The Buffalo Herd
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The Buffalo Herd plus Beckie
Lyndal, JoAnn, Wanda, Anita, Barbara & Beckie
Where Petite is Passé
It all derives from the fact that Mama and Daddy were the proud parents of seven very healthy children. We grew up on a farm, so there was lots of opportunity for manual labor and the resultant hearty appetite. For her part in this saga, Mama, in her capacity as chief cook and bottle washer, never exactly cottoned to the modern definition of healthy cooking. According to Mama, food was healthy if it was plentiful and the consumption thereof kept the diner from getting too hungry before the next meal. The preferred method of preparation for all meats and most vegetables was frying, and the application of butter and lard was frequent and liberal. At first glance, it would be easy for the casual observer to find fault with this philosophy. But, given that Mama lived to be 91 and was healthy and productive until the last few years of her life, there must be at least a grain of virtue buried somewhere in her methodology.
But that's just the first part of Mama's culpability. The next part has to do with quantity. I'm convinced that Mama would have been completely comfortable preparing three squares a day for the Seventh Army. On the farm, especially during the summer tobacco harvesting season, Mama's dinner table was routinely attended by a dozen or more field hands who were six hard labor hours removed from their most recent meal. Consequently, the quantity of the dinner spread could rival most modern buffets or Chow Halls. (By the way, in Mama's vocabulary, dinner is the huge meal served at noon, the large meal served in the evening is called supper.)
To complete this picture, we have to put the methodology and quantity together with the age and origin of the consumables at hand. In the summer, all the vegetables were freshly harvested from Daddy's garden (with his very own invention, the pull behind Butterbean Picker, but that's another story), so it wasn't unreasonable to assume that any given vegetable served at noon had been witness to sunrise in the garden. Now, the conspiracy comes together and the diner's dilemma begins.
Mama has rung the dinner bell and the table is set. What's a hungry field hand supposed to do? Politely decline this massive spread of fresh, home-cooked victuals in favor of a low-fat baloney sandwich, or wash his hands and eat like there's six more hours of hard work before supper? Without exception, we opted for the latter--many, many times.
As a means of promoting and sustaining maximum growth potential, Mama's culinary philosophy can only be described as inspired. In terms of stature, by mid teens, all of the boys were over six feet and the girls (let's see, how can I put this tactfully), let's just say they had the kind of build the folks at Weight Watchers like to call Big Boned.
With all of the above as background, I'm sure the reader can now better appreciate the chronicle that follows.
Three of my sisters, Lyndal, JoAnn and Wanda (Anita steadfastly denies her presence to this day) and a family friend name Barbara (of equal physical stature) had stopped at S&S Cafeteria just south of Macon for lunch. As luck would have it, they got there close to noon and the line was already pretty long. A lady and gentleman, presumably husband and wife, were approaching the main entrance just ahead of them. The husband arrived first and opened the door for his wife. I don't know the order of arrival, but one of the sisters was just a couple of steps behind the wife so the husband held the door for her as well. Another sister was right on the first one's heels, and another after that, and another after that, with Barbara somewhere in the mix.
Now, Barbara and all of my sisters are courteous to a fault, especially in a public setting, and I know they would never deliberately commit some social faux pas that embarrassed or inconvenienced a courteous stranger. But, by taking advantage of this gentleman's politeness, they had quite inadvertently put themselves and a good bit of distance between this gentleman and his wife.
The gentleman door holder had a dilemma, there were four non petite ladies between him and his wife and the entry corridor was rather narrow. He apparently wasn't overly anxious at the prospect of walking sideways and trying to excuse himself to everyone involved as he squeezed by to join his wife. To make matters more awkward, his wife was calling him (loudly, by name) telling him to, "Come on up." Exasperated, after several attempts with no response, she finally made the trip back to him and her first words were, "Why didn't you come up?" Paradoxically, this gentleman who couldn't muster the fortitude to traverse a narrow corridor past Barbara and my sisters now has no inhibitions about responding, "I would have, but that buffalo herd got between us."
JoAnn, the least inhibited of the group, responded by suggesting that the gentleman exercise caution and not step in the buffalo chips.
But, by the end of lunch, the creative humor in the comment had overcome the derogatory connotation and they ultimately adopted it as their collective reference. Anita of course is still in denial, but the de facto membership of the Buffalo Herd Sorority includes Lyndal, Joann, Wanda, Anita and Barbara.