Committed to Cake

My mother was a woman of commitment.  When she married my father in December 1955, she promised her life to him (and he to hers) and they lived out that commitment.  Together with my Dad she committed to work in the civil rights movement in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  She committed to do her best to raise her family.  She committed to be the best teacher she could, and fulfilled that commitment by teaching science and by pushing for education for gifted students in the city public schools.  She lengthened her commitment by teaching thinking skills to new teachers.  

One of the things she was committed to was home baking.  She did not insist on special ingredients - no expensive butter nor particular type of flour for her.  But don’t you dare bring a manufactured pie crust or store-bought cake into her presence.    

Mom was famous for her pound cake.  It was actually Joyce Hatch’s Pound Cake, since Mom got the recipe from the pastor’s wife when we lived in Columbus, Mississippi for a year.  Thank you, Joyce Hatch, for giving our family the enduring tradition of this cake. 

When I decided yesterday to recreate her pound cake, I found out just what level of commitment is required - this cake takes 1 ½ hours baking time, and that’s not including the mixing of the ingredients.  I cancelled my plans for the morning.

It also requires a heavy investment of sugar.  After Mom’s online funeral, we the family distributed some of her recipes to those who attended.  One person said there must be a typo in the pound cake recipe - does it really call for 3 cups of sugar?!  

I was astonished that it calls for 1 tablespoon of vanilla.  My husband likes vanilla everything, so he is pleased with this discovery.  

My father called it “Joyce Hatch’s ½ pound cake,” because the recipe calls for only half a pound of butter (two sticks).  Let’s not neglect the 1 cup of sour cream, 6 eggs, and 3 cups of flour that also contribute to its heft.  When it’s all put together, I think it weighs 3 or 4 pounds.  It is a substantial cake, a cake of commitment.  

My Mom’s recipe is missing a key detail, which the baker is just automatically supposed to know - bake this cake in a tube pan, buttered and floured.

Mom’s birthday was last Friday; she would have been 89 years old.  

Mom, I made your signature cake in your memory.  I miss you.  Thank you for being a woman of commitment.

Joyce Hatch’s Pound Cake 

 

½ pound butter                 

3 cups sugar                              

6 eggs

1 Tablespoon vanilla

3 cups flour

¼ teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup sour cream

 

Cream butter and sugar well.  Add eggs, one at a time. Alternate dry ingredients and sour cream.  Bake 1 ½ hours at 325 degrees.

Only 8 ingredients!

1.5 hours later, the cake is done.

Delicious with fresh fruit, or 
juicy strawberries (like
for shortcake) or with ice cream

And we turned it into emergency cake!
16 slices being stored in a 
freezer in an undisclosed location.

Cri de Coeur

 

Art I created at the NextChurch conference in Baltimore, February 2018

We are fine here.  But we are not exactly fine.

I’m not even physically involved in moving my Mom from assisted living to skilled nursing care, and still I am exhausted.  I am emotionally worn out by trying to calm her down, at the same time as the world’s dread presses in on me.  It’s like 2016 all over again, except more fear-filled and more compressed. 

When I tell Mom that a worldwide virus pandemic has caused the governors of every state in which her children live to issue stay-at-home orders, and that’s why we can’t be there to help her make this move, she doesn’t believe me. She thinks we are staying away on purpose, as some kind of punishment.  Her suspicion of our motives is hard to take.

In tonight’s virtual church meeting, our devotional included the disciples in the boat during the storm (Mark 4:35-41).  The boat was unstable; the waves were exponential; the disciples were terrified.

In this household, we are privileged to have most everything we need.  Except for the ability to go hold the hand of our frightened, angry, confused elderly relatives and friends.  I know that lots of people are in this boat of fear and trembling with us.

Our devotional then had these words:

Do not fear, for I am with you,

    do not be afraid, for I am your God;

I will strengthen you, I will help you,

    I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.

§  Isaiah 41:10

Damn it, I WILL fear.  I am fearful.  Yes, Jesus, I have little faith. I am the disciple trembling in the boat that is filling with water.   It is those next words I need to hear, over and over.  “For I am with you.”

When the 2016 election was done, some people said, “Don’t worry.  It will be okay.”  No.  It has not been okay, and it is not okay.  Don’t tell me, right now, that it will be okay, or that we will make it through this, or that we are strong.  That may be true later on. But right now, I just need to hear, “I am with you.  It’s okay for you to feel this fear and anger.  It’s okay for you to grieve what is not to be.  This is indeed a terrible and sad time.”

I will cry and cry and cry, just like I did in November 2016.  I will cry for that leader who seems to have no capacity to cry, who seems to have no understanding of the suffering of others.  I will cry for those of our leaders who are too busy doing a good job leading in a horrible situation to be able to allow themselves to cry.  I will cry for my mother, who has no person who loves her to be with her as she moves to the necessary but difficult next stage of her life.  I will cry for those who lost their jobs and don’t know how to manage tomorrow.  I will cry for those who are endangering themselves to keep the rest of us alive.  I will cry for the homeless in a stay-at-home-order world.   I will cry for those who were lonely before all this began.  I will cry for my children, and all children.   I will cry for you.

I didn’t know it, in November 2016, but these are the things I was crying about, when I sobbed every day for three days straight.

Tomorrow I will stop crying and will get up and work and cook and eat and laugh and sing while I wash my hands and enjoy the company of the three who live here now.  We will be fine. But tonight I will cry my heart out.  For I am with you.

Love is a bit blurry at the moment, but
love is everywhere

The Power of Lift

Thoughts while in Canada in December

The week before Christmas wouldn't be my first choice for a time to go to Canada. My brothers and I are here for the memorial service for my uncle, my father 's younger brother.  I am grateful we made our trip here in June, in happier (and warmer) times. 

The miracle is that my mother is also here. It is no mean feat for a woman of her age with various challenging physical ailments to get to this smallish town in Eastern Canada. My brother travelled with her. We shall have to submit his name for sainthood. First they flew from the States to Montreal, or as my mother called it, "That horrible city we had to go through."  Strictly speaking, she means "the horrible airport where we had to pass through customs."  My mother has many years of experience travelled internationally, mostly due to my Dad requiring her to vacation in Pakistan, India, Albania, Israel, Ireland and more. (I went on some of those trips with them.  My husband always says, "How come your family never wants to take a vacation in, say, Paris or London?") But it's been a long time since she made those trips, and air travel has changed considerably. 

To reach our destination here in Canada, she and my brother flew on a prop plane, a 20-seater.  I can only imagine how much their flight might have resembled a video game. 

Airline flight never ceases to amaze me. Every time I am in a plane I am astonished when we actually are able to lift off the ground.  My son has tried to explain the physics to me.  It's something about higher air pressure under the plane's wing compared to the pressure on top of the wing, and this is called "lift."  I can't say that I really understand the principle.  I have to take it on faith that air pressure is a strong enough thing to lift up an entire airplane with me in it.

The other thing that amazes me is that I am not frightened out of my wits to fly in an airplane. In my young adulthood I developed a fear of heights.  Acrophobia is supposedly an irrational fear of heights, but it seems perfectly sensible to me to fear falling off of high things. Yet on an airplane I prefer the window seat, so I can look down on the beautiful and fascinating world below.   My faith in lift must be pretty strong. I go with the notion that God invented physics and lift, so for me, faith in lift is a sort of faith in God. 

I have to admit that when we experience turbulence, and also during landing, I kind of abandon faith in lift and revert to Anne Lamott's prayer litany of saying "Help! Thanks! Wow!"  I can't say with certainty that I believe in the omnipotence of God (don't get me started on theodicy or we'll never be back in time for tea), but I do believe that in our struggles with lift, and with life, God travels with us. That's powerful enough. As we head off to the funeral home to honor the memory of my uncle, a kind person of great integrity, wit, and inner strength, that is the best place to leave my faith for the moment. 

Loaded Nightstand

A few observations about library books

Library books are hard to take a photo of.  They have that protective covering that greatly reflects light, so you have to position them at just the right angle.

What method do you use when deciding what books to borrow from the library?

Sometimes when I go to the library I take a list of books recommended by friends, fellow bloggers, my mother, and NPR.  You fellow bloggers and my mother have rarely steered me wrong.  Thanks.  

Sometimes you and my mother serendipitously recommend the same book.  How did you know?!

Sometimes I end up at the library without my list of books, and I just grab books based solely on the look of the cover, or the sound of the title.

I am finding it hard to concentrate on what I’m reading.  Call it a combination of too much else going on in my life, menopause, and wondering if I should have started that other book first.

Two weeks I finished a great library book about math:  The Grapes of Math. I just finished (and am still cogitating on) David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m a few chapters into The Towers of Trebizond, which is, so far, an amusing tale of British people traveling to Turkey, and the other mostly British people they encounter.  And I’m reading The Burglary, which is about an Edward Snowden-like heist of secret FBI files, only it’s the 1970s and J. Edgar Hoover is in charge of the FBI.

I would like to spend hours curled up with these books, but lately that's not a possibility.  So I take comfort in just having the stack of books there.

On the Nightstand

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay

All Cry Chaos, by Leonard Rosen

The Burglary, by Betty Medsger

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection, by Alexander McCall Smith

The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

A Glass of Blessings, by Barbara Pym

Saving Fish from Drowning, by Amy Tan

An Academic Question, by Barbara Pym

Royal Pain in the Icing

I  am only here writing on the blog because I had to sit down.

When I was a kid, my mother made a gingerbread house every year at Christmas time.  For mortar, she used sugar, heated to one of those crack stages (soft? hard? I’m not sure).  It was very difficult to work with, as it hardened quickly.  It made gossamer strings of sugar all over the kitchen as my mother transferred it from the pan to the construction site. If the hot sugar got on your skin, you could not rub it off, so it burn-burn-burned.

This memory puts my current love-hate relationship with Royal Icing into perspective.  Royal Icing is the gooey, sickly-sweet stuff you should use to glue together a gingerbread house.  It is easier and safer to work with than hard crack sugar (sounds like a drug!), but it is not the best tasting icing, since it contains only egg whites and sugar, but no butter.

After my mother went back to working full-time I took over making a gingerbread house each Christmas.  This makes it sound like I was contributing to the family welfare, as if I were milking the cows and bringing in the hay while my mother worked in a munitions factory, but that wasn’t quite the case.  She returned to teaching, and I had time on my hands. 

My last recorded gingerbread house was made 31 years ago.  Land sakes alive, after that, I graduated college and didn’t have time for such frivolities.

 

My last known gingerbread house, 1982.
Santa must have been having hot flashes,
because he is not wearing a shirt.
(Click to embiggen to see shirtless Santa.)

Two weeks ago, after the thrill and agony of Thanksgiving had worn off, Younger Daughter and I were looking at photos together, and she saw the one I had made in 1982.  She said plaintively, “Oooh!  Can we make a gingerbread house together, Mommy?  I have always wanted to make one.”

How could I refuse her?  We started on Friday, and have been at it all weekend. That is why my kitchen is coated in a fine dusting of confectioner’s sugar, my dining room table is covered with random-looking gingerbread shapes, and my back is killing me.  I also have a pain that shoots up my right arm occasionally.  YD is on sugar overload from licking Royal Icing off her fingers, but otherwise greatly enjoying our project.  That makes it all worth it (but I’m not saying I will do it again next year).

Time to get back to the construction site.  In the meantime, here are some photos of what we did Friday and Saturday.

Assemblage of ingredients

The recipe called for 6 cups of flour, which makes enough
 dough to make the Taj Mahal in gingerbread.

The dough had the consistency of clay.

Time was, I had to make my own templates.  Nowadays, you
just download them from the internet.

YD opted to make bears in place of Santa Claus.

Cutting out a piece of the sleigh

Slippery Time

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, into the future.  My Mom has been visiting us this week, and it’s been a really great visit.  She was able to visit several cousins and her college friend.  There were Scrabble games, writing challenges, reminiscences, music performances, and too much good food. 

Last week we marked the passage from the end of the summer toward the school year:  Marching Band camp started!  Youngest Daughter has been struggling through that, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.  I love it, because it’s sort of like school starting 2 weeks early. 

I’ve been only marginally paying attention to the task of getting the Son ready to move away to college.  The college has sent umpteen e-mails with instructions for how to prepare.  I haven’t read a single one, which makes me think that I will pay dearly for that in the near future. But then I think, I’m not the one going to college, so I won’t pay.

Tomorrow I make the trek to drive my Mom back to her place.  Then turn around and come home the next day.  Then drive my son to college.  Then come home and have one week to get YD ready for high school.  It’s all good, but it’s happening too fast.  I desperately want some time to just think about things. Somewhere in there it will be my birthday, but who has time for a birthday these days?