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Chocolate Gravy and Legacies

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Mother is sleeping in her padded chair in the dining room while on the TV in front of her, a cooking show goes on and on about how to whip potatoes.  Funny, all those years I thought we were having mashed potatoes they were really whipped potatoes because Mother always did them just like the TV show says to do them if you want them whipped.  The test cook chef is amazed at this new recipe she has found and how good they are.  They should have been at Mother’s house for the last seven decades and they could have already had them.image source:cookscountry

I suppose that means we never really had mashed potatoes.  One thing we had that I bet most people didn’t, was chocolate gravy.  Over fresh, hot biscuits.  Wow.  I wanted to get my face down close to the plate and just shovel it in while savoring every bite and lick of the spoon.  It’s the consistency of gravy, but it’s chocolate.  Milk chocolate.  Not a glace, not a mousse, it’s gravy; chocolate gravy that runs down the side of the hot Bisquick biscuits straight out of the oven.  Man, it’s good.  Melts in your mouth.  Hits that chocolate itch perfectly.

I’ve only met two other people outside the family who knew what chocolate gravy was.  And they were clients I had in Nashville, a young woman who moved to town from a little country town in Oklahoma or Arkansas.  Her mother was in town to help her find a condo to buy and we had a good time visiting as we rode around looking at condos.  Turns out the mom made chocolate gravy!  I couldn’t believe someone else knew what that was.  And, of, course, they put it over hot biscuits.  Although, I think she made her biscuits from scratch.  Mother could too, but usually was too busy.

Mother always made yeast rolls for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.  They were made from scratch and were fabulous.  Yum.  One of those things that brings back memories the moment you smell that yeast in the oven.  Mother hasn’t made them in years because it’s a big job but my sister used the same recipe to make them all the years her girls were growing up.  Now my sister’s girls and grandchildren always ask for them at the holidays so she’s built the same memories in her family that we had growing up.

Lemon meringue and chocolate cream pies.  Mother made those from scratch too.  And in the summer, Daddy would buy a lug of peaches and Mother would make peach ice cream or sometimes, banana or fresh strawberry.  Once in a while, chocolate, but usually a fresh fruit ice cream.  Daddy would sit out on the back stoop, cranking the ice maker, filling the sides of the ice cream maker with rock salt and ice and talking to whoever would sit out there with him.

Someone was usually playing the piano, one of us kids running in and out the back door.  Or sitting on the couch, noses buried in a book.  My sister used to say that if I was reading she could never get my attention.  But what I remember are all the sounds of the house swirling around like background music to whatever I was reading.

About the time I moved to Nashville to sell houses, I gave my sister a big bag of books that I wasn’t taking with me and her husband said,image source:shereads.org

“We’ve lost her now.  She’d be buried in books for weeks.”

It runs in the family, this immersion in books.

When Daddy died, we donated over 1100 of his books to his favorite university.  I can now go online and search their library catalog and see his name there.  Such a nice feeling.  He left a quite a legacy.

Speaking of legacies, I remember being concerned when I was a girl that since I only had two brothers, the Dean name might not carry on.  I’ve since learned that there are millions of Deans, but most of them are in the Eastern United States or in Great Britain and European countries.  In my life, I have only personally met two, maybe three other families named Dean.

Turns out, I needn’t have worried.  My oldest brother has three sons to carry on the name and two grandsons, so far.  My other brother has four sons carrying on the name and they are all at marrying age and beginning their families.

Legacies are interesting.  It started with two, Mom and Dad.  Sixty four years later there are forty-six of us now, plus three deceased and another seven that left the family through divorce.  We stretch from the youngest who is about five months to Mother, the oldest at 85 with every age in between.

One year, there were four or five great-grand kids graduating high school the same year.  In the last year, four of the great-grand kids brought spouses or significant others into the family and started having babies.  Two more got engaged this year.

image source:mcmnetworkIt’s good being here so that Mother can stay in her home but it feels different from what I thought these years of my life would feel.  I miss being free to travel to my sister’s or my brothers’ houses.  Laughing with the kids and their kids.  I always thought I’d be there to support my nieces and nephews and their children.  I didn’t imagine that I would not be able to travel to their graduations or weddings.  But here I am, so that Mother can stay in her house.  That’s a good thing.  I’m happy to be here for her.  I just didn’t expect the limitations it would mean for me.

But then, I’m not sure you can really understand what your legacy will be.  A warm, safe home, with lights shining out the windows in the twilight and the smell of Mother’s cooking are what I remember.  That and Daddy’s peace and calm.  I guess I have to just trust that I built some legacy with my nieces and nephews and their children and that this part, this being stuck in one place, that’s part of the legacy as well.

To value or not to value….

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image source:google images

     image source:google images

Monday night TV at our house is PBS and Antiques Roadshow.  First, the      original show that is recorded in Great Britain, which is especially fun because those antiques are really old.  Next is the American version with relatively newer antiques, followed by a new show this season, Market Warriors, which is about four buyers who hit flea markets and sale houses to find treasures that are then auctioned off, hopefully for a greater price than what the buyers spent to purchase the items.

The fun in watching these shows is to see if that stuff around the house that you thought was junk is just junk, or if that loved item that some ancestor was sure was valuable, really is valuable.  I like to test my knowledge and see if I can recognize the item before the expert tells us what it is.  I know what I like, but I also know that most of the ‘tells’ that indicate value or worthlessness are mostly Greek to me.  If I can learn by watching and guess the designer or manufacturer then maybe I can move beyond my ignorance. That isn’t the real reason though, because ignorance isn’t that big a deal; everyone is ignorant about something.  To change that, you just have to learn.

But can I move beyond an upbringing that was filled with cast-offs, cheap, mass-produced functionally adequate furniture, clothing, housewares – all devoid of any real beauty or value?  Can I move out of the cookie-cutter suburbs and into something that actually has some class?  We had no money, no class and no fine culture.  Can I cover up that basic beginning with a coat of sophistication like you’d cover over a cheap, pressed cardboard backed dresser with a new finish?  Will I then feel valuable?  Will I then BE valuable?

And what is real value?  Mother grew up with even less that we had when I was a child and she loves these shows as well.  Is that because she sees the beauty in things, whether of value or not?  Like the three-quarters finished paint by number canvases we found when going through stored boxes looking for the oil paintings she did years ago.  We hung her oil paintings in the house and I sat the paint by number canvases in the box for Goodwill.  Mother took them out of the box and keeps saying she is going to get some double stick tape and put them, unframed, up on the walls of her bedroom; walls that already have hanging on them the original oil paintings that she did as well as oils done by friends; walls that also have outdated calendars with pretty pictures but which can’t be thrown away because they’re pretty.

Why would she even care about the old paint by number paintings?  Is she able to see some beauty that I can’t?  Doesn’t she know how tacky they will look on the walls?  Actually, I can see the beauty of the scene, if you stand far enough back that you don’t key in on the paint by number aspect, but there’s no monetary or resell value to it.  So, why keep it?  Why clutter up the full walls with one more thing that is cheap and mass-produced?

The clutter that covers every space in the house drowns out all beauty for me.  It’s too much.  It threatens to close in on me, so my mind’s eye tries to shut it out and it becomes some dark, busy background that drives out the air and leaves me feeling stifled and I find myself breathing shallowly, barely existing.

And then, some person on Antiques Roadshow brings out their treasured tchotchke and the appraiser tells them it’s worth hundreds or maybe thousands and as I look at it my childhood memory is jogged.  Mother turns me and says that the one she has, that is just like the one on TV is in the cedar chest, and “don’t forget to keep it, don’t send it to Goodwill.”

image source: google images

image source: google images

My breathing expands, I take in more air.  There is value, right here in all the clutter.  Right here in my classless childhood.  Not really because there’s something here that’s worth some monetary amount, but because Mother, whose family survived the Dust Bowl, the depression and years as itinerant workers, recognized value and held on to it.  And I see that she has a classiness that I had missed before.  A classiness that has nothing to do with things and everything to do with the intrinsic value we each have.  We’re God’s creation.  We are the thing of value.  All the stuff that fills up life, whether it’s sophisticated and expensive or classless and cheap is just that, stuff.  Once again I see that I do have value, and with that reminder, I have hope that I can look beyond the things and recognize the true beauty around me and the real value within.