Ada's Rules by Alice Randall Page A

potatoes naked in their jackets, and I mean peanut butter spoons.”
    â€œPeanut butter spoons?”
    â€œYou get you some organic sugar-free peanut butter and you dip one of your grandma’s silver spoons in it and you call that breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, whatever you want. It got protein and fat, and you won’t be hungry an hour after you eat that.”
    â€œSweet potatoes and peanut butter. You want me on the George Washington Carver diet.”
    â€œChild, I been on that all my life, and I have never had any problem with my pressure, with my cholesterol, with my knees or with my hip, with my weight or with my sex life. And fromwhat I read in the old folks’ magazines and the style magazines, the other oldies like me are having a lot of trouble with their knees, hips, and weight, and the young ones like you are having all kinds of trouble with your sex and your weight and your skin. When I grew up, black girls didn’t have bumps all on their faces.”
    â€œNext time you hit me with your grocery cart, mine will be piled high with jars of peanut butter and big sweet potatoes.”
    â€œGood. Get back to your food roots. Peanuts and sweet potatoes are the mama and daddy of soul food. I love sweet potatoes. You can just throw one in the microwave or the oven.”
    â€œNext time the girls come home, I may just serve the entire family peanut butter spoons for breakfast and get myself some rest.”
    â€œYou could do a lot worse. I don’t know why you young people insist on thinking of fried chicken and Kool-Aid and God knows what else as soul food. Soul food may be chicken once a month when the preacher comes, but it ain’t fried chicken every day. And it’s not anything made with corn syrup or white flour. And it ain’t butter neither. Soul food is corn on the cob and peanuts and fish your daddy caught from the pond, or the lake, or the stream. It’s simple.”
    â€œAmen.”
    â€œAnd you need to get your DNA tested.”
    â€œHow’s that? You see something in my eyes?”
    â€œI think you need more information. Inherent Health dot com. Check it out.”
    â€œInherent Health dot com?”
    â€œThey’ve got a test will tell you what you should be eating and how you should be exercising—according to your genes.”
    â€œAccording to my genes?”
    â€œAccording to your genes.”
    For the next three days Ada subsisted on a diet of baked sweet potatoes and peanut butter spoons, and she lost three pounds. That night after the Altar Guild meeting, she scribbled into her journal a new idea that was too funny to be a rule but too useful not to write out in full: Eat like the skinny old folks eat.

10

BUDGET: PLAN TO AFFORD THE FEEDING, EXERCISING, AND DRESSING OF YOU
    THE VERY NEXT morning, en route to KidPlay, Ada was back to thinking about stealing guitars, which she knew to be a strange thing for a minister’s wife to be thinking about.
    Except push had come to shove. Earn and spend, Preach was plain awful with money. He spent too much on his parishioners and would, if he could, let them pay him in homemade cake and great big hugs. This forced Ada to do two things: earn a little money, and get really good at being the frugal housewife. For years now her favorite column in the
Tennessean
newspaper had been the Ms. Cheap column. Doing good while being broke was hard work.
    When they first married, Preach had headed up a “regular” church, and Ada had anticipated he would be a well-paid preacher and they would bounce around the country as he advanced. But then the placement came, and it was Iowa. Then they offered Oregon. Preach took the job as the assistant at Full Love.
    Stopped at a red light, Ada allowed herself to imagine Preach as a modern-day Sweet Daddy Grace or Father Divine. She saw Preach in front of his independent mega-church. She saw herselfdriving away from in a white Mercedes-Benz to her