Here's my sorghum in the jar, followed by a bit in a prep bowl, followed by a bit with butter mixed in.
When I was a kid, we'd drive, every few months, over to Gnaw Bone, Indiana, about two hours each way.
There was a sort of outdoor market there, sold all kinds of stuff, kind of like a flea market, and there was an old man set up in the back with a cane press. He had a bored donkey turning it.
He was pressing and selling sorghum, and that's why we were there. He sold sorghum in gallon cans, like paint, and smaller cans as well, and it wasn't cheap. We'd buy a gallon, and it would last a couple of months, then we'd go back for more.
One trip over, the old man was just sitting there, his wife taking the money, and the donkey tied up to the truck bumper. Dad got to talking to him and commented that the press wasn't running, and it was a good time to take a break.
"Ain't takin' no break. Press is broke."
Now, my dad is the most mechanically-minded person I've ever met; in another life, he probably was an engineer. So he asked the old man to show what's wrong, and he reached down, picked up some kind of metal piece, two pieces really, and held them up for my dad to see.
"That's it right there, and I'm not real sure what I'm gonna do. The man who built the thing is dead, and I don't know anybody who could make that part."
Dad rolled it over in his hands several times, looked at it from every angle, studied it, then handed it back and said that was some pretty bad luck told him he hoped he got it working again. We bought our sorghum and left.
A few days after we got home, Dad started working in the back corner of barn, where he'd built a small forge because he'd had to make several missing pieces from the sawmill he'd bought a few years before. I liked when he was doing metalwork, because he didn't need any help from me, it was a one-person job, I just had to hang around and be handy in case something came up.
Any free time he had in the evenings, when we weren't sawing or working on something else, he was out at the forge, hammering away.
After a few weeks, on a Sunday morning, he told me to get in the truck and "come on, Egghead!" Egghead was what he always called me, because I did well in school, but when he said it, it wasn't a compliment.
I had no idea where we were going, which wasn't uncommon, but we left out of the house, went into Oxford, then out Contreras Road, and that told me we were going to Indiana, but that didn't help much, because there were a lot of places in Indiana where we went.
By the time we got out past Oldenburg, I knew that we had to be heading to Gnaw Bone, which I couldn't figure out, because we been just a few weeks before, but sure enough, that's where we ended up. Out of the truck with my dad carrying something wrapped up in a towel, and off to the sorghum man.
There he was, sitting with a much smaller stock of sorghum cans, the press not running, and the donkey wasn't even there.
We walked over and Dad handed him the towel and said, "Tell me what you think of that."
Unwrapped, it was a replacement piece for the piece that had broken. My dad had made it at the house and brought it over.
The man looked at it, nodded, and said he thought it might work and told us to come back and find out. It took the two of them no time to hook it back up, and the man handed the pole to my dad and asked him walk a circle with it, then another, and sure enough, it was a perfect fit. The press was working again.
Boy, did he ever shake my dad's hand, and slap him on the back, introduced him to his wife, and couldn't quit saying how, "Brother, you have saved my life! Yessir, you really have! I can't believe how you did that! All from memory like that. Oh, you have really saved my life!"
We walked out of there with a free gallon can of sorghum, and the promise that any more we wanted from then on was free of charge...which was promptly forgotten the next time we went over.