Canned Milk

The prompt was about something learned from someone else. While my first instinct was to write about gardening, canning and racism, an easier topic came to me while I was making coffee. 

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When I was an undergrad, I tried my hand at working as an art model for life drawing classes. I loved the setting, learning along with the students, making interesting angles and shapes to challenge them. And the pay was good. 

When I moved away after college I looked for similar opportunities, because I had just graduated with a degree in Medieval Studies and had few job skills to draw on. I called an artist friend and he got me a job sitting for his Monday drawing group. The host was a well-known California realist. His studio, down some rickety stairs, was spare. The model stand was large enough to have been a bandstand for a four piece, and on the wall behind it was a large lithograph map of the city of Paris in the 1800s. From the model stand and over the heads of the artists: the hummer, the tiny and adorable man from Martinique who had dated Julia Child's sister, and my comparatively regular friend from Chariton, Iowa, you could see the streets that inspired Wayne Thiebaud's famous streetscapes. 

I remember that there was a table holding an urn of hot water, and tea to drink during break. And alongside them was a can of Carnation Evaporated Milk, that we used in our tea. Models worked for two Mondays in a row, and there was the same can of evaporated milk, now wearing a tin foil cover. It hadn't spoiled. 

A few years later, when I got tired of waking up and going to Kidnapper's Liquors to get milk for my coffee on my day off, I started buying canned milk for my coffee. This is what I now use in my coffee every day. It's always in the pantry, and nobody ever drinks the last of it.