When you recall your childhood, what do you hold dear? Of late, I find myself pondering what I call “mill talk.” Before I get to words, though, I’d like to serve you some food.
My paternal grandfather lived on South Escanaba Avenue in an area of South Chicago known as Vet’s Park. He had a smokehouse in his backyard — yes, a smokehouse — and a flat-topped, cast-iron wood-burning stove in his basement.
On that stove, he cooked smoked ham hocks or homemade sausage in a white-specked, blue-enameled pot, along with potatoes and sauerkraut, all heavily peppered.
There was a small coal company in South Chicago, and my father and I would pick up a bag of coal for Grandpa, who liked to add a chunk or two to the wood in the stove as he liked a good, hot coal fire.
While the food simmered, my father and I sat with Grandpa at the wooden table he had against the wall across from the stove. Mostly, it was the three of us, but on certain occasions, Orthodox Christmas and Easter, the house would be filled with uncles, aunts and cousins. On such days, several uncles would join us, while the aunts and cousins stayed upstairs, although a few of the older male cousins briefly joined us before ascending back into that other world.
Although I was one of the youngest grandchildren, I was allowed to stay and sit alongside the men. Why I was granted that touch of magic, I’ll never know, as all of the people I’m talking about have long gone into the world of light.
But the magic had been bestowed upon me, and it allowed me to hear words that I came to understand more with each year and subsequent gathering, words that I again refer to as mill talk.
Mill talk? My father and grandfather were steelworkers, while my uncles were pipe fitters, welders and men who knew how to use machines. They made things, installed things and fixed things. They were doers.
Their words were forged from iron and steel.
They talked about the economy, labor issues, both locally and nationally, and things that defined for me then, and now, what adults should be talking about. Wood- and coal-stoked fires, the aroma of that food and mill talk — they all seem so distant to me now.
While my eyesight has dimmed with age, my hearing unfortunately hasn’t. Instead of mill talk, I often find myself surrounded by “pop talk,” or popular culture nonsense.
Nowadays, people only seem to blather about this television show or that one, one streaming service or some other. Or did someone catch the latest season of this or that? And of course they talk about the latest smartphone: Did you upgrade?
To me, it’s all so adolescent, no different from what we talked about as, say, seventh graders in the early ’70s: the newest Hot Wheels, G.I. Joe or the latest episode of something silly and stupid.
That’s at best. At worst, the words I hear around me, or on the news, seem violently adolescent: angry shouts, bitter accusations and crude finger-pointing. Think of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her cohorts or the recent slate of candidates for Chicago’s mayor.
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If given the choice, I obviously would have us talking mill talk rather than pop talk. The first has depth to it, as it denotes the production of things. The latter is shallow, as it denotes only the consumption, or even destruction, of things.
A Bible passage from 1 Corinthians sums it up: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Finally, a beloved seventh grade teacher would always counsel us about our deportment, “how one carries oneself in public.” We are known by, and judged by, the words we speak.
Considering the current state of America, and the world, I’d say it’s time to put away our childish things.
John Vukmirovich is a Chicago-area writer and book reviewer. His essay “Loren Eiseley, the Hidden Teacher” recently appeared in Catamaran Literary Reader.
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