My late grandmother, may she rest in peace, was very, very good at the things she was good at, and spectacularly bad at the thing she was bad at, which was cooking.
She could sew and knit and organize into oblivion, and she could draw and paint, and she had beautiful penmanship and made her bed so neatly and perfectly that you could bounce quarters off the surface. Every photograph she ever put into an album (chronologically, always, all of them) was labeled and dated, and she balanced her checkbook to the penny. She could crochet. Her collection of antique hatpin holders – she had hundreds of them – was kept spotless. She saved every dollar she ever had and could account for every dime she ever spent. She had the most beautiful long nails that she kept impeccably manicured in pearly bubblegum pink. But cook? My Bubby could ruin a bowl of cereal.
The three things you could always find in her refrigerator were artificially sweetened iced tea, powdered milk, and margarine. So you can imagine the shivers of unhappy anticipation that went through our bodies when Bubby invited us over for a meal.
If we got lucky, she would have ordered in hoagies from her local sub shop (Sack o’ Subs on Ventnor Avenue in Ventnor, New Jersey); if we were less lucky, she would have cooked. Once, for brunch, she prepared pecan pancakes. Good news! Pancakes are hard to screw up! Unless, of course, you were my Bubby.
My relationship with my mother was, um, complicated. She was a kid herself in many ways, having been neglected by her own beautiful but narcissistic mother. She pretty much raised herself and from my jaundiced teenage perspective, my mother was a disgrace. She wanted romance and adventure and was frustrated by the mundane tomb of her obligations. Never mind the fact that she’d been a parent since the age of 19 with 4 kids.
My mother was not Donna Reed or Jane Wyatt. What’s worse, in an era when father knew best, she was a single mother. To support us, she trained race horses. Since none of them ever won, we moved a lot. The two constants through all of this shifting and moving were my mother’s stews and spice cakes. In both cases, she was proud of never having used a recipe. In the case of the stews, memory tells me she could have used a cookbook. The cakes were a different story.
Mother’s Day was always a meaningful day in my life, but not because of my own mother. Because of my father’s mother. She was born on a day in May that fell on or near Mother’s Day. Each year her family celebrated her birthday on Mother’s Day, no matter what the date of her actual birthday. Her large clan would all come to her little house, deep in the Valley, to honor her. Most of them lived nearby, but not us.