of course, but they did the best they could and I always knew I was deeply loved.

toddler.jpg

Mark as a toddler

We grew potatoes on the farm, but my mother used to make a lot of rice too. Some summer days when she didn’t feel like heating up the oven for a noontime meal, we got plain white rice, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar. It wasn’t as if we were being starved; there were always vegetables in the garden to eat and usually leftovers in the refrigerator from the night before. If we didn’t finish the rice, she made it into pudding, which I liked much better anyway.

Mom’s Rice Pudding

Ingredients

3 - 4 cups leftover rice

3—4 large eggs

3/4 cup sugar

3 cups milk

1 cup cream

2 teaspoons vanilla

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 cup raisins

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Beat the eggs and sugar together. Pour in the milk and cream and mix well. 

Add the vanilla, cinnamon, rice, and raisins and stir to combine. 

Pour into a greased casserole dish.

Bake for 30 minutes. Gently stir. 

Bake for an additional 30-45 minutes or until the top is set and a knife inserted comes out clean.

All three of my older sisters started school in the one-room country schoolhouse a couple of miles northeast of the farm. By the time I was old enough to go to kindergarten–age five–-we all rode the school bus into Slayton and back. Kindergarten only lasted a half-day and the country kids went in the afternoon. The kindergarten bus arrived around noontime and I rode back home after school on the same bus as my sisters.

Aside from a few cousins, I wasn’t used to being with kids my own age. I didn’t want to go to school. I wouldn’t know anyone there. I was fine living in a world of grown-ups. They looked after me and they fed me well and I must have amused them in some way, so it seemed like a fair deal to me.

Besides, I already knew how to count to a hundred and tie my shoe-laces. My sisters read to me sometimes, especially Joan, who was the nicest one when I was that age. I think Ann and Lynn were already sick of me by then. I couldn’t blame them. Joan read me all of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books.

The girls had left for school earlier that day and Dad must have been out in the fields on a tractor, so I spent that whole morning of my first day of kindergarten alone with my mother. I must have told her that I didn’t want to go to school. I could still tell her anything then. I hadn’t yet even thought of things I couldn’t tell anyone.

I have no recollection of our actual conversation that morning, but I know that Mom would not have coddled me. She would have said something like, Of course you’re going to school. Everybody goes to school at your age. You’re going to climb right up onto that school bus when it comes and you’re going to ride into town and meet lots of other farm kids and learn a whole bunch of new things and you’re even going to learn to like it.

She walked with me out to the end of the driveway to wait for the school bus to pick me up. We were plenty early. I guess she wasn’t sure exactly what time it would come on this, the first day of its kindergarten route. Our driveway was gravel, just like the road going by. Even though I was only five years old, I remember my mother picking out the biggest stones she could find in the gravel, then getting me to help search for the biggest stones, which I did, as if this was our new game. She must have been trying to take my mind off of worrying about the school bus coming and my first day of kindergarten.

I realized that she was spelling out my name with those stones on the edge of our driveway. M…A…R… I loved her for doing that. I loved my mother anyway, but this was such a sweet and loving gesture that it made me want even more to stay here with this kind and lovely woman.

When we finished the letter K she took her little Brownie camera out of the pocket of her apron and took pictures of me standing beside the stones that spelled my name. Pretty soon the school bus came and she took pictures of me on the bottom step, waving good-bye to her. She set me loose that day. I climbed up onto the bus and found a seat and I went to kindergarten and a little part of me changed that day. She broke my trust. A little part of me resented my mother for years for sending me to school, knowing full well that I didn’t want to go.

schoolbus.jpg

This isn’t an exact recipe, as such, but it’s the way I remember Mom doing it. Lots of people like strawberry/rhubarb pie, but I always find that the strawberries get too sweet with so much sugar already in the pie.

Mom’s Rhubarb Pie

Chop the slenderest stalks of fresh rhubarb into a bowl, enough to fill your bottom pie crust to heaping. The bigger stalks are only for rhubarb sauce, not pies, and none of it is any good after the Fourth of July, according to Mom. It’s just too woody. The leaves contain a toxic substance called oxalic acid, which is especially poisonous to dogs, but our dogs on the farm never seemed to care for rhubarb anyway.

Drench the rhubarb pieces in flour with a dash of salt. Make sure they’re all coated and then lift them with your fingers into the bottom raw pie crust. Beat four eggs with a cup of milk and a cup of sugar. Add some cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla. Pour over rhubarb and top with pats of butter.

Bake at 350 degrees for about an hour.

Most farms had outhouses in those days. Ours, like most, was a two-seater just beyond the lilac bushes. In the days when farm families had ten or twelve kids I guess they needed at least two seats. There was usually an old Sears and Roebuck Catalog between the seats. They told me we were lucky to have toilet paper. In the old days (whenever they were) people had to use the pages of the catalog. We still kept the wish book there for something to read, I guess.

When I was in the second grade we remodeled the farmhouse, enlarged the kitchen, and built on an indoor bathroom. I got off the school bus that autumn and ran up the driveway to see what progress the workmen had made that day. The kitchen became twice as big with more windows facing south and east for the morning sun. I remember my first bath in the new bathtub was with my dad and he got mad because I peed in the water. I couldn’t help it.

The bathroom had green plastic tiles on the walls around the tub. I stole one of the extras and hid it under my mattress upstairs. I wasn’t sure why I wanted it, but one night I discovered how good it felt when I rubbed the cold plastic across my boner, pressed up against my stomach. I soon discovered that I could wrap my hand around it and didn’t need the tile anymore. One night I rubbed it so hard that some white stuff came out and it scared me to death. When I didn’t die, I just wanted to do it again. I didn’t feel guilty about it, but I sensed that it wasn’t something I should talk about. It would be my secret, at least until I heard that other boys at school were doing it too.

Town boys and farm boys were all starting to develop at around that time. I wonder if my second grade teacher Miss Boehler noticed that we were growing up, some of us sooner than others, growing hair where it never grew before, growing taller, our voices getting deeper, and now we also had to worry about getting hard when we stood at the blackboard. Those things in our pants had a mind of their own.

If puberty was hard on us, I had no idea what the girls were going through. Since I had three older sisters at home, I wasn’t curious about girls. My middle sister Joan was a junior in high school and Lynn was in eighth grade by the time we built the bathroom. Ann was already in college by then. She had graduated high school the same week I graduated kindergarten. The only thing I remember about kindergarten graduation was when the elementary school principle, Mr. Olson, dropped the punch bowl. It smashed in a million pieces on the stage of the auditorium and that sticky red liquid ran everywhere.

I saw a box of sanitary napkins in the new bathroom, but I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t want to know what they were for. In one of Fanny Flagg’s novels a little girl goes to the school nurse who tells her they’re for dusting in hard to reach places. That answer would have been good enough for me. I was more interested in boys’ things like jock straps and sneakers. I was never crazy about gym class, but I still like the smell of chlorine to this day. It reminds me of locker rooms and gay bath houses, even though those came along a lot later in my life.

I read somewhere that the places we remember best from childhood are the places we went to