It wasn’t about the quality of milk that Dan the milkman delivered; it was the quantity. With six kids around the kitchen table, it was pretty crowded without a lot of elbow room, but reaching or food became a lot easier as carton after carton of milk disappeared. Oldest brother became the deal-breaker when he cheated on the rules of “one glass each,” doing the pour-and-gulp trick.
Dad’s fist landed in the middle of the kitchen table to stunned silence and very wide eyes as he announced that, from then on, our milk would not be delivered in cartons; it would be distributed from a live Holstein cow.
Cows were just great—we had a bunch of them—but the idea of feeding and cleaning up after a special milk-producing appliance didn’t go over too well, especially with Mom. When the youngest sister meekly asked how the milkman was going to bring the milk from a cow in the barn to our house, it broke the silence a bit and we all got pretty excited to go “cow shopping.”
Seated neatly in the back of the pickup, we six shoppers directed Dad through a pasture full of black and white Holsteins while arguing over which huge milk container looked the finest for our morning cornflakes.
The lead cow moseyed over to check us out and stuck her whole head in the window while letting out a very loud moo. Dad honked the horn to shoo her away, but Ol’ Boss, as we immediately named her, stood her ground against the pickup and gave Dad a very gross smooch. Dad was vetoed for any other automatic milk-producing choices, and Boss was delivered to our farm the next day.
Down the line we were elected, oldest first, to be in charge of Boss and deliver the morning milk to Mom. Excited to try out the new giant milk maker, all six of us kids fought over the gleaming silver pail the first morning to be the first to produce our cornflake topping and get on Mom’s good side for the day.
We stood around the cow as she happily munched her hay, and fingers pointed all the way around until they stopped at me. Oh, goody cheesecake, I thought to myself as I was the chosen one to “make milk.” The girls from “Little House on the Prairie” milked cows, and if Laura Ingalls could do it, so could I. The first lesson that Ol’ Boss taught us kids is that you never, ever sit on the stool behind a cow and try for milk. I washed my hair ten times that day, but the stink just wouldn‘t come out.
Lesson number two ended with little brother plastered against the wall and the pail through the only glass window in the barn. We all knew that horses kicked, but no one had bothered to explain that a horse’s “cow kick” originated with Boss. That old gal could kick sideways ten times faster than all of us put together could run forwards.
Dad strolled into the barn just in time to see the world’s greatest milking machine ever invented. The dog was assigned “cow alert” at Boss’s head; two kids were each wrapped around a back leg, holding it down; the oldest brother was sitting atop the cow for weighted-down kick-proofing; and I was trying my darnedest to make some “real“ milk. Dad immediately relieved us of our milking duties and sent us packing to the house so he could “get milk.”
Shortly after that, an extra walk-in door to the barn was placed where Dad had gone through the wall. Boss was sent back to her green pasture, and we kids waited happily at the end of the driveway for Dan the milkman’s truck to arrive with some good, “old-fashioned” milk…