Mother's Day

Around our house in those days, if you didn’t clean up your room you went to bed without dessert.  Not just a mess in your own room, either.   If you left a mess anywhere and refused to be responsible for it—reasons ranging from recalcitrance to outright sloth—no matter!  There was NO EXCUSE FOR IT!   You hit the sack with a hole in your belly.  Tough patooties.  That was the law of the land.

In the great Southeast, no meal was complete without something sweet to finish it off. Round it out, take the edge off.  Such punishment then was tantamount to twenty lashes. While you might be able to stand fast, stay whatever course had to be stayed concerning your Mess and its necessity, it was you, the Messer, who teetered bedward in sugar shock, the withdrawal kind, not the law upholders of the land.

It was 1960, when our mother’s chums entered her in the Mrs. Nashville contest as a practical joke.  Not because she wasn’t up to muster in all things home ec, it just wasn’t something anybody from our side of town had ever “done.”  Nonetheless, she went right on ahead with it, jumped through the field trials, and sashayed home with the banner.  Mrs. Nashville, 1960.  Nice picture in the paper, everybody got a big kick out of it. 

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.

Although they looked like no other cake I’ve ever seen – for some unknown reason, she baked them in metal ice cube trays rather then cake pans – their taste haunts me to this day. They were a wonderful mixture of exotic spices, sugar, and ordinary flour cooked into light golden brown loafs. I enjoyed these odd concoctions in private, but was not happy with them in public, whenever they showed up in my school lunch.  Luckily, I was never at any school long enough to really be embarrassed by them.

On her last visit, my mother brought over a box of things that she’d saved over the course of my childhood: early drawings, high-school term papers, first stories and notes.  Looking forward to a trip down memory lane, I began to sort through them.  Within moments two things became evident.  Firstly, that my mother went through all of my trash (a love letter from my first boyfriend, which includes the depressingly spelled “arection” proves this point).  And secondly, she apparently chose only to fish out the things that would most embarrass me. 

Where are all the well-executed drawings, the A plus papers, the naive and yet endearing journal entries?  They are long gone, and in their place exist all manner of horrors.  A grade school essay on Goya (don’t ask) is particularly misinformed, and a drawing from my early years, in which I’ve lovingly adorned a list that my mother herself has written, is earnest enough to break your heart. 

The list, entitled “Stuff That Makes Mom Happy”, places “being alone” and “working” in the top slots, and goes on to include fishing, running, and ballet class in consecutive order.  (Spending time with her daughter is, needless to say, conveniently missing.)  My mother has also contributed her own cartoon horse to the edge of the drawing, and with it’s back to the viewer, the horse is quite obviously running away.

My Mother Vina circa 1957

Instead of turkey, mashed potatoes, etc., stuffed grape leaves (along with shish-kabob and pilaf) is the traditional centerpiece of our Christmas dinner.

Disclaimer:  Every script I’ve ever written is overly descriptive and too long, so no doubt this recipe will be, too.  Apologies in advance. 

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