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Start asking questions this day
(by Barbara Christian - May 09, 2012)
WINDOW ON MAIN STREET, BY BARBARA CHRISTIAN
Start asking questions this day
Everyone has a mother. No one should need proof of this, but just in case you need confirmation, look at your belly button. If ever there was a tie that binds, there it is -- the physical evidence.
Mothers are the people who pushed you out into the world and kept pushing and urging and supporting and suggesting and teaching and cajoling well beyond the point we thought we needed it.
If your mom is still with you, rejoice. There is time to make the most of that relationship, and that includes asking the question you have been meaning to ask her.
Take that as the best advice you will get today. It comes from one whose mother is no longer here and who left without having the chance to answer the questions I never asked. Some have to do with our family's colorful, if sometimes dramatic, history.
On a less ponderous note, there are the questions about the food she prepared every day and which I never though much about at the time beyond how good it all was. At the time, I did not understand that food, beyond nourishment is love.
Her cooking is a sense memory that lingers along with unanswered questions. What went into her meatloaf? How did she make that from-scratch devil's food cake we had every birthday? What was her recipe for the boiled white frosting she topped it with?
When Mom died, the three of us, her kids, went through her things, deciding what we wanted to keep as mementos. I chose the white-with-green-border-striped Walker China Co. platter on which she served that meatloaf. And I took her recipe box, which I was sure contained the Rosetta stone to her cooking.
Life got busy. I set the box aside and forgot about it until years later. I opened it and was disappointed to find it contained recipes cut from magazines and ones from her friends for things I don't recall eating: "Doris' peach marmalade," "Lucille's frosting" and "Alice's gooseberry pie."
Digging deeper into the recipe box would have its rewards. The "real" recipes were there. Mom had typed some of them; others were jotted down in pen or pencil. I would be lying if I didn't tell you how heart tugging it was to see her handwriting again.
There they were, yellow and faded recipes for her famous lemon meringue, coconut cream and pecan pies, marble cake and the date-nut bread she baked in large bean cans.
And finally that devil's food birthday cake which called for real ingredients like flour that must be sifted first, butter, soured milk, sugar, melted square of baking chocolate. Sadly, directions for the boiled white frosting was not among the cards, symbolic of all the never-asked questions.
Sunday is Mother's Day. Make it Ask Your Mother a Question Day. Ask her something you don't know about her. It might be trivial; it might not. But ask it then ask another. She will love you even more for wanting to know.
On second thought, don't save your questions for one day a year. Ask them early and often and while there is still time.
Paul Simon wrote a song that for some reason reminds me of this. The refrain is, "Oh, the mother and child reunion is only a motion away."
Or maybe just a question away.
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