The Milkman’s Cousin

When I was a kid, we had a milkman.

Mostly, it was a fellow named Harry, but at other times, it was my father’s cousin-in-law, Phil, whose family owned the dairy. And still other times it was my father’s cousins Matt and Ned, the sons of my Great-Aunt Alice, my grandmother’s sister. (Matt’s and Ned’s sister Ellen was married to Phil. Got all this?)

Anyway, while most milkmen, I take it, left their glass bottles outside the door in your milk crate, our milkmen delivered right into the kitchen. And sometimes the milkmen – especially if it was on a weekend, and Phil, Matt, or Ned was on and my father was around – sat down at the kitchen table for a cup of coffee or tea. Harry came in the house, too. I remember him coming down into our cellar once to look at something or other, and doing some minor fix or another. We had a rocking horse that was named Harry in his honor. (Don’t get any ideas here about the milkman’s children. If there’d been a vote, my mother would have been unanimously elected The Mother Least Likely to Get It On with the Milkman or the Breadman or the Fuller Brush Man…)

Most folks on our street got their milk from the Hillcrest Dairy, which had one really nice feature I was envious of: their trucks came in a variety of fun colors, including turquoise and purple.

We went with Blanchard Dairy because they were family. Their trucks were all the same: boring green and yellow.

But the real advantage of Blanchard’s was that, because we were family, during the summer, the milkmen let us jump up in the back of the truck and gave us chunks of glittering ice, covered with a tasty scrim of diesel exhaust. Today, I ask myself how it is that any of us are still alive, but back then, on a sweltering summer day, licking one of those chunks of ice was a complete and utter treat. Those chunks were like diamonds to me. (I also liked the smell of gas stations, and envied the family out on Route 9 who lived over their station, with half their home built up on stilts over the gas pumps. Now that was living! Meanwhile, I grew up around some pretty darned lovely Catholic churches. Our parish church was a beautiful Irish-Gothic pile that’s stood the test of time. I was there last summer for a funeral, and it really is quite a place. Despite this exposure to beauty, I thought the most beautiful building in our neighborhood was the Esso gas station in Webster Square with the big red dome. I was a child with extraordinarily sophisticated taste.)

Back to the main thread: With five kids and a milk-drinking father, we went through a lot of milk, and the milkman came a few times a week.

But at some point – did Blanchard’s stop home delivery? – we no longer got milk from the milkman. We got it from the store. And somewhere along the line, milk no longer came in glass quart bottles with the cream at the top (you had to shake the bottle to homogenize the milk), but came instead in plastic gallon jugs, pre-homogenized.

I pretty much always have milk in the fridge, as I take it in my tea and frequently have cereal for breakfast. Mostly it’s pint-sized, which pretty much takes me through the week and change.

But others, of course, have greater milk requirements And some of them, believe it or not, still get their milk delivered by milkmen.

The milkman, that symbol of simpler times, appears to be making a bit of a comeback in Massachusetts. About 10 New England dairies deliver in the state, servicing everyone from families with children to single young professionals. While there are no concrete data on the popularity of home delivery, many dairies say they have experienced an increase in customers in recent years. (Source: Boston Globe)

There are a few things driving the surge in home milk delivery.

One is the increasing interest in farm-to-table. The dairy’s doing the delivering are bringing milk from their very own contented cows. Not anonymous cows off in Vermont or wherever. (As it turns out, a number of the dairies mentioned in the article don’t have their own cows. They outsource from dairies elsewhere in New England. Like Vermont.)

Some of the increase is also attributed to the fact that, thanks to Amazon, everyone’s just gotten so used to home delivery…And it’s just so damned convenient.

Many dairies now deliver a wide range of products other than milk, including eggs, yogurt, meat, pre-made meals, vegetables, ice cream, and even rock salt.

The principle driver, however, seems to be nostalgia, which is a bit odd, given that the families with young kids and the single young professionals nostalgic for the milkman are unlikely to have grown up with any memories of them. Can you be nostalgic for something you never experienced? Apparently so.

Me? I’m a remember-er, but not so much – at least I don’t think – a nostalgic remember-er. Certainly not enough to want the milkman to show up with a bottle of milk for my tea and cereal. Still, it would be kind of fun to sit around the table with my father, with Phil and Matt and Ned, and listen to them chat about whatever it was they chatted about. Guess I’ll have to settle for a nod in their direction the next time I visit my parents’ grave. Phil, Matt, and Ned are all in the neighborhood. Phil (and Ellen) and Ned are within spitting distance. Matt’s in another section, but the cemetery’s small so he’s not that far. Ned, the last of my father’s first cousins, died a year or two ago. I can still see the “boys” – they were all a decade or so younger than my father – coming into the kitchen in their grey-striped milkman’s overalls, sitting down for a cup of coffee. But I think I’d take a pass on licking a chunk of diesel-grit covered ice, even if it were on offer.