Maxine

My grandmother had a friend named Maxine, who had been on her death bed as long as I could remember. For a dying person, I thought, Maxine was quite involved in life. She belonged to a local homemakers club like most of the other empty-nester housewives in our gossipy mountain-hugged valley. Maxine was also a regular Sunday service church go-er at the historic Baptist Church on the corner of Grand Avenue and Seventh Street where she had grown up,been married, had her children baptized, and cried her final farewell to her husband at his funeral.

Maxine’s typical 1950's square three bed room home with a large plate glass window in the L-shaped living room and a wooden framed carport just off the kitchen was blue. The inside, outside, all the furnishings, and carpets were various hues of blue. Her sofa, which was covered in clear plastic that crackled and made my legs sweat when I sat on it in a skirt, donned an upholstered covering of crushed blue velvet. Not the rich dark romantic blue reminiscent of
Renaissance Italy, but a shade of baby blue that one would expect to find lining a silver casket opened for the last viewing.

The familiar smells of day old grease mingled with Avon perfume polluted every room of Maxine’s house, just like my grandmother’s. These golden ladies fried everything from a good grade of T-bone steak to butcher block bologna in cast iron skillets, then “saved” the grease in a Corelle coffee cup in the back of the refrigerator. It still remains an unsolved mystery to me what the treasured stale grease was actually saved for.

Maxine collected salt and pepper shakers; in cabinets, on shelves, and in boxes. She had hundreds of sets, all complete, the salt shakers with larger more numerous holes and the pepper shakers with smaller holes less in number, or sometimes just one large hole on the top.

Considering Maxine was in poor health and dying she began distributing her cherished possessions to family, friends, and loved ones. She stated that family and loved ones are definitely two separate groups of people. Family members are the people who send Christmas cards every December, show up at family reunions with some fabulous new hair style and a delicatessen chicken, but never bother to call any other time of the year. Loved ones are those who bring chicken noodle soup to nourish a cold, boxes of divinity at the holidays, and will help clean or drive if one is in need. Friends, according to Maxine, are the ones who can open the back door without knocking, appreciate how a person looks in a bathrobe and curlers, and help themselves to a cup of coffee without asking because they know exactly where everything is in your house, and you, in theirs. My grandmother was such one of these back door friends that were so precious to Maxine, and me, well, I was the granddaughter of her friend. I knew where the milk and cookies were in Maxine’s kitchen and I also could find the peppermint sticks in the depression glass candy dish on the end table in the living room. I had mastered the skill of lifting the lid straight up off the cylindrical container, whisking out a stick or two of cool pink and white striped candy, and silently replacing the top without anyone, Maxine or my grandmother, missing a morsel of neighborhood gossip to chide me about eating sugar before lunch.

I was to be the recipient of the cherished salt and pepper shaker collection at the age of nine and in the fourth grade. The purpose of salt and pepper shakers were to deliver enhancement to my mashed potatoes and mask the green taste of broccoli for me. Although not a connoisseur of salt and pepper shakers or even of the flavored herbal enhancements themselves, I lowered my voice to a reverent whisper and thanked Maxine for the gift that I was to commemorate her life with after she was dead and buried by adding on to the tiny containers and keeping them dust free and desirably displayed. I had always been a people watcher; observant and sensitive to body language and gestures and aware of my surroundings and those in them. I could tell from the posture of my grandmother and her expression that I was to shower Maxine with hugs of gratitude for entrusting me with such an honor.

Contemplating the powdery containers in the boxes before me, I mustered the confidence to step in a shuffling fashion to Maxine’s side, avoiding eye contact, requested permission to ask a question. Baffled by the oddness of the collection, I was compelled to acquire all the facts on how it began and why it was carried on. Maxine willingly pulled me up on her polyester lap feeding my head with her stories, as if she hungered for someone to listen. Her Great Aunt Mabel had tucked a tiny set of silver and crystal salt and pepper shakers shaped like tea pots gently wrapped in an ivory lace hankie into the hope chest her grandmother tended in the attic. This was her first set. Her father, an avid hunter for the family’s yearly meals, passed on a set of metal shakers dented from traveling in a saddle bag on the trail, being banged on the cold dirt earth to loosen the salt hardened from the moisture in the autumn air. Maxine also recalled the adventure she had gone on when she acquired the most recent set of shakers; just a cheap ceramic set shaped like a pick and pail. Visiting a Colorado ghost town with a gold mining history, crawling on her hands and knees with a headlamp on through the deserted mine and shooting out the tube at the end set up like a giant slide for tourists. Maxine was spit out in the gift shop at the end of the mine tour with overpriced leather pouches of fool’s gold, nugget earrings, and, in a corner covered with a thin layer of spring time dust, the salt and pepper shakers that Maxine snatched up and the store owner quickly wrapped and sacked as if he were afraid she might change her mind.

Vintage salt and pepper shakers, dented metal ones, cheap plastic dime store pieces, ceramic sets lacking the smoothness of quality, milky glass meant to be clear, cut crystal with a melodious chime, and every shape and size shaker set filled the cardboard board boxes lined the screened in porch and waited for me to take them home. There were parrots with red tails, blue Dutch children carrying buckets of water, covered wagons hand carved out of greasy wood, pink plastic hippos in net tutu’s, a crystal fiftieth anniversary set from Hallmark, a set of miniature black metal telephones, ceramic Model T’s, furry elk with salt grit stuck in their fake coats, accompanied salt and pepper shakers from every corner of the world, walk of life, career, and vacation spot.

I carefully helped my grandmother load the boxes in the trunk and backseat of her green Pontiac placing them just as Maxine was ordering from the curb as not to create even a slight fracture or scrape. The boxes sprinkled stale salt and pepper onto my pink corduroy skirt ending up in tiny ant hills on the brown vinyl seats of my grandmother’s car. Reflective as we drove home, hardly listening to my grandmother’s speech on respect and appreciation, salt and pepper shakers took on meaning that day. I was touched by Maxine’s graciousness in trusting me to honor her memories and continue her tradition in collecting the tiny deliverers of flavor. I was only nine, but I realized how important keeping the past alive in the grains of salt and pepper were to Maxine and I speculated that her family was not interested in her silly collection. I never valued the shakers like Maxine did, but I kept them for several years, together in boxes, as if they were displaced orphans comforting each other with closeness in the boxes.

Maxine finally passed away years later and her collection was split up and sold at yard sales or broken by careless young hands as I grew up and we relocated to different houses, with the exception of the original tea pot shaped shakers sitting proudly in my antique china cabinet in the sunny dining room. My duty is simplistic, but the honor is great. Thirty years later I think of Maxine every time I set the table or embellish my meal with the white grit of salt or see the bold black pearls of pepper against the lemony yellow of deviled eggs.