“Religion is the means by which we come to understand how to be a finite being in an infinite world.”
–Source unknown
Sweet Memories
A weekend of rain is all the winter it seems we’re going to get in Southern California this year. Still, the gray skies set my mind and spirit on homespun things. I signed up for a knitting class. I need something different—something more creative than technology can provide—to occupy my hands, mind, and nervous energy each night. And I’ve just spent the morning baking. For all our growing awareness of the evils of sugar, nothing transports memories through time like homemade sweets. On our close-knit cul-de-sac I’m always assigned desserts for parties. Tonight I’m bringing salted caramel tarts to an Oscar screening, and, as I set the dulce de leche in a roasting pan to thicken, I think of my cousin Chris and his wife Laurel. It was a recipe they introduced us all to one Thanksgiving, a new option to sit aside the pumpkin, apple, and pecan pies at my Aunt’s house. It was my aunt who taught me to bake when I was little. We would have sleepovers and she would take me through every recipe, step by step. I can still picture myself standing on a stool in their tiny kitchen in Van Nuys, she in her nightie, finessing a wooden spoon through the batter, turning the big white bowl in the crook of her bent arm. I have a bowl just like it, a Williams Sonoma standard that I’ve had for 20 years now.
But not everyone likes salted caramel tart. Some people, like my husband, like chocolate more than just about anything. So I flip through my old recipe book and find a yellowed entry for fudge pie with walnuts. I am delighted beyond words to discover I have all the ingredients on hand. At the bottom of the recipe there’s a note from his mom, who passed three years ago. “In my experience, it slices much better if you chill it first. But it’s a wonderful recipe to serve to very special friends.” It’s signed, T.D. for Terry Davis, with a smiley face, and I stop to imagine what scraps of my life’s work will be unearthed later by my kids, my grand kids— and what, out of the great swath of if, will be meaningful to them. To make the crustless fudge pie I use the hand mixer that the mother of my uncle (I’m never sure what that would make her–a great aunt, maybe?) gave me at my bridal shower, 29 years ago. Still works like a charm. Just like the simple joy of placing the large near empty bowl laced with streaks of thick, sweet fudge in front of Lon. A thousand memories of pies and cakes and parties come flooding back as I see him smile at the sound of those five magical words, “Want to lick the bowl?”
Have a sweet and Blessed Sunday. And even if the movie Nebraska doesn’t win best picture, remember, it should.
The story of Elijah begins here
Another voice of Elijah
Even if you’ve never read a word of the Bible, you probably could name at least one biblical example of provision lasting much longer or stretching much further than it should have. Think about it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You might have thought of the story of the loaves and the fishes (there are several of them actually), different times when Christ took a little bread and fish and turned it into enough to feed the Staples Center and send everyone home with a doggy bag. Or the time God made a day’s worth of lamp oil last longer than humanly possible, which is remembered each year for nine days of Hanukkah. And if you’re fond of a good wedding reception, you might have recalled Jesus’ first miracle, where he turned water into an endless stream of the “finest wine,” amazing and delighting the guests and kicking off, at his mother’s urging, the beginning of the end. The point is this: God knows how to make stuff last. But who can really afford to believe it? Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we give up our earthly to-do lists and start asking how He—whoever he is exactly— thinks we should spend our days and we even learn to pray and we even start to hear him and then suddenly the worst happens: we run out of money. Or food. Or time. And we’ve got no back up plan. No cushion. Not even a well-connected friend to pull us back up when we fall.
It is this fear that drives us to drive our kids to aim for the big numbers, the sort of SAT scores that’ll ensure they’ll never run out of anything—ever. This is our legacy to them: we made sure they jumped so high that the world could never fail to pay them enough to make them feel safe and secure all the rest of their days. But for all the mathematical certainty of that equation, we don’t feel sure at all. (Elijah & the SAT, p. 55)
Another voice of Elijah
It was February of her freshman year. Remy had been working on a new spin, a reverse camel spin, in which she enters quickly and forcefully on an inside edge. She had been so excited about it she even asked me to stand at the rail to watch. I crossed my arms against the chill as she picked up speed for her approach and— It happened so fast, the thud echoing through the rink, causing two former Olympians to look over and gasp. Her edge gave out from under her and she flew up and out and back, smack on the base of her skull. We waited for her to get up. I felt blurry inside as I watched her rise. But rise she did. Two days later, Natasha Richardson hit her head in much the same way on the slopes and never came home.
In addition to having had brain surgery as an infant, Remy had had one other hard blow to the head in her lifetime. Her class had been rehearsing for the major rite of passage at our little K-8 school: the 4th grade play. They were doing a vampy musical version of Cinderella with lip-synced tunes from Abba. Remy was cast as the wicked stepmother, a role that she adored. This was the year she first declared that she wanted to be an actress. Every day the director, a school parent who was a successful film and TV star, would tell me she had something special. Teachers who’d snuck a peek at rehearsals said she was at a whole other level. I couldn’t say either way; Remy never wanted me to watch her in her preparations—not for theatre or skating or art. She liked to work on top-secret projects that she then revealed to me, watching closely for the level of delight and pride in my eyes.
On the day of her 4th grade fall, I had been at the school for Wednesday morning chapel with the kids and had just returned home, poured a cup of coffee, sat down to write. I was just thinking that maybe this would be the year she found her way to shine, when the phone rang.
“Heather, Remy’s fainted,” the principal said. “ She hit her head pretty hard. She’s sitting up now and conscious. They had just started their play rehearsal. I called an ambulance to have her checked.”
When I got there, she was sitting in a huge wooden clergy seat near the altar, surrounded by paramedics. The play was held in the church, which was covered in Spanish tile. She had been standing upright, evidently delivering a line with so much cackle it took the breath right out of her: she suddenly fell straight back, no bend, no slouch, no buffer, flat on the back of her head.
“Don’t take me to the hospital,” she cried. “They’ll cut my head open!!” It was the first time I realized how much she carried the memory of her surgery with her. (Elijah & the SAT)
Heather Choate Davis 