Mom liked to have fun. So did Daddy. In my Middle School years and beyond, while I was still at home, Mom would quickly clean the kitchen table after supper – we always had supper, except on holidays, when supper became dinner – and they’d get out the cards to play canasta all evening long, loudly calling to one another over the table.
And it wasn’t until many years later that I learned the other things that Mom thought were fun. Volunteering at the hospital, where she made good friends among the other volunteers. Spending a whole day with me whenever I returned from moving West to Northern California. We’d spend the day driving around Milwaukee, looking again at the old neighborhoods on the North Side where we’d both grown up. Then we’d end up at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where Mom stood silently in front of her favorite painting -“Le Pere Jacques (the Wood Gatherer)”, looking closely, as if she was seeing it for the first time. We always had at least one meal out at a restaurant of our choosing. We had our favorites.
And Mom especially liked to bake. Every winter, in Christmas season, she’d bake the cookies we liked best – meringue dots filled with chocolate, Kris Kringles, sugar cookies in all shapes, carefully decorated and sprinkled with chocolate chips or plain cookies sprinkled generously with nonpareils. She loved to try new cookie recipes, too. She had her assortment of recipes – a collection of cookbooks across many years, holiday gifts from the Gas Company and Electric Company – and marked, with comments – i.e. “a favorite, try this one!” The comments were meant for me, for the time I’d be baking my own cookies at Christmas. An event that has never happened: ask my husband.
I’d add my own comments now: “I’m not a baker, but I’definitely try this if I was a baker!”
And Mom had her own way of talking about those days of playing Canasta, about the days of baking cookies to be enjoyed by the whole family: “That’s the fun of it.”
I’m a different temperament from my mother. Gratefully, my own path has taken me through University and Seminary, following the leading of my temperament. And so, my comment holds: “I’m not a baker.” Every year, though, I bake three kinds of pies – sour cherry, pumpkin, and apple – to contribute to the holiday feast at Norman Bahlert’s and Cheryl Rouse’s long table on Thanksgiving Day. Mom would be proud of me, I’m sure.
My poor photo of a print of “Le Pere Jacques.” This print hung above the desk in my mother’s small room at Mathilda Brown Home in Oakland, 1998-2001.
