Saw an old friend on the grocery store shelf - Spam

I saw an old friend in the grocery store the other day.

My old pal was on the superette shelf.

Spam.

But the stuff wasn’t 99 cents a can anymore. Somehow Spam had risen to the ranks of being “high dollar,” about $4 a can.

I ate Spam when I was a kid. I had cans of it stacked up in a kitchen cabinet during my groovy bachelor days.

I mean the cost was just right.

I’d fry up some Spam slices, get them nice and brown, whip up a box of macaroni and cheese, and bada-bing! A meal fit for a king.

But when I started hanging around eligible bachelorettes, well, it seems me and Spam went our separate ways.

Meanwhile, here in the future, I don’t know how I came to be talking with Robyn Snowberger about Spam, but I did.

You may know she and her husband are all things McDonald’s around these parts.

Anyway, Robyn told me she discovered on a visit to Hawaii, Spam is on the menu at Hawaiian McDonald’s franchises.

It makes sense, because I read a “fun fact” many years ago that the Hawaiian Islands are No. 1 in sales of Spam nationwide.

The Hawaiian love affair with Spam goes back to World War II when Uncle Sam brought it in to feed the military folks posted there.

During my “barefoot boy with cheeks of tan” phase of life my family lived in Hawaii.

I ran around barefoot everywhere. I had big, thick calluses padding my feet.

While there, my mom seemed to be making Spam sandwiches all the time.

I can remember we went for picnics on Waikiki Beach and she had made Spam sandwiches, even with them burned a bit.

I like stuff that way.

One time The Lady of the House, commenting on my affinity for browned meats, said, “I think your mother may have burned a lot of food.”

It is said, “All good things come to an end,” and that’s the way it was for the family’s Hawaiian life.

Dad took a job in the mountains of Virginia where his parents were.

Much to my delight my grandmother was a big Spam aficionado.

Except Grandma had a whole different way of fixing Spam: She treated it like it was a tiny ham.

She would put it in a baking dish, stick little cloves in it, top it with some pineapple, put it in the oven and, soon, a delicious main course for dinner.

By moving to the Mainland I stopped running around barefoot. There were too many sharp things around. And Mom didn’t make as much Spam sandwiches as she used to.

But Grandma brought something brand new into my world: The fried bologna sandwich.

I mean, to me, bologna didn’t taste all that different from Spam.

She’d fry up a couple of pieces of bologna, put them between two pieces of cushy white bread, hand me a cold grape soda out of the fridge and there was lunch.

I didn’t think to put mustard on it because I thought mustard was just for hot dogs.

I still do.

Now if my buddy Catfish and I had been playing outside, Grandma would fix him a “sammich” too.

The two of us would be on the back porch of my Grandma’s house with our fried bologna “sammiches” and grape sodas.

And life was simple and good.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

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