Does Burnt Toast Really Make You Sing Good?

I'm currently reading a great book called Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good. Its full of family recipes and the author's grandmothers' "old wives tales", one of which inspired the title of the book. Larry had read about the book somewhere on line a couple of months ago and thought that I might enjoy it. I had jotted down the name in a little notebook that I keep near my computer and kind of forgot about it until I was thumbing through the notebook looking for something else a few days ago and saw the title. When we went to the library yesterday, there the book was in the non-fiction new book section.

I started reading it  last night and stayed up way past my bedtime. And when I woke up around 6 a.m. this morning, I attached my Itty-Bitty book light and read some more. As I got further into it, I realized that I could write a similar book about my family and include all of our favorite recipes, as well as my Mom's vast repertoire of old wives tales and cures for whatever ails you - including the removal of warts! But then I realized that I won't really do anything as ambitious as that - I can't even seem to finish the never-ending novel that I'm working on based on the lives of my great-great-grandparents. It's so like me, though, to become distracted by a new project before finishing a current one - can't let that happen! Instead, I think I'll take Jumbo Down a Side Road and share some of my favorite family memories and recipes on my blog. I put together a cook book for my kids a number of years ago and have wanted to reproduce those recipes online in some manner, so we'll see how far I get with it.

But back to the burnt toast and the singing. That didn't happen to be one of my Mom's sayings, but the author's grandmother used it when her grandchildren refused to eat the bread she toasted in the oven when it got just a little too crisp and black. I figure that the reason I can't sing well is because (a) we had a toaster that rarely burnt the bread and (b) on the rare occasion that it was burnt, I would simply refuse to eat it.

The reason we rarely had burnt toast was because my mom had such a fantastic toaster! She's still using it to this day, 67 years later. It's a Toastmaster that my Dad gave her on her seventeenth birthday.

Mom thinks that Dad bought it at Weisfield's Jewelry Store in downtown Everett. It came on a chrome tray with the toaster on one end and a coffee pot on the other, chrome creamer and sugar bowl, bowls with lids for jam, and a rack for the toast. It sounds like something that belonged on the breakfast table of a couple of movie stars. I imagine my dad thought of my mom as being every bit as glamorous as Donna Reed!

So, because of a lack of burnt toast, my singing ability never developed. I learned to mouth the words when singing in church so as not to offend anyone's ears. I loved to sing when I was alone...

 

and still do, but I couldn't imagine singing in front of anyone!

My Mom and Margie have beautiful voices. That brings up the question as to whether Margie ate burnt toast? Hmmmm. I have a feeling that my Mom did. Grandma Ferguson didn't have one of those fancy toasters, and if her toast got a little too overdone, I can't imagine that she would let Mom get away with letting it go to waste.

Margie and Mom  get so much pleasure from their singing. Every once in a while they suggest that I join them and make their duet a trio....

They think that if I practice enough, I'll surprise myself by what I can accomplish. They must be kidding!  And I think it's too late to start eating the burnt toast now... besides it would have to be made out of gluten-free bread, and that's disgusting!

So, my singing career will never materialize, and that's OK. I'm perfectly content to do my singing in the privacy of my little red car with no one to hear me but the dog!

And she hasn't complained...at least not yet!