(She minored in home economics in college, but personally I think she must have earned an added emphasis in food storage somewhere along the way.)
(Assuming food storage is, in fact, a recognized area of study.)
Regardless, when I contrast Mama’s methodical, sensible placement of her groceries with my willy-nilly slinging of various and sundry food items, I can’t help but wonder if I need to put a sign on my forehead that says, “WELCOME TO CRAZYTOWN. THE CUCKOO IS HERE AND ALSO IN MY PANTRY.”
Once the groceries were situated, the first thing on our prep list was to mix the marinade for the beef tenderloin my brother was going to cook on the grill, and Janie and I managed to cross that item off our list late Thursday afternoon. Afterward we talked about what appetizers would work best, and Janie, who is super organized, ran through the list of everything we needed to do on Friday, then pulled out all the serving pieces that we’d need for Saturday night’s dinner.
That evening Janie’s mother, Jane (who, interestingly enough, I call Beverly, which might seem weird unless you consider that she calls me Stephanie, and as a result we crack each other up every time we say hello or good-bye), came by to check on our progress. She suggested that we label each serving piece with a Post-it note to remind us what dish would go inside—a tip I considered pretty much genius. My brain started to feel a little less cluttered and overwhelmed, and by the time I went to bed Thursday night, I was optimistic and hopeful about Friday. FIRE UP THE STOVE, GLADYS.
Friday morning was all about the side dishes, and that is precisely why I was cooking twelve boxes of Uncle Ben’s Long Grain & Wild Rice by seven thirty in the morning. We were expecting about fifty people at the dinner—family members, close friends, former neighbors who had moved away years ago—and when I’d gone to the grocery store the day before, I was fighting an underlying fear that somehow we wouldn’t have enough food. The fear caused me to buy about four more of everything than I initially thought we needed, but I figured it was better to miscalculate on the side of plenty rather than want. One of our dishes was a shrimp and wild-rice casserole, and while I probably ended up making enough for seventy-five people, at least I could rest easy knowing that, say, Mama’s friend Betty Bailey wasn’t going to walk up to the buffet table and find one whole teaspoon of casserole for her enjoyment. Heaven forbid.
While the rice was cooking, we started the arduous task of grating an obscene amount of cheese, and as I was attempting to calculate exactly how many calories were represented in our econo-sized blocks of cheddar, my dear friend Bubba rang the doorbell. Bubba and I have been friends since we were freshmen at State, and from the second we were introduced, we were like long-lost brother and sister. We put countless miles on our vehicles driving around Starkville, singing our hearts out, and talking until we were hoarse. We adored each other in the sweetest, most uncomplicated way. And we still do.
Bubba had the audacity to transfer to another college when we were juniors—he needed to be at a school that was better for his major—but that just meant we did most of our talking over the phone instead of in one of our cars. In the twenty-plus years we’ve known each other, Bubba has managed to endear himself to my whole family, and he has become friends with Sister and Barry as well as Brother and Janie. Even now I know I could call Bubba right this second, tell him I need him to be at my house tonight at seven, and he’d invoke my family nickname and say, “Well, hold on, Peaches—you’re going to have to give me a few minutes to clear my calendar. It’ll take me a little while to drive from Memphis to Birmingham, but I’ll be there. What do you need me to bring?”
So when Bubba showed up to visit that Friday morning at Brother and Janie’s house, it was hardly a surprise. After he hugged Janie and me within an inch of our lives, he grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and settled onto one of the bar stools. It took approximately four seconds for him to make fun of the sheer quantity of cheese we were grating, but in true Bubba fashion, he followed up his teasing by saying, “So. What can I do to help?”
Since we were planning to serve a green-bean dish that’s one of our family’s favorites despite the fact that any green beans participating in said dish are left with absolutely no nutritional value, we wanted to go ahead and assemble the ingredients so the beans would have plenty of time to absorb all the flavors. It’s one of those recipes where the green beans are more of a vessel, really—they’re just a means for delivering the sweet-salty-bacony goodness to your mouth. Hallelujah.
We were making six batches of the beans, and while I can see how that might seem excessive, I know from personal experience that the green-bean recipe has a way of turning people into buzzards who will swoop in for seconds and thirds. That meant we needed to fry three pounds of bacon for the beans, and since we didn’t want to skimp, we decided to add an additional pound for good measure. Plus, we needed four more pounds of bacon for assorted appetizers and our salad. Which would be eight pounds total. EIGHT POUNDS O’BACON.
Glory to God.
I don’t know if I’d ever given any real consideration to how long it would take to fry eight pounds of bacon, but it’s fair to say that this level of bacon frying requires a significant time commitment. Janie has a big stove, so she, Bubba, and I each commandeered the skillet or Dutch oven of our choosing, and y’all, we stood at that stove for over an hour and a half. It was surprisingly challenging to figure out how much each pan would take without turning the bacon into a chewy mess, and once I knew my skillet could handle five strips at a time—NO MORE—I settled into a rhythmic bacon-frying routine: add strips, wait, flip, wait, flip one more time, wait, move bacon to paper towels, pour grease into bowl, repeat.
As you can tell, it was all very glamorous.
Honestly, I felt like Bubba and I took our friendship to another level during those one hundred or so minutes. If I were at all crafty, which I’m not, I might have made him a commemorative plaque: A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born to helpeth you fryeth all the bacon. Amen.
The next two days were a bit of a blur, but that is understandable since we were, as one of Daddy’s cousins would say, busier than a one-armed paper hanger. Janie and I concentrated on moving through our manifesto/to-do list to finish preparing the food while Sister worked her magic, creating gorgeous flower arrangements to scatter around the house. (If I didn’t know better, I would harbor suspicions that Sister is somehow related to Martha Stewart, because the things she can do with flowers—my word.)
Brother tended to the grill and cooked twenty pounds of beef tenderloin to absolute perfection. Barry and David must have made six trips around town to help with last-minute errands. And much to our relief (and maybe even surprise), by six o’clock Saturday night we were officially ready for the party. All we were missing were the people.
There were lots of times in my childhood when I thought my parents seemed like an odd match, when I wondered why Mama hadn’t married somebody who was really outgoing like she is or why Daddy hadn’t married somebody who was more introverted and serious like he is. I dwelled more on their differences than their similarities, and as a result I probably spent more time than was normal wondering if they were happy, if they were going to stay together, if they struggled to find stuff to talk about when the kids were away and they were the only two people in the house.
My tendency to worry unnecessarily has been a theme in my life since I was about six years old, and I think in the instance of my parents’ marriage, this tendency was fueled by one too many after-school specials about divorce as well as some movie I saw one time about a girl whose parents split up and the mama couldn’t get out of bed long enough to braid her daughter’s hair in the mornings. For the sake of perspective, I should probably admit that I also had an unusual fear of dying in a Jet Ski accident after seeing a particularly harrowing episode of All My Children where Jenny Gardner tries out a Jet Ski on Willow Lake and then BLOWS SLAP UP while her brother, Tad, and her boyfriend, Greg, watch helplessly from
the shore.
So I think it’s fair to say that my fears haven’t always been logical. Or, you know, based on anything even remotely resembling reality.
I wasted all manner of my teenage time and energy wanting to give Mama and Daddy the latest “Are You Sure You’re Compatible?” quiz from Seventeen magazine and trying to think of hobbies they might enjoy participating in together. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that Mama and Daddy have always shared a quality that is absolutely invaluable when it comes to matters of marriage: commitment. Both of them are just rock solid in that regard. I’ve never known either one of them to start something without finishing it—or to make a promise and then break it. Just typing that makes me teary eyed, because MY GOODNESS, what a legacy that is.
And here’s what I know now that I didn’t know way back when: the Lord has used their commitment to each other—which has been unwavering, even when they were so frustrated with each other they could barely speak—to shape them and change them and mold them in ways that I don’t think either of them could have anticipated. I recently read a quote by Elisabeth Elliot where she remarked that God “is always doing something—the very best thing, the thing we ourselves would certainly choose if we knew the end from the beginning. He is at work to bring us to our full glory.” When I look at Mama and Daddy’s marriage, I absolutely see evidence of that. Mama has mellowed my admittedly type-A daddy and helped him to be more compassionate and loving. Daddy has modeled consistency and steadiness to Mama and protected her from her natural inclination to be overly trusting and a little bit gullible. They balance and complement each other. It didn’t happen overnight, but they really are more fully themselves than they were on their wedding day, than they were at their twenty-fifth anniversary, than they were last week, even.
And though the dynamics of our marriages are somewhat different from Mama and Daddy’s, my sister, my brother, and I are impacted every single day by our parents’ commitment, by their willingness to do the hard thing and trust that God’s long-term plan for their marriage and their lives far outweighs any short-term tension or hurt or conflict.
I think it’s safe to speak for the group and say that we are unspeakably grateful for that example.
There have been many instances in my life when the anticipation of an event turned out better than the event itself. And honestly I was a little concerned that that might be the case with Mama and Daddy’s fiftieth anniversary party. We wanted more than anything to honor and esteem them in the presence of friends and family, but there’s just no way to predict how a group dynamic will play out. Plus, if you’re anything like me, a worst-case scenario sometimes lurks in the back of your mind, so I spent two or three days trying to block out visions of burning food, awkward silences, and unexpected no-shows.
(I’m telling you: I can get bound up in the fear and the worry.)
(In fact, one of my grad school professors once told me that my lamentations about the inadequacy of a paper I was working on made Jeremiah look like a stand-up comic.)
But Debbie Downer here need not have worried. The whole night—from the time the first guests arrived until we served the green beans with all that bacon until all the cousins moved out onto the patio and talked into the wee hours of the morning—was absolutely wonderful. Anyone who questions the power of consistent, humble, servant-hearted influence should have seen Mama and Daddy surrounded by their children, grandchildren, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, and longtime friends. An abundance—an overflow—of love, gratitude, and laughter filled Brother and Janie’s house that night, all because a couple of people stood at the front of Moss Rose United Methodist Church and made a promise to God and to each other fifty years before.
That’ll preach.
The next morning our immediate family met at Brother and Janie’s for a quick breakfast before everybody hit the road. Our little guy was whiny and tired from being up late the night before, and asking him to do anything other than sit in his grandmother’s lap resulted in a fresh crop of tears. My younger nephew, Houston, was running around the kitchen in a Transformers costume, trying his best to convince Janie that miniature M&M’s were a fine and nutritious breakfast, while my older nephew, Beck, tried his level best to convince Mama that what she really wanted to do was make him a fresh batch of pancakes. Sister was nursing a killer migraine thanks to a weather front that was threatening to move through the Mid-South later that afternoon, and while she turned a deeper shade of green with every passing minute, I was trying to pack our bags in a hurry so we could get back to Birmingham in time to pick up our dogs at the kennel.
That calm, serene, laid-back vibe from the night before was nowhere to be found. It felt like a distant memory, like it might have happened somewhere around the time of the Eisenhower administration, but certainly not within the previous twenty-four hours. No way.
But that’s family. They’re the people who make you willing—eager, even—to drive four and a half hours so you can spend three days in the kitchen and fry eight pounds of bacon (or cook twenty pounds of beef or arrange six dozen flowers) for one night of celebration that’s followed by a morning mired in the depths. And you do it so that someday, maybe fifteen or twenty years down the road, you can think back on an anniversary party, tell your children or grandchildren about it, and say, with all sincerity, “My word. That was a gift. That whole thing was a gift.”
Because that’s family. That’s what you do. That’s how you love.
And you know what?
It is a gift.
Every single bit of it.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It Only Takes a Spark to Get a Kindle Going
ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES of growing up in a smallish town is that if you end up marrying someone who is from that same smallish town, odds are you will have known each other’s family members for what feels like forever. When I was in elementary school, for example, it never occurred to me that Martha, the sweet lady in my parents’ Sunday school class, might one day be my mother-in-law, or that Scott, the always-smiling friend of my brother’s, would be my brother-in-law, or that Rose, the pretty homecoming queen who was Scott’s high school girlfriend, would be my sister-in-law.
But sure enough, when David and I started dating and then got engaged and then got married, becoming part of his family was an easy transition because, well, I’d known everybody since I’d been a kid running through Mission Hill United Methodist Church with Popsicle smeared all over my face. So for me, an added bonus to saying, “I do” was that I would share a last name with people I had known and loved for a big chunk of my life.
(That was sort of sweet, wasn’t it?)
(Well, it ought to be. Because I mean it.)
Since I’d known David’s family for so long, I was already well aware that a long-standing practice with the Hudsons is that David is the go-to person for any questions or issues related to electronics. Actually, he’s the go-to person for any questions or issues related to Items with a Switch or a Plug, and I never realized how much Martha and Sissie depended on him for small repairs and whatnot until our first post-wedding visit to Myrtlewood. We pulled in the driveway, ready for a home-cooked meal and a piece of Martha’s Italian cream cake, only to find Sissie standing at the carport door with a couple of boxes of lightbulbs in her hands.
For the first fifteen minutes of our visit David trailed behind his grandmother while she walked from room to room and pointed out overhead lights that needed to be changed. We did eventually get to enjoy a home-cooked meal and Italian cream cake, too—but David had to work for it first. And for the next ten years, every single visit to Martha and Sissie’s house followed that same pattern.
It was never just lightbulbs, though; Martha and Sissie shared a disdain for all things involving buttons. As a result, David often had to set the time on the coffeepot, adjust the color on the living room TV, program the preset stations on Martha’s car stereo, or set the speed-dial options on the cordless phone. Really, it d
idn’t matter if it was a flashlight or a cell phone; Martha and Sissie would see buttons and immediately throw up their hands in resignation.
To be fair, Martha has more than earned the right to be frustrated with buttons and plugs and the like. She is unwavering in her belief that THINGS SHOULD JUST WORK, but her personal experience tells a different story, I’m afraid. In the mid ’70s David’s daddy, Dan, bought Martha a Buick that could only be described as “gigantor.” Martha had test-driven several cars, including one she claimed smelled like rotten eggs, so at first the Buick with the new-car smell was a huge hit.
Eventually, however, there was the none-too-small matter that the Buick didn’t like to stop running when Martha turned it off. She’d ease into the carport, put the Buick in park, then cut the ignition, but that big ole sedan was stubborn. The motor would continue to chug and sputter and spit as Martha gathered her belongings from the car and walked into the house, so she usually sidestepped to the back door while nervously looking over her shoulder, trying to avoid being startled by the final THUMP or BOOM from the engine. Martha also maintained that the car made a noise like “those whirlybirds on that ride at the fair! You know that whirlybird ride at the fair? I could drive for five or six blocks, and then all of a sudden it sounded like those whirlybirds were trapped underneath the hood of the car! Like they were chirpin’ and whistlin’ and carryin’ on like that whirlybird ride at the fair!”
And if Martha happened to be at, say, the Winn-Dixie when the Buick decided to show out, you’d better believe Dan would hear all about it. Even now Martha will recount the horrors of being in the Winn-Dixie parking lot when “all I wanted was to talk to my friend Regina! I just wanted to talk to Regina! Because I’d be in the parking lot and see her walking into the Winn-Dixie, and I’d say, ‘Regina! Hey, Regina!’ but she couldn’t hear a word I was saying because that car—THAT CAR—was still going, POP POP, VROOOOOOM, CLANK, POP POP, and there was no way Regina could have heard me, there was just no way—not in the middle of all that racket!”
A Little Salty to Cut the Sweet Page 14