Milk

by Jesse Deupree

I am continually surprised at the choices my memory makes; what it retains and what it lets go, hopefully only when making room for something new. One of my earliest memories is of a car that my parents sold when I was four. I can visualize the holes in the floor behind the rear seats of this 1949 Ford wagon. I can still press my eye to one of these holes and watch the road rushing by and smell the blend of carpet and exhaust that filled my nostrils then. My mother, who drove the car for five years, had no idea what I was talking about when I mentioned these precise details to her.

When I got to Maine each summer, my first goal was to transform my bed into a boat. I did this by swiping clothespins. (I preferred the spring operated type over the simple two-pronged ones then, and still do today.) I would use them to fasten my bedspread to the iron bedstead after pulling it tight over the head and foot rails, thus enclosing the space where I slept and allowing me to transform my bed into a cabin cruiser and my headboard into a dashboard that I could sit behind and drive towards my future.

Mornings were cold, and my summer shorts and shirt were not adequate until about 9 a.m., yet I rose first in my house and ate breakfast alone with my plans for the day. We had switched from an icebox to a refrigerator before my time, although the icebox still stood in the pantry, complete with a door so ice could be loaded from outside. In the refrigerator were glass bottles of milk, which came from a local farm.

The bottles were crowned with two caps. The outer one was a folded bowl of waxed paper that could be used to float small items in the sink, bath or ocean. The inner cap, the one you replaced after pouring, was a stiff paperboard disk with a flap that lifted up and became a pull tab. This disk could be folded in half to form a small motorcycle with a half wheel on each side and the flap for a windshield. Of course, when I was done pushing this vehicle around the table, it was less than practical for capping the bottle, and I liked capping the bottle for a reason I will get to, so I learned to play with the cap only when the bottle was empty.

The milk we drank in Maine was neither pasteurized nor homogenized, in contrast to the more modern milk that came in paper cartons in Ohio; and this was one of the joys of summer. Nothing but cream would do for my cereal, and despite regular pleas from my mother, most mornings I opened a new bottle and carefully poured off some of the cream that rose and filled the narrow neck, leaving the rest of the family to drink milk that might be close to skim. Even the smallest member of a family can assert his presence; and the only way to stop me was to join me for breakfast, which might have been my unconscious intention. I do know I loved the cream.

This milk was delivered by Mr. Emmons, who owned the farm. He came around in an old dark green pickup with his bottles in the truck bed covered by a burlap blanket that he wetted down so that evaporation helped keep the milk cool. Of course he came early, and frequently I was the only one to greet him. Mr. Emmons was missing parts of several fingers. I knew I was not supposed to stare, yet I always did, as he carried in the bottles in a wire basket and delivered them to the refrigerator. Subtle I wasn’t, but timid I was. I never asked how he lost his fingers and he never told me how it happened.

Once or twice a summer, something special happened to the milk. Breakfast in our house was eaten in shifts, with one child after another and my mother taking a place at the kitchen table. Early arrivals like myself might linger, sitting on a stool, removed, but still part of the scene. The milk bottle remained on the table as each person filled their bowl or glass. I had been taught to shake the bottle before pouring, and had learned to shake it afterwards, thus hiding the evidence of my cream theft.

If conditions were just right, the warming milk would build up pressure and, without warning, the paperboard disk would pop off with a wonderful, gentle bubble-bursting sound and fly, possibly as much as a foot, landing on the table, or even someone’s dish. The pop would startle us all, interrupting whatever sibling rivalries and unspoken tension hung in the shadows of our paradise, uniting us for a moment in laughter. That humor could work this magic was not lost on me, and I still try to reproduce the effect.