Comfort Food

Seventeen years in schools.

It could have been worse.  I almost talked myself into grad school.  Halfway through taking the GRE, the clouds parted and a beam of light smote my desk.  A voice from heaven spoke inside my consciousness, clearly and distinctly: "You don't have to do this.  Just get a job and marry the girl."  After some bumps, I did.  And it's a good thing, too. 

Kindergarten wasn't so bad.  Half a day.  Baby boom, so the school was overcrowded, so they had half of us go in the morning and the other half in the afternoon.  We morning kids liked to think that the morning group were the smart ones.

First grade was the start of Gone All Day.

Even though the first day of first grade was a half day, Mom packed me a snack.  Just in case.  In a little brown paper bag was a banana and a Hershey's milk chocolate bar.  Eating that snack during morning break, I received a valuable blood-sugar adjustment, and felt a little more connected to Mom and home. 

Tastes, like aromas, can be powerfully evocative of memories.  

Banana and chocolate.  The most powerful comfort food in my comfort food arsenal.

Banana and dark chocolate, with coffee in my penguin mug.

Mom was born on Christmas Eve.  Christmas Eve dinner was always Chinese take-out so she wouldn't have to cook, and the kitchen was incongruously decorated with Japanese parasols after the paper lanterns disintegrated.

That's why I am thinking about banana and chocolate today.

My mother died suddenly during the summer of the year 2000.

Does that star-spangled banner yet wave?

On 13 September 1814, the issue was in doubt due to the British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry.
 
That event inspired certain lyrics, which say in part:

Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

On 11 September 2012, the issue was not in doubt at the American consulate in Cairo -- the star-spangled banner was down and burned.  And at the consulate in Benghazi, the flag was down and we had four dead, abandoned by the Obama administration. 

Today where the flag still waves, does it do so over the land of the free?  Less and less free, I am afraid. 

But by glory -- yes, by Old Glory on every staff and mast -- she still waves. My hope is that ours will indeed prove to be a home of the brave -- home to a people who act bravely enough that there may truly be a land of the free. 

Lo-o-o-ong Distance Phone Call

I had seen the movie "The Matrix" the weekend of 17 June 2000.  The idea of phones ringing might have been percolating around my brain.

I was having a midsummer night dream.

I am at a cafe in a downtown high-rise.  Looking out the window, I can see the glass front of another high-rise.  In that other building across a narrow street -- hey, I can see my Mom!  She is standing there with HER  mom (my grandmother, who died in 1981), and they are all dressed up.  My mom is holding a telephone, but she is not speaking.  Instead she is smiling, waving at me, and pointing.  Not pointing at ME but at  something BEHIND me.  I turn around, and see a pay phone on the wall.  I turn back to my mom, and I gesture toward the phone, as though to say, "What?  You want me to make a phone call?"  Mom nods, and she and Grammie smile and wave.  My Mom is still holding the phone, and she's pointing again.  Just then the phone rings.

The phone rings.

I wake up.  I can still hear the phone ringing.  "That's strange," I think, "I can still hear that phone."  Then I get it.  It's my REAL phone ringing.  I rise and pick up the phone, but I don't say anything.

It's 1:20 AM on 21 June 2000.

Finally, I say, "Hello?"

On the phone is my Dad, telling me Mom has been taken to the hospital  in an ambulance. He says slowly, "The prognosis not good."

Well, Mom had died very suddenly of a massive heart attack, and was perhaps dead by the time the ambulance showed up, but her pacemaker restarted part of her heart, so there was some question to the  paramedics.  I know sometimes dreams can create a context for a noise that is about to wake us up.  But I think that the dream was a real call from my Mom.  Lo-o-o-ong Distance and not only "Person to Person" but Soul to Soul.  Calling to give me one last hug, as it were.  It was my Mom, with my Grammie.  There they were, on the "other side" -- and happy.  To me, that is too much for coincidence.  That dream continues to be a source of some comfort, and of great hope.

Valentine Cake

When I was growing up, the center of the house and the center of family life was the kitchen.  My mother's spotless kitchen held many secrets.  Under the oven, in the back of the cupboard, behind the electric griddle that hardly ever got used, there used to be a clean tin from a canned ham.

The canned ham tin was used twice a year from about 1965 through 1975.  One use was as a cake pan for the Easter Egg Cake.  Wow.  Well, it's just that shape.  But it also served to make two halves of the Valentine's Day Cake.

The Valentine Cake required two bakings of a size that would have fit into a normal round 9" cake pan.   Thinking of the project with the big ends of the resulting cakes in the up position, and a section having been cut by means of a straight line off of the lower right of the left-hand one and the lower left of the right hand one, the two cakes could be joined into one at that straight line to create a passable Valentine shape.

Chocolate with pink vanilla frosting.  (That's the answer to the question I know you were about to ask.)

What's that you say?  What happens to the parts that were cut off?

Those are for the cook, of course (and once or twice, shared with her helper)!