Shortly after graduating from Highlands High School in 1969, I started working at a radio station and making a ridiculously high salary of $400 per month. It was a union job and in 1969 that was an insane amount of money for a 17-year-old kid who had never gotten more than a one-dollar weekly allowance. I went wild and rented an apartment for $120 per month. It was a lot of money for a one-bedroom apartment but at 17 the world was my oyster, as people apparently used to say (though I’ve never heard anyone actually say it).
Having never lived anywhere except with my parents I was still a child, nervous about living alone so I invited my buddy, Ray Hunter to move in with me.
I don’t remember how we came up with furniture, but I think the exorbitant monthly rent was because the place came furnished. I can only remember that there was a cheap couch and a cheaper dining room table. I do know Ray and I each brought our mattresses from home and tossed them on the floor in the bedroom. That was all the comfort we required.
To celebrate our official graduation into adult-adjacency we went grocery shopping so we could stock the kitchen like real grownups. It was weird. Neither of us had ever been grocery shopping for anything more than an RC Cola and some junk snacks. Now we were pushing a cart up and down aisles we had never visited. Should we buy baking supplies? What kind of soap did our moms buy? Do we even have a laundry room?
When we got home we put away the groceries like a couple of excited kids opening Christmas gifts under the tree. It involved animated discussions about where things should go to be easily accessible for convenience. To open a can of soup, for example, we should put soup near the can opener. Or the other way around. (Do we even have a can opener?)
On that first night, we celebrated with home-cooked steak. Neither of us had ever cooked a steak or anything else of course, so we did what seemed obvious: we got out a frying pan and tossed the meat onto a gas burner.
As good as they looked and smelled we didn’t understand why fried chuck steak was so tough to chew.
It wasn’t long before Ray and I settled into a steady diet of Fritos and bean dip.
But here’s what started me down this lovely memory path: dry beans.
Weird as memories are, buying dry beans is the strongest recollection I have of that first-ever grocery shopping adventure in our neighborhood Albertsons supermarket. As we wandered down the aisles we snatched up stuff we had seen in our moms’ kitchens without considering whether we needed or had any idea how to use them. Ray grabbed a large bag of dry beans. His mom was a school cafeteria cook and always had dried beans in the pantry, though neither of us had ever eaten any that way, as if dry beans were just poured into a bowl like cereal. We had no idea what to do with them but if they were important to Norma Hunter we knew they were crucial to our nest.
Now, 55 years later I have finally learned how to prepare dry beans for consumption. I spent 12 hours on a batch yesterday and Ray, old friend, I can finally tell you it’s not worth the effort. Canned beans weren’t that expensive even 55 years ago when we were flush with cash.
Hilarious !! my first excursion out of my parents house was similar. Cheapo Apt in Carmichael with two buddies. So cooking utensils we few and far between. The only thing I remember cooking that first day was bacon layed over the wire racks in the oven, it was edible however the smoke was horrendous, no smoke alarms back then.