A Thanksgiving Memory

My mother had a classic set of nesting Pyrex bowls.

Only the blue and yellow ones survived. She used the blue one for mixing up the gravy thickening. Nowadays, it usually contains Jell-O.  The yellow one had many purposes. Most often it was for popcorn. But Thanksgiving day it had an even more delicious duty.

Thanksgiving Eve we would, as a family, lay out slices of bread. We covered the kitchen table and all the counters with bread. Then early Thanksgiving morning, we sat around the and broke the now-stale slices into small pieces and put them in the big yellow bowl while Mom chopped celery and onions.  We had to prepare the dressing (some of you may know it as stuffing, but we called it dressing) so it could cook inside the turkey.

Thanksgiving dinner was a family project. From setting a festive table, to sprinkling the paprika on the cream-cheese stuffed celery, to literally breaking the bread, we all chipped in.

What are some of your Thanksgiving memories?

 

Mommy Files: Birthday Cake Fiasco

My husband and I grew up in different cultures. He’s from a high-rise in the Bronx. My roots are in rural upstate New York. His mother bought his birthday cakes at the corner bakery. My mom baked mine from scratch.

When our children were young, I decided it would be fun for the three of us to bake my husband a birthday cake ourselves. Y & X-Chromos enthusiastically agreed. From scratch! We had such fun, measuring, stirring, tiptoeing around so the cake wouldn’t fall in the oven.

But Mommy made two mistakes. It had been so long since I’d baked and frosted/decorated a cake, I forgot one important thing, and didn’t consider a second important thing.

  • We didn’t wait for the cake to completely cool before we frosted and decorated it. Oops.
  • Even worse, we needed a place to hide the cake so TV Stevie wouldn’t see it. So we put it in the oven. Which also hadn’t completely cooled. Double-oops.

The next day, TV’s birthday, I discovered those errors. Oh, the cake was edible. But the decorations had melted into the frosting, making a pastel tie-die effect.

I think that was the last time I attempted to bake cake. The Chromos and I settled for a future of baking quick breads and cookies. X-Chromo spent many hours in college perfecting the art of molasses cookies.

At least I didn’t traumatize the children.

 

 

The Penny Candy Store

I grew up in a rural community. Mostly there were apple orchards and dairy farms. We lived about a mile from a hamlet which was really nothing more than a cemetery, a church, a Grange Hall, and a cluster of houses. And LaFlam’s.  We rode our bikes to LaFlam’s every chance we could.

Mr. LaFlam owned a small orchard. He was an older, bald man. He also ran a penny candy store on the enclosed front porch of his house. His youngest daughter, Anna, helped him with the penny candy business. Anna was what we called “slow” back then.

One of Anna’s brothers was intellectually disabled. He would hitchhike up US-20 to the town proper, where he was known as the Mayor. People watched out for him.  There was a perpetual bald spot under one of the trees on the Presbyterian church’s lawn where Henry (as he was known in town) sat. In his home hamlet, we called him Hank.

Both of Anna’s children were also severely intellectually disabled. Eddie and Ginny were adults when I knew them. The people in the hamlet watched out for the LaFlams. It’s what folks did back then.

Someone had given Eddie an old bicycle. It was, as far as we all could tell, his prized possession. He couldn’t ride, but he pushed the bike up and down the road all the time.  If he heard a car coming, he would push the bike way off the road to avoid being hit. Eddie also wrote love letters to his “girlfriend.” He always had a small spiral notebook and pencil stub in his pocket . His wavy lines were very neat, between the lines on the paper. He would share those love letters with us if we asked him to show them to us.

Sometimes, visitors who weren’t familiar with the family, would try to take advantage of Eddie…get him to give away apples and such. But no one in the hamlet did that. No one was mean–not intentionally. Yes, we sometimes imitated the way Eddie spoke, called it our accent, but there was no meanness in it. One of my cousins had Eddie down-pat.

In the summer, every Monday night, Anna and her daughter Ginny would walk to dinner at a house down the road from my parents place. We would always greet them. But Ginny was shy and seldom spoke.

After old Mr. LaFlam passed away, the penny candy store had to close. Anna wasn’t capable of doing whatever needed to be done. We lost our place to buy Turkish Taffy, Fireballs, Tootsie Rolls, licorice whips, and cherry vines. Another family tried to do the same thing on their enclosed porch, but it never succeeded. LaFlam’s was an institution to a generation of children in the area.

I grew up and moved away. My folks weren’t sure whatever happened to Eddie and Ginny after their mother could no longer take care of them.  Dad thought Ginny went into a home, but didn’t know what happened to Eddie.

I did a little Internet snooping

Henry/Hank died in 2005, survived by one niece and one nephew.

Ginny died in 2017. Her obit reads: She is survived by her brother Edward. Ginny loved getting her nails manicured; going shopping and to her ARC program.

Eddie was the last one to pass away. He died only a few weeks ago, at the age of 88. I missed his memorial service by two weeks. How utterly sad that his short obit reads: Edward has no known survivors. Please contact the funeral home with any additional information. 

I don’t suppose they meant memories of bicycles, love letters, and penny candy.

The Mommy Files: Yum Yums

Friday nights at our house have always been pizza night. After a long work week, it is nice not to have to think about what I’m going to cook for supper.  When the Chromos were young, I did cook. Every night. Except Friday.

We go through phases with our pizza toppings. TV likes green peppers and mushrooms, two things I cannot abide. I like Italian sausage, something he considers extremely unhealthy. Two things we’ve always agreed on are black olives and onions. So for a while, our weekly pizza was topped with onions.

Y-Chromo was old enough to eat a slice on his own, but I had to cut up X-Chromos pizza into tiny pieces for her to handle.  “Yum yum,” she would say. And thus began what would be come a weekly game.

X-Chromo would reach over to my plate and pluck the onions off my slice. “Hey!” I would chide her. “What do you think you’re doing? Those are my onions.”

She would smile and reply, “Yum yums!”

It became a weekly game.

Memory: Milk

As a child and teenager, I loved milk. Whole milk.

When I was very young, a milkman delivered to our house, twice a week. We got the pasteurized milk in glass bottles with green tops, while my aunt & uncle next door got homogenized milk with red tops. That meant at our house there was always an inch or so of cream at the top of the bottle, and no matter how much I shook the bottle to blend the cream into the rest of the milk, there were disgusting thick white clumps on my Alpha-Bits in the morning.

As a teenager, we got milk in waxed cardboard cartons from the supermarket. Homogenized, thank you G*d.  My mom always had warm-from-the-oven homemade cookies waiting for us when we got off the school bus late afternoon. A tall glass of cold milk was the perfect accompaniment.

Then I moved out on my own. With room mates.

See  that  stove?

An  antique  Norge.  Best  stove I ever  had.  Pilot  light.  Kept  the  whole  top  of  the  stove  warm.  Great spot for raising bread dough. Bad spot for a room mate to leave the milk. All day. A second room mate would come home, see the milk on the stove and put it back in the refrigerator. I would come home and pour myself a glass of . . . clumps. Made those clots of cream from my pre-homogenized day seem almost palatable.

Which is why I can no longer drink a glass of milk.