My Mother, The Diner: Part 1

 My Mother, The Diner: Part 1

My mother and me

It always seems best to me to start at the beginning. 

When I was born in 1962 my parents were 40 years old and my mother was dying of emphysema. My older sister was 18 and embarking on a relationship with the guy she would eventually marry. My older brother was 9 and involved in his own imagination. My father was totally focused on his career as well as a few other women. 

I only have one real memory of my mother before she died three years later. I remember her sitting in a dining room chair gasping for air. 

I have one other memory from my first 3 years and that is of having to keep my red tricycle out of the way of the truck that pulled into our driveway and hearing the metallic clanging of the oxygen tanks as they were delivered to our house. 

I've heard from family and friends that the first 3 years of my life were filled with chaos. My mother was having psychotic episodes that were caused by the lack of oxygen to her brain, the family said, though they resembled episodes of a paranoid schizophrenic. The police were in and out of the house because my mother thought she was being watched through the television. She saw lights and tried to read messages in the rubbings she made from the scratches on the back of my father's credit cards. She wrote messages on the kitchen cabinets with white shoe polish and when the family came home after leaving us alone, Mother had covered us both in glitter. 

My sister said it was a horrible time for the family and it seems as though the family pulled away from school, church, and the community. Our family became one of those mid-century families withdrawing from the community trying to hide a mental health secret.  

We had a black maid named Gracie and she cooked and cleaned, and took care of my mother and of me. My sister was involved in my care, too. She dropped out of high school to help the family. Her classmates and church people actually thought I was the illegitimate child of her and her boyfriend. 

It is said that I called my sister, "Mama" and called my mother, "That Lady." 

So, as an infant in this situation, who knows how well I was taken care of. It's probably just as well that I don't remember. As long as I can remember, I used to say, "I don't miss what I never had." I don't know where that bit of wisdom came from. I just knew it to be true of my life. 

When I went into any situation or was introduced to people their initial reaction was pity. Everyone felt sorry for me, but chaos is normal life when you don't know any different. 

My own family's reaction to me was: guilt. Everyone always felt they had failed me in some way. I don't know what they didn't do, but "I never missed what I never had." 

After Mother died, we had the funeral and they said hundreds of people came to see the beautiful young woman who died and left her sad husband and 3 children. I stood on the front pew with my family and a whole community of people felt sorry for me. 

In the whole story of my first 5 years of life, there was never a story about meals or food. No mention of food at all. I don't remember what I ate or who fed me. Food was not involved in our family story. 

In the coming years, however, food began to make an appearance and she was not pleasant.  

My Mother, The Diner: Introduction

 My Mother, The Diner: Introduction

Introduction

My relationship with food is difficult to describe. I've been to counselors to talk about it. When I talk about what I think and how I feel about food, people are confused. 

I love food, but I don't like it. 

I read cookbooks, and I am fascinated by the history of food and recipes, but I don't like to cook. 

If I think about cooking as a craft project, then it's more interesting, but I generally don't want to eat what I cook because when I'm finished making it, the interest is gone and I generally don't like to eat. 

The idea that food brings people together and bonds people is a beautiful idea, I want to be a part of that experience, but I have a visceral negative reaction to sitting at a table and eating a meal with people. I hate it. I panic and I run. 

So, I thought if I went back to the beginning of my relationship with food, and walked through it, I might understand it better. I thought maybe I could figure out where we went wrong and try to repair our relationship. 

Maybe you'd like to go with me? 

A Road Trip to Brownwood, TX

 My last post though published today, was actually written back in August when it was still summer. I just wanted to mention that. 

Today, it's actually quite nice, high in the 70s, and rainy. Fall has arrived, I think. 

I wanted to share about a spontaneous little trip Steave and I made to Brownwood, Texas. 

Steave having been out of work for 6 months now and having put off any travel to save money, we were experiencing cabin fever. So, I did a quick search on the internet, saw a photo of a book tunnel in a bookstore, and said, "Let's go there." 

2 1/2 hours later we were in Brownwood, Texas. 

First, we stopped at Underwood's Cafeteria for lunch. 

We slipped back to the 1950s when we walked through the door. The Musak elevator music set the tone. The decor, the food, everything was retro, not in an "on purpose" way but rather in a "just hadn't been changed" way. 

We got a meat and two sides. I got cherry cobbler and sweet tea. Classic! 

After lunch, we found the Intermission Bookshop not too far away. The owner saw me getting a photo outside and met us at the door with "Is this your first visit?" And then proceeded to tell us the history of the shop from when it used to be a movie theatre to the present day. I loved the lesson! 

The coolest thing to me was when she pointed to the spots on the wall above the stairs. She told us that when the space had been a theatre during WW2 and being located near a military base, soldiers would come in and sleep during the films. The pomade in their hair left spots on the wall where they slept. Their ghostly images can still be seen. 

I bought a few books and we rode around the area. It was a nice, little town. We'll probably go back! 

The Old Jail 

Lake Brownwood

I Hate Texas In The Summer When It Sizzles

As I sit here comfortably in my air-conditioned house in a small town that is carved out of northern Fort Worth, it is a blazing 110 degrees outside. It will not get below 95 degrees overnight. It doesn't cool off this time of year. I've lived in DFW for a little over 3 years now and I can tell you that this temperature is not strange, it is normal for August. 

In the first 2 years that I lived in DFW, I thought I had died and gone to hell. Texans justify it by saying, "But it's a dry heat." I lived in Atlanta and Houston and it's so humid that when it gets hot it feels like you're wearing a wet fur coat so I can distinguish between dry heat and humid heat. In my opinion, when it gets up toward 100 degrees, it's hot, and hot is hot! 

This time of year we run from one air conditioning location to another. From the house to the car to the store to the car and back home again. If parents want to have a children's birthday party outside they plan it for early in the morning and prayerfully there is a pool or some sort of water activity involved. 

Those big ole Stanley cups that people are now starting to make fun of, yeah, it's not a joke here, it's a necessity. Staying hydrated is treated like a second job. 

When we started gardening in Texas, we heard that at the end of the season, tomatoes would literally boil on the vine. My granddaughter picked a handful of cherry tomatoes last night and it's true, they were cooked on the vine. 

The black grackles that loiter in every parking lot around here start to look raggedy and worn out this time of year. They spend their time hopping from one speck of shade to another hoping to get a sip of water from a puddle of condensation from a car's air-conditioner before it evaporates. They pant and squawk and generally look like they're on their last leg. 

Yes, I am complaining. Not as much as I have over the last 2 years, so that's something. I think I am coming to terms with where I am. 

Right now, my desk chair is literally sitting on the Great Plains of the United States. If I close my eyes to the never-ending sea of brown roofs of the surrounding subdivisions, I can almost imagine seeing the wind cut a path across an endless panorama of prairie grasses dotted with sun-bleached bison skulls.  

I have fought and I have lost and I have sadly given up on pointlessly trying to turn my stamp-sized backyard into the Eastern Temperate Forest of Georgia and just let it go back to the prairie. I will never have the tropical beauty of where we lived in South Florida or even the hint of rainforest that we had in Houston. The Texas Plains are stronger than me. 

However, I will occasionally come across a fossilized sea shell or ammonite and feel a shiver of awe at touching something so old and I find myself honored to be in this spot on the floor of an ancient ocean. 

I always remind myself that Texas is younger than the eastern states. It was founded by people escaping the over-industrialized, crowded cities of the Atlantic Seaboard (or possibly their own sin, law-breaking, and bad choices). Even though Texas is now dotted with the same overcrowded industrialized cities, the space between large cities still retains the skeletons of small towns. Shop facades tipping the hat to the Alamo are in every little town. Feed and seed stores are still in operation. Every old town sprouted by the railroad track and most often the trains still run there even though the town is boarded up, wind-blown, and dusty. Then you'll come across a subdivision that is trying too hard. Trying to create an oasis from the desert. It, too, seems to be teetering on the edge of survival. Just outside their carefully manicured lawns, on the other side of the privacy fence copperheads, and prickly pears are just waiting to take over. 

It is not in my heart to say that I find Texas beautiful. To be honest, I haven't seen all of it yet. I haven't been down to the Hill Country or far west but everything I've seen so far seems to not come from fertile beauty but from desperate survival. Everything is grasping for its own space, water, and shade. Even man-made beauty such as buildings, gardens, and employment seems to be teetering on a fine line between just barely making it and dying. Sometimes I feel like Temple Grandin from the movie based on her life when she steps out of the plane and so affected by the heat, shouts, "Do people live here?" 

I suppose, however, that's the point. People leaving the East and coming West wanted to be left alone. So, what I witness in natural Texas is what people have left alone. And left to its own devices, Texas is a harsh, desperate, hardscrabble kind of place. Texas leaves it up to you to decide if it's beautiful or not. It doesn't flaunt its beauty in your face but gives you flirtatious flashes of a smile in its wildflowers or canyons. 

So, while I can't say Texas is beautiful, I can tip my hat to its strength, persistence, and endurance. 

Texas and I respectfully nod to one another, but we aren't looking for a relationship.