Yes, my husband did ask the waiter at Hugo’s Frog Bar, “Do you have frog legs tonight?” And what good-manners, fine-restaurant training this young man must have had. He said, “Yessir, and they’re the best thing on the menu.” I myself couldn’t have done it. I know this because I almost got fired from my summer job at the optometrist’s office by answering an old lady, “Okay, you’re a cab.”
Anyway, that big pile of frog legs (and later, big pile of frog-leg bones) made me remember two funny stories from my tadpole days. First, Granddaddy and Danny Bell went frog-gigging with Mr. Montgomery who lived next door. Mar Mar was frying them up, but forgot to break their leg joints. Those darn things hopped all over and OUT of the frying pan! We weren’t the ones getting spattered or cleaning the floor, so we thought it was pretty funny. Related to that gigging, a gravely wounded frog must’ve gotten out of the bag and crawled up-under-somewhere in Mr. Montgomery’s station wagon, and died. Lord help the child who had to ride to the swimming pool with Mr. Montgomery. His daughter/my best friend, Melissa, would plead, “Daddy! Cain’t we take Mama’s car?” Answer? “You want to go to the pool or not?” Sigh. I think that’s how I learned to hold my breath for so long.
The second story (or does this count as three?) is about the big ol’ pile of frog bones on my husband’s plate. Whenever Mar Mar ate her fried chicken, she left a pile of chicken bones on her plate that just tickled Granddaddy to pieces. (Please know that it was bone china and sterling on the table, with dewy glasses of iced tea to wash down the chicken and fixin’s. Mar Mar was a Southern Lady.) Anyway, Granddaddy would always look at her plate from his end of the table and say, “Virginia, it looks like a chicken crawled up on your plate and died.” She’d scold him, we’d laugh, and we’d all do it all over again next Sunday.
ginnygram 