Some of you may know that I’m working on another memoir cookbook, titled: Kitchen Inheritance II: More Memories and Recipes from my Family of Cooks (I know, it’s not the most creative title, but sequels are like that). One request from many of my readers of the first book was, “Tell me more!” Especially when it came to Mama. So I’ve been working on more pieces about her for the next cookbook.
Mama taught me how to bake, and encouraged my passion for it. The issue here is, we only had about thirteen years together before our relationship became about surviving her illness (early onset dementia); after that, we didn’t bake together. Being a survivor of an ill parent is complicated. Sometimes I don’t want to talk about it; sometimes it’s all I want to talk about. Now, as I dig for memories of Mama like a young archeologist, I am returning to a time before her illness. What I wrote below is a taste of the safe place we inhabited together when I was a child and she was still well. Be patient with me, dear reader; I am still finding my way back to her.
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Mama singing to Vino, 1968
If I'm going to be totally honest, I'll have to begin by saying I don’t remember much. Had I known that one day I'd have no witnesses, no one to remind me, I would have held on tighter to each moment in that kitchen with her.
What I do remember is a childlike sense of playfulness—the way she and I giggled and sang together. But was it on a Sunday, when the stereo console in the living room played Ella Fitzgerald, Live at the Côte d'Azur? (It don't mean a thing/If it ain't got that swing.) Or was it the transistor radio on the sparkly Formica counter, the AM station playing the Beach Boys or the Monkeys? Maybe there wasn't music at all, just her high, sweet voice and fleshy arms, that deep dimple on her deltoid, a scar from a vaccination, big as a doughnut hole.
Mama.
Music memories conflate, but I can still see her there—so graceful—the way she moved around the kitchen with ease. The way she knew just when to let go of the olive green refrigerator door, so that it slid closed without slamming. Her short, muscular legs under a skirt, under an apron. The light in the hood above the stove, the plastic cover lost long ago, pouring onto the counter where we measured out the flour, baking powder, and salt, into a green Pyrex bowl. The clang of the cupcake pans and the clink of the beaters, the handheld mixer. Sometimes we used a boxed mix. "Duncan Hines is the best," she always said, "because it's always moist." (Or am I making that up?) Or Jiffy Corn Muffins, the cardboard box, the waxed paper pouch.
I remember being allowed to flick on the oven light and position the step stool in front of the oven window so I could watch whatever we had mixed together rise and change shape. But you see, I've written all of this before. I'm reaching back into that six-year-old's memory, trying to find new details, a new sound bite. "Christopher," she'd always say, "can you help me with this?" (Or am I making that up too?)
By the time I could read, I wanted to hold the hand mixer myself, but until I was nine or ten, I remember her hand over mine, gently. She didn't have pretty hands—short, square nails, blue veins—but they were soft and pale. I remember her engagement ring, platinum, with one solitaire and several smaller diamonds (the big one went to my sister; the small ones into posts I wear in my ears every day). I remember how the diamonds shone under the bald light, the way that ring and her plain wedding band slid around her fingers, the way she would fidget with them to line them up (though they would always slip out of place again).
It's here that I draw a blank. Because all I really have are the simple, uncomplicated memories of a young child. I lost interest in baking as a 'tween, and was thirteen when she started to lose interest in baking herself, the dementia already creeping in and taking her away bit by bit. I was fourteen when she said, "I've done that all my life, and I don't want to do it anymore." She started to say that about everything at the beginning of her disease. And it was all downhill from there.