On becoming my mother

 

The Chicago house of my childhood.

Several years ago, when my oldest granddaughter, Maddie, was five or six, she and I were in the guest room giggling about something, the rest of the family was in the living room, and the dogs were in the back yard barking continually.

“Colin really must do something about those dogs,” I said, getting up off the bed and heading for the living room. Maddie darted ahead of me, stormed into the room, and hands on hips said, “Colin, you really must do something about those dogs.” She mimicked me perfectly—tone, inflection, even the semi-angry stance. I clearly heard myself. Everyone laughed, and Colin went to quiet the dogs.

That incident came to mind because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the conventional wisdom that every woman turns into her mother. In my case, that would be a very good thing. But it’s not her laughter or her wisdom, her passion for learning and food, its not even her enveloping love that I’m thinking of. It’s little things.

In Chicago summers, in an old house without air conditioning, Mom would throw the house open in the early morning to bring in cool, fresh air; by noon she had it closed up tight, shades drawn against the sun, and it stayed that way at least until dark set in. I do the same with my cottage, turning off the a/c and opening the French door so Sophie can come and go, and I can get the feel of being outdoors, even at my desk.

For her children, Mom was a one-woman clipping service, often sending us news pieces that she thought we would or should enjoy. I’m afraid Christian gets the brunt of that from me because I’m always sending him links to stuff about garden and lawn care (I did just this morning) or recipes I think he’ll like. I did send all the kids a note yesterday that their favorite greasy spoon in Waco is for sale and I wondered if they wanted to make it a family business. Only a million and a half.

Mom lived through the Depression as a young wife and mother, and the rest of her long life she wasted nothing. When we cleaned out her refrigerator that last time, we found baby food jars with unidentifiable bits of food in them, some of it moldy. She used paper towels twice—once on a counter spill and the second time on a floor spill—and she had a special place she kept them in between. She saved bits of string, used gum wrappers (they were aluminum back in the day), and rubber bands. She canned her own tomatoes, made her own applesauce and soups, and cooked from scratch. I’m not as frugal, a fact she often pointed out to me once I had my own home, but I save leftovers in the freezer, and I do a lot of scratch cooking. I thought of Mom the other night when I made salmon croquettes, one of the dishes she regularly rotated though in retrospect I can’t imagine how she got my meat-and-potatoes father to eat them.

I’ve got a long way to go to be as kind and gracious as my mom, let alone as good a cook and as good a mom, but sometimes I hear her in my voice or recognize her in my attitude. It makes me smile.

On another note, I slept so hard and dreamt so vividly this morning that I woke thinking if I could write like I dream I’d have best-selling novels and box-office hits to my name. My dreams were jumbled but somewhere in there was a sit com about New York fashionistas enduring the hardships of camping for the sake of the men in their lives—it was all slapstick humor, and, by the end, there was not much love to be lost. And then there was a movie about what a wonderful life on the lam a runaway girl had, and I remember thinking what an awful, unrealistic role model that was for young girls. No, it had nothing to do with the movie by that name or the band. It probably came from a book I was reading last night where a young girl is kidnapped, and some officers insist that she was probably just another runaway.

Here's my cheer for the day: to Jou Joubert, barbecue pitmaster who was delivering the wedding dinner to a party at a private home, only to learn that the minister hadn’t shown up and the bride was in tears. Asked if he was an ordained minister, he told them yes and married the couple in a ten-minute ceremony.

And here’s my boo-hiss for the day: to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for a headline proclaiming that Beto swore at an Abbott supporter. Beto’s got too much class for that kind of cheap political stunt. Swear he did, but who the man would vote for wasn’t the issue. Beto swore out of passionate, deep-down anger at a man who would try to make a joke out of AR-15s and the massacre at Uvalde. I might not have used the same word, but I’d have sworn too. Go, Beto!

On cleaning refrigerators and hand washing dishes

 

My mom is on my mind today. I am becoming her all over again. In many ways, that would be a good thing. I’d like to have her graciousness in almost all situations, her light laughter, her intellectual curiosity, her devotion to what she thought was right. And, yes, I’d like to cook like she did. But those are not the traits I’ve apparently inherited. I got her frugality.

Mom lived through the Depression as a young wife, then a too-young war widow, and again a bride. She carried the lessons of those years with her throughout the rest of her long life. Of course we saved aluminum foil for the war effort; she used paper towels twice—once on counter or stove-top and then it went in a special cubbyhole to be re-used for a spill on the floor. We never threw anything out, and boy did I know about the clean-plate club. Mom canned her own vegetables, from the struggling produce Dad coaxed to life in a tiny Chicago back yard, and she hung her laundry on the line to dry, which meant she had really muscular shoulders and arms. When we cleaned out her refrigerator for the last time, my brother said, “She has all these petri dishes in the back.” There were jars of who-knows-what—leftovers, jam, and so on.

Mom never thought I learned those lessons of frugality quite well enough. When I was married and running a household of six, she lived down the street and dined with us most nights. She’d ask what to do with leftovers and then, before I could answer, she’d say, “I know! Just pitch it!” (I do the same to Jordan today because I think she’s too quick to throw things away.)

Today I cleaned out my refrigerator—eliminated thirteen jars of various sizes that held a dab of this and a bit of that—jam, sauerkraut with mold, chutney, things I couldn’t identify. And I don’t have a dishwasher, so I hand-washed most of those jars. I declared three beyond recovery. Still I was at the sink for a long time, and I thought of Mom again.

For much of my childhood she cooked—and let me experiment—in a kitchen probably almost as old as our 1893 house. I can still see that old Roper gas stove and the scarred porcelain sink that stood in one corner. There wasn’t much money. Dad was a doctor, but was mostly in administration, not practice, and he supported his mother and sister in Canada as well as our family. But in the Fifties, money came from somewhere and Mom got her dream kitchen—the whitewashed knotty pine she loved, turquoise Formica counters, and a round picnic table with benches that curved around it. And a dishwasher! We thought that was the ultimate luxury.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the revered Buddhist monk who just died, preached that staying in the moment should be a goal. He apparently once said, “When washing dishes, wash dishes.” It made me think of Mom and how many dishes she must have washed in that old kitchen. I thought of it again today as I was washing those jars. My writing sisters in an online group heartily embraced that philosophy this morning in our daily discussion, but I rebel. Washing dishes is one of those things you can do with your mind turned off the process. So I often plot and plan while my hands are in soapy water.

I admit I was a bit proud of myself this morning. Those jars had been staring balefully at me for a long time. Tomorrow, I’m tackling my pajama drawer because the other day, when sub-freezing temperatures were about to hit, I looked for a special pair of flannel pajamas and could only find the bottoms. I bet there are a lot of things in that deep drawer that I never wear. When you’re mostly quarantining, it’s a good time to clean out. Oops, do I sound smug?

Some thoughts on frugality

 

A post on the New York Times Cooking Community this morning got to me to thinking about frugality. A woman wrote that she had cooked an Asian meal and, presumably for the first time, used water chestnuts. But she had half a can left over—not, she said, enough to freeze (do they freeze?). She asked what to do with them. Well, I could have told her: pitch them! It’s taken me years to get that attitude.

I inherited frugality from my mother, who lived through two world wars and the Depression. She saved bits of string and aluminum foil; she had a special cubbyhole right under her sink where she stored used—yes, used—paper towels. If she used one to wipe a counter spill, it went into the cubby; if there was a floor spill, she used her knee to open that cubby and re-used the paper towel. When we moved her out of her home, my brother was astounded at the number of tiny jars in the back of the refrigerator, many of them growing mold. She hated to throw away food—leftovers went into a soup pot.

When I was feeding a family of six plus Mom, leftovers had to be pretty generous before they were worth saving. Mom would ask what I wanted to do with such and such as we cleaned up after supper, and before I could answer, she’d say, “I know, I know. Pitch it.”

It took me years to get over the compulsion to boil the turkey carcass after the holidays (I did it again this year and was so grateful for the rich broth). I still save leftovers and, yes, I have a soup-pot container in my freezer. And bread—I must have a hundred different varieties, from breakfast breads to sandwich rye and dinner rolls. You never know when you’ll want to make croutons or need some fresh breadcrumbs. Panko? It’s just a fancy way of spending money when you can make your own crumbs.

But I will never be as frugal as my mom, and my kids are helping me see that I don’t need to. My oldest son, Colin, is a CPA, and I discuss financial things with him. Some twenty years ago, he and I were driving in Dallas, and I remarked on how much I’d like to have another VW bug. “Mom,” he said, “if it would make you happy, you should have it.” And I bought a bright blue Bug that some may remember.

When my four kids and I planned a nostalgia trip to Chicago so that I could show them the house and neighborhood where I grew up, I said there was a Best Western Motel nearby. They would have none of it, and the five of us stayed in a suite at the Drake Hotel which, all my growing-up years, was a symbol of luxury to me. We ate in fine restaurants, including the Palmer House, and we Ubered around the city like we were millionaires. That trip is one of the highlights of my life.

They buy me better clothes than I would buy for myself and they send generous gifts of flowers and chocolate. Colin keeps telling me I can afford a few things that I want, and sometimes I draw up a bucket list. Maybe it was the NYTimes thread but my bucket list often has to do with food—with pandemic and not going anywhere, I don’t need new clothes.

But I want to make gravlax from scratch (salmon cured with sugar, salt, and dill) and I want to waltz into Central Market and buy a whole leg of lamb. I already use real butter and whole milk, and I would like chocolate mousse with my dinner every night, please. I want to try my hand at Beef Wellington—and Salmon Wellington is pretty intriguing too. A bit of caviar? Of course, with cream cheese and capers. And lobster. Always lobster.

Maybe food and frugality are forever linked in my mind, but I’m trying. And I count my blessings every day. Thanks, Mom.

Mom, the Great Depression, and the Trumpeter

A hopeful sign of spring

My spider plant got left out in the cold

but one brave shoot is poking its head up

Spring and good times are coming

Like many Americans, my reaction to the dramatic drop in the stock market ranged from disappointment (there’s that trip I wanted to take my daughter on and my friends who wanted to replace the windows in their house) to mild and brief panic. No, I am not old enough to remember the Great Depression, but my mom lived through it, and I have heard the stories. More directly, I saw the lifelong impact it had on her.

Born in 1900, Mom was in her thirties in the years of the Depression, a mother at thirty-two, a widow at thirty-four. The years of scraping by and making do showed in her housekeeping. She hated to throw out leftovers and would squirrel them away in small containers in the back of her fridge. In her later years, we would periodically clean out those containers and find many with mold growing. When I was a young wife and mother and would say of leftovers, “Just pitch it,” she mocked me and finally made me see the error of my ways. Her frugal habit is surely the origin of my soup of the week—I collect and freeze leftovers and put them all together when there’s enough to make a pot of soup with the addition of broth or canned tomatoes (this week it definitely tastes of lamb).

Mom re-used paper towels. She’d clean a spot on a counter or something and then stash the slightly-used paper towel in a special place she had for them. Spill on the floor? Out came one of those slightly used pieces of towel. She saved bits of string. And foil? The smallest pieces were saved and re-used. Of course, she washed out plastic bags when they became available. Socks beyond darning (who has a darning egg these days?) became dust rags, great for running your hands over stairs.

Mr. Trump would be in the cross-hairs of Mom’s ire for many reasons, among them the fact that he has not taken responsibility for this historic drop in the market the way he was quick to take credit for the meteoric rise in the Dow Jones. The rumor that he once said a president in office when the market dropped a thousand points in a day should be shot into the air from a cannon is that—a rumor, or as he likes to say, “fake news.” But he does consistently ignore that the rise in the market began well back in the Obama years—he probably dismisses the  calendar and history. I’m sure he’ll never mention any possible connection between his disastrous tax bill and the market fail.

I saw a cartoon on Facebook recently that should give us all pause. It showed a homeless person, asleep on a park bench, covered by newspapers for just a bit of warmth. The caption suggested that instead of measuring our economy by how well the wealthiest among us are doing, we should measure by how the poorest are doing—or not doing.

Food for thought.