On your feet all day

There was a clear hierarchy of jobs in my mother’s view of the world, and it started at the bottom: If you were stupid and lazy, you would be relegated to a life of “digging ditches,” or, more peculiarly, you’d be “nothing but a hod carrier.” I was always a little hazy on the nature of hods, but clear on the contempt with which she held their transporters.

Just a rung above those jobs, in my mother’s mind, was any occupation in which “you were on your feet all day.” That view is certainly ironic these days, given the health horrors now associated with a life spent sitting down. (“Enjoying your comfy couch? You’re about to DROP DEAD!”) But Katherine Kendrick was a woman of firm opinions, and she never wavered in her belief that an eight-hour shift spent on one’s feet was a miserable fate.

I have never before considered why those circumstances would be such an object of dread for her. That’s because, I now realize, I’ve never thought about the particulars of my mother’s feet before. This, however, seems to be the year in which I begin to reflect on her life, and mine, from the ground up. Genetics have caught up with me, and the poor quality of my flat and misshapen Irish feet has suddenly become a top-of-mind — or is that bottom-of-foot? — issue in my life. This is the year I’ve developed a close relationship with my podiatrist, have learned how to swallow handfuls of aspirin  without water, and have begun to place significant value on the joy to be found in owning several pairs of comfortable shoes.

An ad for the Chase, circa 1968. Check out those room rates.

 In the 1960s, my mother asked her girlfriends to teach her how to drive, and then she took a job as what was called a “hat check girl” at the one posh hotel in St. Louis — the Chase-Park Plaza. The job opened up her life in many ways — she made friends with staff who were, in the parlance of the time, colored, and she became chummy with actual foreigners. She was great chums with several  Greek waiters, all of whom who slept eight to a room and rotated spots on the three or four cots they had in their sparse apartments near the hotel. She made friends with gay men, who gave her great advice on how she dressed and carried herself. She checked coats for Frank Sinatra (“he looked scared”), Danny Thomas (“biggest cigar I’ve ever seen”), and for all the players in the St. Louis Cardinals (Red Schoendist was her favorite because he was a big tipper). Her friend Libby got to meet Gregory Peck, long considered the biggest “get” among the group of middle-aged “girls.”

The job may have been great for expanding her world view, but it played hell on her feet. Every night, she wore a nice dress, a girdle, and a pair of incredibly pointy-toed high heels. The floor in the hat check room was concrete. She was in her mid-forties. Why did I never put these facts together and think about how much her feet hurt? One summer, our family was even more strapped for cash than usual, and she took a second job, working during the day as a hostess at a tony restaurant. I remember her talking about the restaurant's terrazzo floors as if they were land mines. Now I understand why.

When she and I traveled together, or when she came to visit me, I remember seeing lots of foot-related doo-dads — corn plasters and foot tape and bunion pads. Toward the end of her life, she had a hammer toe so severe that the toe had to be amputated. I was concerned for her, but still unaware of how it might feel for her to take a step, and seemingly unable to imagine it. I am sorry to report that I can remember telling her to hurry up, or to walk faster. “Stop being such an old lady,” I would tell her. She would laugh, and try to speed up. Oh mom.

Yesterday, in the shoe department of the Land’s End inlet store, it all came crashing in on me. I was browsing through the winter shoes, looking for some safe choices among all the things that hadn’t sold, and when I sat down to try a pair, I hesitated. I didn’t want to take my current shoes off, because that would hurt. I didn’t want to put the new pair on, which I was already eyeing with the suspicion that they’d inflict a new level of discomfort in some sore place I didn't know about yet. And then I remembered shopping for shoes with my mom, how sometimes just looking at a pair of shoes would make her wince.

Of course, I thought, sitting there immobile in the brightly lit store, staring across at a rack of potentially uncomfortable footwear. Now I have my mother’s feet. Now I understand what it felt like for her to stand up, and work, and walk. And now it’s too late for me to tell her. I miss her for many reasons, and I’m sure that sharing stories of foot pain would not the first thing I’d want to do if I ever get the chance. Mostly, I’m just thinking about my understanding, and how dim it was before, and how clear it is now. I hope, I really hope, that she’s finally had a chance to put her feet up somewhere comfortable.

From the peak of Mt. Parenthood

I remember pregnancy and childbirth with all the warmth and fondness of that “127 Hours” guy who had to chop his own arm off, only I had nine months of it, and my parka wasn’t as fluffy. But, it turns out, I think other people’s “pregnancy experience” is adorbs, so go figure. The next-door neighbors had their first child a few months ago, and I had a front-row seat from my office window, which is conveniently perched just inches from their driveway (city living, an exercise in pretending you can’t see or hear what is directly in front of you). I saw the darling mom-to-be grow from adorable bump to clearly pregnant to “I think she’s going to explode,” all from the comfort of my swivel chair.

I was avoiding work and looking out the window the day she and her husband left for the hospital. I was avoiding yet more work and still looking out the window the day they came home, baby in tow. Frankly gawking, I noticed the dad taking a picture of mother and son, together in front of their house for the first of what I realized would be a lifetime of photos. It was very Normal Rockwell, but with an iPhone. I dashed down the steps and asked them to allow me to take their family portrait, and I didn’t even drop the dad’s phone. It was all so lovely, really it was, but of course I knew, even as I smiled at them, that they were about to be hit with the Parent Stick, the poor dumb things. At that moment, the thing I knew and they didn’t was that babies are like catchy pop songs. They’re utterly charming for the first few minutes, but then suddenly it’s the hundreth chorus of “I’m Henry VIII, I am,” and their welcome wears thin.

My baby gift to the new parents was the delivery of weekly Sunday suppers for the first few weeks, which might sound like a pointless present unless you’ve had a baby, and then you know that it’s the Best Gift Ever. As I knocked at the door each Sunday, I got a freeze-frame update on how parenthood was treating these two fine young people. Which is to say, I watched them slowly lose control of themselves and the world around them, as they melted toward the floor in a state of utter exhaustion. I saw it in their eyes, and I saw it in the circles under those eyes. Babies will do that to people. Of course the lack of sleep is a big factor, but complete lack of control and heart-stopping fear can wear a person down, too. I remember reading a bagful of baby books on the long flight to China, on the journey to adopt our daughter. It was pretty much a cram course in parenting, and here’s what I figured out after all that studying up: all babies want to do is choke or suffocate, and it’s a miracle any of them survive, ever. Thinking of all the things that could possibly go wrong with a newborn is the ultimate mellow harsher, no matter how cute the nursery has been decorated or how nice the onesies are. After a while, it takes a toll on even the most optimistic, high-energy sorts.

I completed my promised number of dinners, but found myself missing those quick updates on how the new family was doing. On a recent bearably warm Saturday, I ran into them in the driveway, just back from breakfast at a restaurant. As I cooed over the baby, the mom proudly told me their son was eight weeks old that very day. “We ran into someone at breakfast whose baby was only three weeks old,” she confided, “and I told him, don’t worry, it gets better.”

I snapped up to attention and saw her happy face. Clearly, she was so proud she had made it all the way to the two-month milestone, when there probably had been several moments in the past few weeks she wasn’t sure she would live until morning. Standing there in the crisp winter air, I had a crazy old lady moment of flashing forward through this kid’s life … toddlerhood tantrums and school-age hijinks and teen-agery in all its awfulness. She was feeling so proud she had climbed up this tiny little hill, and she had all of Mt. Parenthood yet to scale. 

Contradicting the commonly held belief that I operate without any verbal filters, I did not say, “Right, the first eight weeks, those are the hard ones. The next 18 years should be a piece of cake.” Instead, I remembered all the times when I had done the very same thing, and I recalled challenging times with my kids that, once gotten through, had given me that complacent, “Well, my work here is done” feeling. From sleeping through the night, to curing an incorrigible biting habit, to navigating the mean girls at school, to finally finishing the thank-you notes from the high school graduation party, parenting is just one damn thing after another. And maybe it’s best we don’t realize that, because if we saw, really saw, all that’s ahead, then I’m not sure that many of us would make it. I imagine myself sitting in an aisle seat on a Northwest Airlines flight to Beijing, poring over those baby books as everyone around me slept. If any of those books had even hinted at what was ahead, I might have hijacked the plane and demanded it return me to Minneapolis, asking for  just a few more weeks of sleeping through the night before I committed to Momhood.

Three years later, when I got myself in trouble and was freaking out at the idea of pregnancy and labor, I was gabbling my worries to my friend Lorraine, who calmed my fears and told me I’d have no troubles at all with labor. A few months later, stuck at home with a newborn and an angry, angry three year old, I called Lorraine and shrieked, “Why didn’t you tell me THIS was the hard part?” She chuckled wisely and said, “A lot of times, it’s better not to know things in advance.”

Is ignorance truly bliss when it comes to what lies ahead? Probably. I’ve been thinking of that as I observe the recent Facebook adventures of another new family, two over-the-moon adoptive dads who post a stream of loving photos of their infant girl all with the hashtag #sheisperfect. Well, yes, she is, at least for now. But don’t hold too tightly to that idea, fellas, because she’s got more than “perfect” in her. She’s also got “human,” and that can get messy and exhausting and painful in some monumental ways. But that’s what you signed up for – the artfully posed family portraits are one part of the parenting trek, but so is the projectile vomiting at 2 a.m. So is the scorn, the defiance and the disapproval you might someday see from this same little person who rates her own hashtag right now, just because you love her that much.

I used to think that parenthood had an end-date, that there would be some moment when I had completed the assignment and could move on to my next all-consuming life obsession. Ha. I realize now that it’s a Job for Life in the ultimate sense. And if there’s a chance to be a guilty and worried mother in the afterlife, I wonder how many women snatch at the opportunity, even if it means sitting in the Uncomfortable Anteroom while everyone else frolics on fluffy clouds just outside the grimy, dust-streaked window.

I imagine my own mom, the dearly departed Katherine Clifford Kendrick, sitting on the afterlife equivalent of a DMV plastic chair with one broken leg, looking for a glimpse of me whenever she gets a chance, and nudging me to speak up or shut up or say thank you when she thinks I might be willing to listen. I wonder if I’ll get a chance to join her there, thumbing through old magazines, and trying to help my girls with what they need at the moment -- a great idea for which they give themselves credit, a quick heads up when they need a warning, or an open heart in a time when a little softness is what's required.

Job for Life. As if. 

I Heart Betty

1965 Betty, the St. Paul resident of my dreams

To say that I admire Betty Crocker, or that I'm fond of her, does not begin to plumb the depth of my feelings. Offering the thought that I would gladly burn incense sticks and joss paper while prostrating myself in front of her portrait at General Mills headquarters (assuming that security guards would let me, which is unlikely) might be getting a little closer to the heart of the matter.

As I write these words, I realize it seems as if I think Betty Crocker is a real person.

Of course she’s real; what do you think I am, stupid? I know that Betty lives and breathes and cooks warm and tasty desserts somewhere, and now that I think of it, I even know where that place must be – St. Paul. How could she live anywhere else? I picture her house, a darling cottage on suitably adorably named St. Paul street. None of those big-city Minneapolis number-and-alphabet streets for Betty.  No, she lives in a tree-shaded glen on Juno, say, or Juliet.

I imagine going to visit Betty. Of course I’d be late, because how can Juno follow right after Juliet in the order of streets? Can’t they lay out the streets in any rational order in this god-damned city? Okay, calm down, breathe deeply and stop cursing, I tell myself. Betty is waiting, right behind that perfectly painted door with the two charming pots of traditional geraniums on either side.

She lets me in, pretending not to notice my sweaty and typically Minneapolitan-frantic demeanor, because Betty is a Perfect Hostess. She leads me to the kitchen, which is appropriate but not over-the-top. No Aga for Betty, just a perfectly good Hotpoint, thank you very much. It might even be Harvest Gold, which, to Betty, is still a swell color, no matter what those hipsters in Uptown have to say about it.

Is Betty wearing her trademark red suit and pearls? Hmmm, I’m stumped there. It seems a bit formal for a casual afternoon entertaining a sweaty woman from Minneapolis, more what she might wear when applying for loan at the bank or posing for a box of brownies. I hit upon the solution: Over the one outfit she seems to own, Betty wears an apron, something vintage-looking that she whipped up herself in the downstairs sewing nook. (I’ll bet Betty’s house has a lot of nooks, just saying). As she pulls a pan from the oven, I notice that her oven mitts match her apron. Of course, duh, she’s Betty Crocker.

And then she places a dish of something warm and chocolaty in front of me, and offers me a glass of cold milk. Milk! I haven’t had milk in 25 years, but yes, Betty, I’d love some!

…. and, as I lift the glass to my lips, my reverie ends, and I’m back in Minneapolis, home of many orderly streets and very few Harvest Gold Hotpoints.

And I wonder, what is my deal? Why I am so taken with a woman who is (to some naysayers, I have to say it) an imaginary spokesperson? It’s not like I wish I could meet Uncle Ben, or poke the avoirdupois of the Doughboy. My heart belongs to Betty, and I think I know why – because my mother loved her, too. My mom was a housewife in the 1950s,when it truly was a miracle to toss an egg into a bowl, add a mix, and whip it all up in the Sunbeam. For my mother’s generation, packaged food was always better, and Betty Crocker was the symbol of the perfect housewife who knew how to please her family with reliable packaged goods.  

As I look back on what must have been my mother’s own eating history, I’ve realized something – our mother’s mothers were, most likely, terrible cooks. In my own poor mother’s case, her mother died when she was seven years old, so I can’t imagine that she had many home-cooked meals. And, oh yeah, the Depression, which hit when she was nine. So of course she loved Betty Crocker. The food tasted the same way every time, and no dim-witted big sister or dopey dad could mess it up.

I’ve been doing some writing for General Mills the past few months, and, recently, I pitched a story to the editor of BettyCrocker.com. When she accepted my idea and gave me an assignment, I was happy beyond all rationality. I was going to be writing for Betty herself. If I couldn’t get over to her house in St. Paul (And, let's face it, I could never find my way around there, anyway), I would be writing for her, which didn't even involve trying to figure out the GPS.

I wished the thing I always wish when something nice happens to me. I wanted to call my Mom and tell her all about it. I could almost hear her, wanting to celebrate with me, but also eager to cut the call short so she could call all her girlfriends: Writing for Betty! Her own little girl, the one who used to insist on adding brewer's yeast and bran flakes to every sodden, leaden thing she baked! Finally, she had seen the light and would be worshiping, one egg and half-cup of water at the ready, at the altar of Betty.  

If there's a way to eat package-mix brownies in heaven, I hope my Mom is having a little celebratory treat for me. And here's to Betty -- long may she reign.

My Rules

A friend of mine, who clearly prides herself on running a tight ship at home, once told me that it was no wonder her son always had fun when he was hanging out with my kids. “Of course he has fun, since there are no rules at your house.” I was a bit taken aback by this declaration, but when I looked at the situation through her “sit-down-every-night-for-two-veg-and-meat-dinner” filter, I suppose I could see her point. I have rules, they’re just odd ones.

This past week, I’ve been noticing myself abiding strictly to a couple of my more eccentric guidelines for my own behavior, and I had to laugh at how precise I am about matters that most people ignore. The rules, I’ve noticed, are all about basic human kindnesses, the kind I suppose I crave most deeply. We get what we give, so I give these things, and I hope that they matter, somehow.

Find the One Kid. At every amateur performance or recital I attend (and I attend a lot), I try to pick out one kid who does a really good job … the kid who steals the show in the bit part, the class valedictorian who clearly spent several late nights trying to find just the right words to say, or the dancer in the back row who really kicked it, even if she hadn’t gotten the lead. After the show is over, when everyone in my family is standing around with crossed arms and jingling car keys, I’m still focusing my attention on the crowd, refusing to leave until I find the one kid. Then I race over and offer my hand. “I’m just a regular old mom who happened to be in the crowd,” I say, “but your performance really blew me away. You were just terrific.” Even the most unapproachable-looking kids just melt at this. Praise is one thing from your mom, but when an ordinary-looking stranger takes the time to tell you how great you were, it really packs a punch. Sometimes, the kid starts to cry. It’s even better when they have lots of family around, and I speak Very Loudly so that that crabby-looking granny who clearly thinks theater is a waste of time can hear me loud and clear. The origins of this rule are with my daughter Mary Katherine, the budding actress. I remember her giddy excitement after performing in her first real show. “A stranger came up and told me I was good!” she gushed. If that’s all it takes to make a kid happy, I thought, count me in, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Stop at the Lemonade Stand. This rule came from my mother. She and I used to love what she called “bumming around” together, running errands or visiting garage sales with no particular agenda. She always insisted that we stop at every lemonade stand we passed, and that we each buy one tiny paper cupful of tepid, watery lemonade, chatting up the kids as we did. She even carried a little stash of quarters with her, and would grandly tell me, “my treat,” as she handed over the cash to the beaming six-year-old in charge. My Mom died 14 years ago, but I still stick to her edict. Sometime I am racing home, feeling the pressure of a deadline, and I want to pretend I don’t see that stand on the corner, but I do, and I stop, and I ask the kids about business, and their special recipe, and usually find out some thrilling fact in the course of our conversation, like that they’re leaving to go visit grandma next week, or that this tooth, the one right here, might come loose soon with enough pulling. Who needs to worry about deadlines when you can hear about how much the Tooth Fairy brings at a kid's house?

Talk to the Unemployed. There’s an unspoken rule among working Americans that the unemployed have cooties, and that if you talk to them, you will become infected, too. The minute the guys with the brown boxes come around and start escorting a colleague to the door, it’s as if all those late nights and softball games and happy hours never happened, and the shunning begins. I do not believe in these cooties. Instead, I make phone calls or send emails to the unemployed on Monday mornings, which I know is a bad time, checking in and letting them know that they haven’t become invisible, at least not to me. I arrange to meet for coffee, my treat. Yesterday, I was having a pretty rotten day, one in a string of many. I was just at the point of realizing I couldn’t do much damage by jumping out of my second-floor office window when I got a LinkedIn message from a guy I worked with ten years ago, asking if I’d talk to a friend of his, who is unemployed and applying at a place where I freelance. I wrote back without hesitating: Yes, I will talk to her. I sent emails to a couple friends at the company, seeking some information that might be helpful to this complete stranger. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know her. It matters that she needs help. And that, at the bottom of everything that's piled up in my fearful, cluttered heart, is the only sort of rule I need.

Indirect Objects

Olivia nipped another warm Tollhouse cookie from the sheet and made a pronouncement that had the ring of  undisputed fact, not mere opinion:  “The thing is,” she said, still chewing reflectively, “that they taste okay now, right from the oven, but these cookies taste the very best when I eat them out of the Green Tin.” 

Oh honey. I smiled to myself and kept my mouth shut, but I felt like I had just knocked back a straight shot of pure joy. I was happy because I had helped to conjure a sacred object for someone I love, right in my own sticky-countered, fingerprint-ridden kitchen. That sacred object had been produced from the ever-potent mix of food and love and tradition. The Green Tin, bought for fifty cents at a garage sale a few years ago, has been invested with the power to summon up safe and happy memories for my good pal Olivia Louise, every time she thinks about it. That’s what you get for fifty cents and a few billion homemade cookies.

We all swim in deep, unseen currents of feeling for the objects of our youth, and even deeper ones about the food we remember from those times. So it stands to reason that everyone can recall one or two kitchen objects that summon up memories of unending sweetness and eternal comfort. And if those pasts weren't necessarily so rosy, one treasured object can become a featured player in a Mental Movie of good moments, repeated on an endless loop that deletes any scenes of shouting, worry or pain.

 When my mother died, and we cleaned out her house, I remember that what I really wanted to take away with me was her set of metal measuring spoons. They were the same cheap set that everyone’s mom had back then, at least moms of a certain age who hadn’t gone all modern and opted for the avocado green plastic set, earned as a hostess gift from a Tupperware party. Even though the spoons were not at all unique, they were a sacred object for me. They reminded me of cooking with my mother, which I did not do often, but which seemed, in retrospect, to be some of the most important time we spent together.

Holding those spoons, standing in her kitchen, just weeks after her funeral, I could feel myself back in that same room a child. I was so small that I was standing on a stool so I could see over the counter. I could hear the whir of the motor of the Sunbeam MixMaster, and I could see those beaters spinning and clanking against the white mixing bowl.

In my memory, she has found the bottle of vanilla on the narrow rack of shelves that hang over the back of one kitchen door. And now she’s standing over me, measuring vanilla into the bowl and letting a little extra spill over the edge of the spoon. “Always be generous with the vanilla,” she tells me, “because a little extra won’t hurt anything. But measure the salt in the sink, because too much of that is awful.” Then she tells me, as she does every time we bake together, that women used to put vanilla behind their ears as perfume.

Forty years from now, I will repeat all this to my daughters, and the words will spill from my lips as if I just thought of them. But that isn’t what happens. In fact, they are magic words that have been living in a place where thought doesn’t go. They have been conjured by the sacred object – the cheap metal spoons I use when I bake, the ones that bring me back to my mother. 

The day I saw the Green Tin at a garage sale, I knew that it had potential. I’d had a similar as an object in my childhood, one with a lid that was blue on the outside and deep red on the inside; it was covered with thin line drawings of men singing in barbershop quartets. The tin only appeared at Christmas, when cookies were baked. Every year, my mother told me that my grandfather, whom I’d never met, had been a singer in a barbershop quartet, the Missouri Belles. She told me this until I stopped listening, and I’ve only just now remembered it.

But back to the garage sale. When I say that I knew the tin had potential, what I mean to say is that it possessed a sort of uselessness that  I immediately admired. It was clearly too big, especially for any one-batch, God-fearing, “not too much” Minnesotan cook. To fill this tin with cookies would mean a triple batch, maybe a quadruple one, and people don’t act like that here, a place in which “over the top” means “just an inch shy of the rim, and lukewarm, please.”

When I saw the tin, I knew it would take work, too much work, to fill it with the chocolate chip cookies that Olivia and her siblings love. But I could picture that tin being stacked on top of all the other luggage, ready for trips to their cabin. I could see it being carried into the house by members of my family, all of them grateful for the invitation to be in a lovely place with the people they cared for most. The tin, filled with cookies, would be a thank-you, an offering and a talisman.

I thought all of this as I handed over two quarters and strolled down the sidewalk, holding the tin wth two hands in front of me, as if I were in some Holy Ceremony for Baked Goods, and had somehow broken loose from the rest of the procession.  I went home and I started to bake. It was exactly as much trouble to fill that tin as I had expected, but that was okay. There was power in the effort, not just that first time, but all the other summer weekdays when I slid sheet after sheet into and out of the oven, preparing for a Friday night trip to the cabin that would include a seemingly endless supply of cookies.

My mother's birthday was this week, and if she were alive, she’d be 91 years old. She would have hated being 91. She would have hated to slow down and feel old and watch her friends die. It’s better, I know, that she just fell down in my garden 13 years ago, better that she said “I don’t feel good,” and died in my arms before either of us had a chance to think about what was happening.

I have some memories, and I have the measuring spoons, although I’ve lost a couple in the garbage disposal over the years (we were too poor for such a luxury, which is why she was able to hold onto hers until I inherited them).

And thinking of all that makes me think this:  Olivia is right. They are better from the tin. Right now, she doesn’t know why. But someday she will.

And I hope, when she does know, that she’ll think of me, maybe on my birthday, and wonder what I did to make those cookies taste so good.