jello roll

“Would you like congealed salad with that?”
I guess so, if only to find out what congealed salad might be. Can’t say it sounds really appetizing, but then that duck’s blood glop in Chinese restaurants isn’t as bad as it oughta be. And, hell, when in Alabama, make like the locals, especially when your relatives are the locals.
I was sitting with my father in the Café Royale, one of the only things open for business across from the courthouse in Talladega. It is in that very courthouse, my aunt relates, that my great grandfather Nathan Christopher Columbus Camp, at age 93, slipped on the marble floor next to the spittoon, hit his head on a radiator and died or, she says, “He’d be with us yet.” (This is the same man who, in his eighties, went to his great nephew, the doctor, and told him that he thought there was something wrong with him because he couldn’t have sex more than once or twice a week. Need I add that the same blood runs through the veins of the man who sits next to me at the Café Royale, ungrayed at 84. This is not the same side of the family whose matriarch got down on her knees during the Civil War to pray, “Dear Lord, please protect us from the Yankees and the Baptists.”)
But back to congealed salad. It turns out to be a kind of jello square filled with fruit of an indeterminate kind and topped with a frosting of a sweet, whitish substance. Over the years, the secret of the white stuff has been closely guarded. However, when pressed, the waitress bent over and whispered that given the contents of the trash, she suspected lemon jello, cream cheese and Cool Whip.
A taste test proved that quite possible. I still think they need another name.