Ten Cents Cheaper than Spam

Creative Nonfiction by Kevin Brown

Treet was difficult to describe. Canned meat, sure, but also my 70s suburban satisfaction. Satiation, even. The first meal I tried to cook, if cans and boxes make a meal. Paired with pork n’beans, a box of store-brand macaroni and cheese, and a slice of white bread slathered with margarine. My father formed an open-faced sandwich: bread on the bottom, three pieces of Treet, spoonsful of beans to top it off, with the mac and cheese stranded on the side, seemingly alone as its yellow sheen set it apart from the earthy brown spreading across the plate, though it soaked up some of the juice. My mother ate what we left, a good Southern woman who waited until her three children and husband had taken most of what she made.

What were you, white trash?

Marta asked when I was an adult. We had been waiting in a pizza place for two hours, waiting for their power to come back on; we worked in rural Indiana where we had nothing else to do but talk about childhood. Maybe I was white trash. I mean, given that my grandfather was a coal miner before Black Lung led him to odd jobs; my father moved fifteen times before he graduated high school, only attended college because of basketball; my mother slept in one bed with three sisters, she at the foot because she was the youngest and smallest, and she didn’t own a winter coat until she was in middle school.

But my father didn’t see poverty in the face of the sandwich that stared back at him, just one more way he could afford to feed himself and his children, and my mother didn’t care about cans or boxes; she just needed a meal to make in the hour between her drive home from work and when the local news came on. They fed us care and consistency, with some nutritional value as a bonus, and all along I thought it was my favorite meal because it tasted good.

BIO: Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.