This is the third time around for this joke and I’ll retire it after this. But I came home a few weeks ago and found my wife with the milkman.
Literally.
There in my own driveway, the local milk deliveryman was pitching his products, notably milk, to my wife.
She was relieved when I pulled up because I was supposed to be the heavy who said “No” and shooed him away. I was all prepared with some story of lactose intolerance or the tragic milking incident that blinded my uncle.
Isn’t it funny how differently we respond to people on a given day?
I’m tempted sometimes to scatter the local religious knockers, salesmen and magazine-peddling youth from my doorstep with a water hose.
But, on this day, I was in a good mood. That made me an easy mark for a sales pitch.
By the end of the conversation, we had a blue cooler on our front porch, a free half gallon of milk, a free half-gallon of orange juice and a lifetime contract that we will never buy another grocery store milk carton or so much as look at another cow.
I think I was sucked in by a certain pulling back to my youth.
I remembered the Thursday mornings when we would pull the milk jugs from the wooden box on the front porch. Then we’d take it down to ice cellar for safekeeping.
OK, OK, we never had an ice cellar.
But, it seems to me, that having milk delivered to your home is a rite of passage.
My parents had milk delivered to their home until I think they got some bad butter and that was the end of it. And my wife says her family even had milk delivered to their home for a while.
In that way, I feel like I’m carrying on a proud tradition. My daughter gets excited about helping me bring the milk in and maybe it will be a requirement she’ll make of her family someday.
It’s almost like living on a dairy … a dairy where the cows milk themselves, bottle it and put it on your front porch.
I also feel like I’m supporting a fading tradition. Everything is going technological. We don’t write letters anymore, we send e-mail. I assume someday we’ll get our milk via hard drive.
So, when there’s a chance to step back and have things a bit old fashioned, I’m all for it.
And it doesn’t taste bad either.
