Measuring Up
I’ve mentioned before that my father Edson Carl Beck was a very opinionated, headstrong person who when he had convinced himself of something, it would take God Himself to make my dad change his mind of what he thought was true. One story came to my mind was his thoughts about Jesus Christ. He believed that NO person could be six foot tall. Where or how he landed on this “fact” I will never know, but he said that Jesus Christ was six foot even and because Jesus Christ was perfect, no other person could be just six foot tall because Christ was the one and only perfect being.
While I was thinking on this, I remembered another of his misconstrued ideas. Back quite a few years ago television commercials honed in on the facts their products were low sodium. This was after doctors-in-the-know decided low sodium diets were a necessity, so many companies promoted their product as “No salt added.” It was the craze for the manufacturers to tout the fact that they were in line with the “new standard.” If my dad didn’t have eggs, some kind of pork, and toast for breakfast, he ate shredded wheat cereal. One shredded wheat company was quick to jump on the bandwagon with commercials saying their cereal had “no added salt.” My dad’s attention fastened in on this advertisement. To my dad the commercial meant that they were removing salt from their shredded wheat. Each morning, he would add a few shakes of salt on his shredded wheat, because the cereal “didn’t taste right” any longer without the salt that he added.
Again back to the taste test; when I was in my prepubescent years about ten to twelve years old, Dad would buy our milk from a local farmer. The milk was raw and unpasteurized. Sometimes, the cows would eat weeds and the strong weed taste would permeate the milk. I could taste the weed’s pungent flavoring of the milk. Dad would get upset with me saying that there was nothing wrong with the milk and that I was to drink it or use it on my cereal. I never knew if he told the truth or not, but because of his frugal nature I believe he didn’t want a gallon on milk to go to waste.