Bena Mae's Kitchen

Each year I lend my voice to the hundreds of singing spectators waiting for the horses to come out of the gate. As I sing along with the exited crowd, the beautiful words of My Old Kentucky Home, the song written by Stephen Collins Foster, bring tears to my eyes. My mind flashes back to my grammar school years where my teachers made it a first priority to learn this and other songs by him. Some of the most popular were: Oh! Susanna (1848), De Camptown Races (1850), Old Folks at Home (1851), My Old Kentucky Home, (1853), Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair (1854), and Beautiful Dreamer (1862)....

This column is a reprint from the Bena Mae archives. From the movie A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson’s rant from the witness stand, “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!” was voted the twenty-ninth greatest American movie quote of all time and is near the top of  the poll of one of the most memorable quotes in filmdom. It has become a part of our vocabulary and is quoted often. And it begs the question, Can we handle the truth? Consider this scenario: Say for one 24 hour period, the whole world, from Argentina to Uzbekistan and all countries in between, everyone tells the unfiltered, unvarnished truth. No exceptions. No white...

From the movie A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson’s rant from the witness stand, “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!” was voted the twenty-ninth greatest American movie quote of all time and is near the top of the poll of one of the most memorable quotes in filmdom. It has become a part of our vocabulary and is quoted often. And it begs the question, Can we handle the truth? Consider this scenario: Say for one 24 hour period, the whole world, from Argentina to Uzbekistan and all countries in between, everyone tells the unfiltered, unvarnished truth. No exceptions. No white lies, no dodges, the truth and nothing but. We have...

Johnny Depp is afraid of clowns. Gwyneth Paltrow is afraid of butterflies. And Keanu Reeves is afraid of the dark. David Beckham, the British soccer star, cannot stand disorder. Every soda can he puts in the fridge must be facing the same way. And there must be a certain number. If there’s one can too many, he takes it out and stores it somewhere else. I think this is called OCD....Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Everybody in the universe has a touch of this, myself included. Billy Bob Thornton is spooked by antique furniture. He wouldn’t be comfortable in my house. But neither would I be comfortable wearing a necklace on a chain...

Let’s play a game. Whatcha wanna play? I dunno. Red Rover, maybe. Follow the Leader ... or Hopscotch. How plaintively those words echo through my mind as I think back to the carefree days of my childhood. Like etchings in stone, they remain in my memory as though it were only yesterday. As old as the hills and passed down from generation to generation, the origin of the games was never known to us. It is said that many of them were rooted in folklore. They started in the spring and lasted all summer. “Down in the valley where the green grass grows,” we would skip and chant in cadence as a player...

Colloqualisms of this region have always held a fascination for me. I find that no area of this country speaks more to the point and uses more colorful language in doing so than in this part of East Tennessee and Kentucky. The fact that we sometimes, yea, many times, murder the King’s English only makes our manner of speaking more endearing, more unique. Take the expression, “I ain’t seen hide nor hair of him in a month of Sundays.” Isn’t that more picturesque than saying “I haven’t seen him in a long time?” Or this one, “I wouldn’t believe him if he swore to tell the truth on a...

I have always had a fascination with the English language. I can’t imagine another language being so expressive, so colorful. I love the way we twist it, turn it and hone it to suit our purpose. Take today, for example. I could say I have a bad cold, which is true. But that sounds too bland, too under-descriptive. So I’ll say I have the “granddaddy” of all colds. Now that sounds much more impressive. It conjures up a picture of fever, runny nose, Vicks, Kleenex, Alka-Seltzer Plus. I love the simplistic expressions we use whenever we want to soften a description of someone that might otherwise sound unforgiving, cold. At...

Sometimes when I stand at my door and watch the children board the school bus in front of my house, the lyrics of the old song, “School Days, School Days,’ run through my head. When I get to the lines that go, “reading’ and writin’ and ‘rithmetic, sung to the tune of the hickory stick,” I stop and think about how the teacher’s hickory stick once struck terror in my heart. I was in the third grade at the time. We had just moved to a little town away back in the hills of Eastern Kentucky. Such was our life in those days, following Daddy from job to job, moving...

Mama ran her world with the aid of Ma Bell. Did she ever love talking on the telephone! She didn’t think twice about calling the manager of the largest supermarket in Corbin and asking him to put back a 5 pound bag of Domino sugar because she read in the paper where it was ten cents cheaper. Even though he had ample bags of it on the shelf, the manager obligingly reserved one for her. She had a regular hotline to the office of the Mayor, City Manager, and Street Commissioner, using it every time she felt the inclination. She saw herself as the self-appointed liaison for anything that needed...

Mama would have enjoyed her funeral, and probably did, for who is to say? She would have been proud of the compliments she got from everyone who marveled at how beautiful she looked. Even during her last days, she was mindful of her appearance. “If I had known you were coming, I would have had my hair fixed,” she told a nephew and his wife just days before she died. And she did look beautiful belying the one hundred and one plus years she spent upon this earth, looking at least three decades younger, “She can’t possibly be that old,” many people remarked upon seeing her for the last time....