Barry Wallace: Got milk?

On winter nights long ago. I often used to see my mother heat up a pan of milk for my father -- just plain milk, no cocoa, no tea. Dad enjoyed having a mug of warm milk when he came home from basketball practice. It was a treat that took him back to his Depression-era boyhood. I loved to watch him savor it. Dad seemed to take little pleasure in food or drink, but milk obviously made him feel good.

Milk nourished and sustained our large family and we had gallons of it delivered right to the door. Milkmen were still a common sight in city neighborhoods in the 1950s. They arrived at the house in uniform and cap in a jaunty little truck with Borden's or Dewhirst Diary emblazoned on the side. The milkman slid open the truck door and stepped out carrying an assortment of glass bottles rattling against the metal carrier. It was a happy noise like the sound of tinkling sleigh bells. He removed the empties from the aluminum milk box on the front porch and replaced them with fresh quarts. Sometimes he'd include a yellow paper bill rolled up between the bottles.

One day he accidentally smashed two bottles together and the milk spilled all over the cement steps. I saw him picking up the broken shards of glass in surprise and disgust. The rest of his routine was usually perfect in tone and delivery. He whistled on his way up our weedy sidewalk. Sometimes he would knock on the front door to alert us to his arrival. Whenever I think of him, I think of quiet summer mornings and the sound of birds calling from the maple trees. Home delivery was definitely part of the rhythm of a bygone time. Families usually only had one car back then and the dads would take them to work. We would stay home with Mother and not see another person until the mailman arrived just before lunch. Milk and mail were two bright spots in those long, lazy days.

We waited by the front door and jockeyed to be the first to bring in the milk. This was one job that Mother didn't have to beg us to do. We loved to carry the ice-cold bottles in our arms heading straight into the kitchen. Mother took them carefully from us and lined them up on the top shelf of our tiny refrigerator. It wouldn't be long before Dad appeared and warned us to go easy on the milk. "This has to last us all week, and I'm not made of money." We typically did run out of milk by Thursday and this would cause a small crisis. With so many children in the house, milk was an essential not to be taken for granted. Mother would fish dimes and nickels out of Dad's budget envelopes to scrape up enough for another bottle or two of milk to get us through the week.

Of course Dad preferred us to drink water. "It's the best thing in the world for you, and you can drink as much as you want." He'd point to the kitchen sink to remind us where it was. We did drink lots of water, but milk was something special. Our older brother Kevin would load up his cereal bowl with his Wheaties sitting in a white lake of milk. The babies needed several bottles of milk throughout the day. Our sister Mary Ellen also loved milk, and as the only girl at the time she was allowed as much as she wanted. Dad guarded the ice box like a commando, always alert for any subtle sound that might give away a raid in progress. The man had superhuman hearing. Even in the dead of night he would wake from a sound sleep if he heard the refrigerator door handle click. He was especially vigilant against his twin sons, whom he regarded as one great open maw constantly running up the grocery bill.

Although I am an eager milk drinker now, I loved the sight of milk more than the taste of it when I was a boy. The bottles themselves were a work of art -- the clear glass painted with each dairy's brand in bright red. They were sealed with a crimped waxed paper cap that you peeled off leaving dabs of thick cream on the inside. The milk was rich and inviting. The first scent of it from the open bottle reminded me of the outdoors and green grass. I liked to watch Kevin pour the viscous stream over his cereal and dig in. Every day Mother would fill the glass baby bottles after carefully sterilizing them. We all guzzled tall glasses of cold milk with our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But milk with Mother's homemade cake for dessert was the absolute height of pleasure. To this day I still relish that simple but satisfying combination of American comfort food.

Mother used milk only for her coffee but quite often she just took it black. Dad took milk in his tea, but he also drank milk straight with a gusto he lacked for every other foodstuff. I wondered why he enjoyed milk so much, as it seemed bland to me and not nearly as delectable as the rare bottle of chocolate milk Mother ordered or the even more exquisite eggnog we had for the holidays. I watched Dad's Adam's apple bob as he gulped his favorite drink, sometimes even swigging right out of the bottle until Mother caught him. Then he would imitate the comedian Jackie Gleason mugging and rolling his eyes, "Umhm, that's good booze, Catherine." She wasn't amused.

At the peak of our family's milk consumption, Mother began to order a huge, industrial-sized container that took two of us to lug into the house. But we even went through this with abandon and Dad often complained that his children were going to drive him to the poor house. Through it all there was still the romance of the milkman arriving punctually and cheerfully at our doorstep. We'd hear the sound of clinking glass bottles as he followed his route, then the grinding of the gears as he worked the long stick shift coming up through the floor of the truck. It's hard to imagine that business was done this way before America was so suburbanized with strip malls and big box stores.

When Cumberland Farms opened on north Main Street in Bridgeport, the milkman quickly became obsolete. The Cumberland store sold big bottles of milk at a great price. The glass-fronted refrigerator cases held an endless supply of fresh milk and orange juice. A milk store was quite a novelty then and we embraced it without giving a second thought to the way of life we would be losing with the demise of the local dairies. Now we hardly had any room in the ice box for all the milk stored there. The glass bottles became a thing of the past, too. The milk now came in big plastic jugs like some kind of industrial solvent. The taste was less rich and the smell of spring pastures was gone. But we basked in the new modern way and were happy to be able to stop at Cumberland on our way home from grocery shopping. Mother had each of us carry out a gallon. I can still remember the feel of the bottle's chilly wetness between my knees on the car seat.

Coming home with milk was a kind of sacrament in our house. The car was filled with groceries packed in over-loaded brown paper bags. With these we were assured of the survival of our family for another week. America was a great country where a man could feed and raise seven children on a factory worker's salary. The giant loaves of Wonder bread and the heavy gallons of milk were proof that we lived in a land of plenty and that we were prospering as a family. My taste for milk has grown over the years, and I have to say I enjoy it more than ever. I'm not sure if it's a nod of solidarity with my father, or merely the fact that he can't hear me at the ice box anymore.