Becoming Myself

          

"It's not the years, it's the mileage." --  Indiana Jones

           

So the latest birthday behind me, candles extinguished, love shared with friends and family and now I'm 68 years old.  It's a number that would have horrified me when I was younger, but one of my discoveries through these decades is that it is just a number.  Sure, I've entered what some call the "Golden Years," but our friend Ackie calls the "Medical Years."  Yep, there's a touch of arthritis, the "heartbreak of psoriasis" (as the TV commercials used to call it) and other assorted anomalies of the body.  That said, I wouldn't be any other age than the one to which I wake up each morning.

            [As a quick aside, I need to put this blogging thing in some perspective.  I don't write out of a sense that I have any particular wisdom to offer, but just because I've always been verbal and enjoy writing a lot.  I share the blog because any writer likes to be published in some form.  There's a lot of other writing I do that doesn't fit this venue, but maybe someday I'll do something with that, too.]

            Now back to this aging thing.  I like the age I am as well as any that has gone before.  It seems wise to do so since there is really no alternative, but I've never spent a great deal of time wishing for the past.  If I could have more time with loved ones who are no longer here, I would absolutely want to do that.  I certainly would ask them many more questions about their lives and I would take notes to remember.  Having no chance of that, I cherish the memories and realize how lucky I have been to know and love those who have been part of my life.

            The mileage has been instructive, sometimes fun and joyful, sometimes sad and disturbing.  I have learned from all of it, sometimes forgotten lessons that had to be relearned, but always have been affected by the experience.  I've learned enough to know I'll be learning all my life and that makes me happy because curiosity has driven my life's journey.

            Thanks to my parents Billy and Frances for giving me the gift of reading.  Books have taken me all over the world and into times before I was born and a future we can only imagine.  Authors have inspired me to try new places, not to fear taking chances and, of course, they inspired me to express myself with the words I learned to love so young.

            My sister Pat, about whom I've written many times, set the odometer of my life turning when she allowed me to accompany her on her own teenage adventures.  She taught me to drive in the sand dunes and state parks around Albany, Georgia where we grew up.  She neglected to share with Mama and Daddy the story of how I got the 1948 Chevy stuck in the sand and we had to get help to get it out.  She prevaricated when Daddy wanted to know how the car's bumper got dented, avoiding telling him that I drove into a pine tree at Chehaw State Park. I suspect he wondered how I learned how to drive without his help, but he agreed to take me to the Driver's License Bureau when I turned 16 with one caveat.  Though he had never ridden in the car with me driving, he said that if I could get him there without incident, he would support my getting the license.  I did and he did. 

            Not every part of the journey has been smooth sailing.  I made misjudgments, as most of us do.  Luckily those cost me less than I gained.  A first marriage that went awry gave me the gift of a cherished son. The second marriage gave me a husband who has loved me and forgiven my foibles for more than three decades while loving our son and parenting him with love and guidance.  Some choices that seem so right prove to be wrong.  Sometimes that which seems a devastating loss turns out to be a lesson that heals and nurtures. 

            There are days when my curiosity and thirst for life create anxiety.  I don't want to miss anything.  I can never seem to get enough traveling done to soothe my wanderlust.  Other days I find the comfort of home so appealing that I can't imagine leaving for even a short while.  But this, I believe, is life, that seesaw between desires yet unmet and the satisfaction of having found serenity in one's nest.

            I have few regrets.  None of them has to do with what I've missed.  The only things I rue are the times I let someone down.  Some of those probably happened without my realizing another's disappointment.  I'm convinced that the true gift of experience and aging for me is this awareness that I have had -- and I continue to enjoy -- a life in which I'm learning every day.  How can I regret a moment when the joys so far outweigh the sorrows?  I cannot.

            So I celebrate becoming 68.  The number is insignificant.  The journey that brought me here is what I cherish.   I look forward to whatever lies ahead and plan to embrace each day as it comes. 

Photo by Mike Lumpkin

Recipes and Memories

              

So I decided it was time to clean out my recipe box.  The way I figured this out was I realized for the umpteenth time that I could not only not put any additional recipes in it, but it was so full that I couldn't get any recipes out of it without extreme effort.  And with that decision, I opened the box and the memories flowed out of it.

               This lovely wooden box with its hand-tooled leather top was a wedding gift from our friend, Stella, almost 32 years ago.  It has decorated our kitchens through the decades since, slowly filling up along the way.  We enjoy using it because it reminds us of a dear friend whom we love and of the place where she bought it, a wonderful shop in Chattanooga, TN, called Plum Nelly.

               The Plum Nelly shop took its name from a "clothes line" arts and crafts festival that took place for 26 years on the back side of Lookout Mountain at a place that was "plumb out of Tennessee and nearly out of Georgia."  The name lives on, evoking a time and place where creativity came alive.

              

The woman who began that festival was named Fannie Mennen. Fannie was an artist of great talent, working for many years in block printing.  The Chattanooga shop delivered a couple of other wedding gifts to Mike and me that we cherish.  There are two pillows displaying Fannie's block prints on fabric, attached trapunto-style to the pillow covers.  There is also a beautiful wall hanging of lilies. Her gifts grace our home all these years later, long after her death.  I am sure that many other folks still treasure the works of Fannie Mennen.

               The shop in Chattanooga was begun by Fannie's sister, Celia Mennen Marks, a longtime food columnist for the Chattanooga Times.  Celia, who passed away in 2005,  had an eye for arts and crafts and stocked the shop in Chattanooga with an array of items that was as much fun to browse as to own.  She favored the work of artists who were members of the Southern Highland Crafts guild, but found pieces from as far afield as Texas. The Plum Nelly shop is still in Chattanooga, now with different owners.  We proudly display in our china cabinet the dinnerware set begun there, what our son calls the "good pottery" from  the Texas clay artist, Michael Obranovich. You can see Michael's current work at http://www.obranovichpottery.com. 

              

But back to the recipe box and the memories inside it.  As I cleaned through its collection of recipes, both those used and those considered but never tried, it was a trip through time.  Alongside the items snipped from magazines or scavenged from cookbooks were the recipes given to us by family and friends, including a couple that have become family favorites passed on to an ever-wider circle of friends as we shared the dishes with others.

               There's "Miss Marcia's Quiche" recipe.  This has become one of Mike's favorites.  He has found a myriad of twists on the basic ground beef recipe that was originally given to me by our friend Marcia Kling with whom we worked at WTVC in Chattanooga.  After 50 years on the air in many roles, Marcia retired recently, an icon to generations of Chattanoogans.  She remains one of the people I consider influential in my life, a mentor and friend, a model of grace and goodness.  Her quiche recipe delights many folks she hasn't met, but we faithfully give her credit.

              

There's a little piece of paper in the box that holds the hand-written recipe for Mike's mother's chocolate cake, his favorite.  The secret to this one is the frosting with sugar as its preponderant ingredient.  This recipe was apparently one passed down by Mike's paternal grandmother who was famous for the frosting and its more liquid equivalent that is still revered as "chocolate syrup," served by multiple generations of mothers on biscuits and pancakes.  For chocolate lovers it puts maple syrup to shame.

               There's my own mother's recipe for cheese straws, a simple mix of butter, flour and Kraft Old English cheese that came in five-ounce glass jars.  I'm not sure how easy this cheese (actually a cheese "spread," which is code for processed) would be to find today.  Despite my having become a bit of a cheese snob in my adult years and an enjoyer of fancy cheese straws from various bakeries across the South, I have never had any that tasted more special than Mama's.  She had a knack for getting just the right amount of red pepper in them.  Her recipe calls for "red pepper to taste," but there's where the magic comes in.  Her sense of taste rested on the perfect edge between just enough and not too much.

              

Another treasured and much-shared recipe in the box is one for Corn Casserole, still used on the original recipe card from Linda Eller, a co-worker at WFAA-TV in Dallas.  She brought this sinfully yummy dish to a potluck luncheon in the Channel 8 Promotion Department, circa 1983.  It is a bit like corn pudding, but thicker with its added touch of Jiffy Corn Muffin Mix.  We've served it many, many times over the years, distributed the recipe and been told by more than one friend that it became a  Thanksgiving dinner tradition at their table.  Thank you, Linda.  You started something that has taken on a life of its own.  [The recipe is available at the Jiffy website.]

               Thumbing through the box further, I found several of those recipes passed along by moms and aunts that remind us that the "Greatest Generation" also lived through the Great Depression.  We, their children, grew up on meals that might have been light on the meats that were too expensive to feed several kids, but were heavy on the starches that would fill our little bellies.  There were one-dish meals with a pound of ground beef and three cups of rice with home-grown tomatoes, onions and peppers to spice them up. 

              

There were also, it seemed, dozens of variations on Jell-O salads.  Many of these recipes came through church cookbooks and included a wide array of ingredients added to the requisite fruit cocktail.  These "unique" additions to Jell-O included the much-loved Cool Whip enhanced variously by nuts of every stripe, cereals and even pretzels.  I think there were probably contests to see who could come up with the most outlandish yet edible combination.  The "J" section in my recipe box contains none of these.  I ate enough Jell-O as a child to last my whole life without ever having more.

               Truth is, the recipe box is a tribute to those Great Depression survivors.  They learned as children that food is, in fact, love.  After their generation, most of those who followed have not known the widespread hunger that left so many vowing never to know that feeling again.  We not only have more food available, but more varieties of food are shipped from near and far.  Meals that would have taken our mothers hours to prepare could be quickly readied in a microwave or even made in a slow-cooker while we were off to work outside the home. 

               Despite the fact that I don't spend the time in the kitchen that my mother did, I relish the memories of the dishes she cooked and the recipes she left me.  We memorialized even more of her dishes in a family recipe book that my sister and I put together for Mama's 80th birthday almost 20 years ago.  Like the recipe box, that little spiral-bound book is filled with love and memories of good times gathered around the dinner table.  I am grateful for the recipes, but even more for the memories.

Photos by Mike Lumpkin