Category Archives: my family

A Eulogy for My Mother

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My mother passed away on October 7, 2020. She’d outlived all her friends, but she lived to see her four great-grandchildren. She was 101 years old.

It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t know her, what a force of nature my mother was, but I’ve been writing about her in this blog, off and on, for years. You can begin to get an idea of what she was like by following this thread.

Never one to shirk a difficult task, my mother planned her own funeral and wrote her own obituary and her own eulogy. And that eulogy says more about her than I ever did, with all my blog posts. I would like to share it with you.

Say this of me: I loved life and mostly everything in it. The world is mostly beautiful and I have tried to add a bit of beauty to it. My involvement in art for most of my life has brought me pleasure and solace, and I have been grateful for the gift.

I have been blessed with length of days, generally good health, family and friends, and thanked God for all of it every day of my life. Most blessed was I with grandchildren—my arrows into the future.

I do not fear death, that final, inevitable chapter which is a part of life, the endless circle. I have enjoyed my stay in this world but do not regret my leaving to return to whence I came. I have faith that the Creator of All (of which I am but a tiny part) has yet another purpose for having created me.

I give thanks to all my loved ones for having been a part of my life.

My daughter, my mother, and me, on the occasion of my mother’s 101st birthday

Aunt Shirley’s Apple Cake

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My mom’s sister Shirley was an intense personality worthy of an entire blog post all by herself. Probably more than one. But I want to focus here on one small memorable thing about her: she made the best apple cake I’ve ever eaten. I’m sure many of my cousins remember, as I do, her gifts of apple cake wrapped in foil direct from her freezer, where she always seemed to have a supply. 

Aunt Shirley passed away many years ago, but her apple cake lives on. And now that Dan and I have an apple tree of our own, Aunt Shirley’s apple cake has become a necessity in our lives. We make batches and batches of it in the fall. It freezes well and lasts into the following spring.

Coincidentally, I have unearthed considerable archaeological history of this cake, including facts that may be unknown to our family until now. The recipe, or its nearly identical antecedent, reappeared in my life shortly after Aunt Shirley let me copy hers. It came to me on the Usenet newsgroup rec.food.cooking in 1988 and credits “an old issue of Gourmet magazine.” The magazine article credited a Mr. John Kram, who owned a bakery in East Baltimore in the 1930s. This rings true to me: Shirley grew up in East Baltimore and might have still been living there in the ’30s. Shirley, however, called her recipe “Helen’s Apple Cake.” I don’t know who Helen is. I have also seen a version of this cake called “Jewish Apple Cake”; the Jewish Museum of Maryland may have published a version.

Without more ado, but with relevant commentary where I have made modifications, here is:

Aunt Shirley’s Apple Cake

This makes three bread pans’ worth of apple cake, and I get 8 to 9 slices per pan.

Ingredients

about 10 apples (Note 1)
2 tsp cinnamon
3 Tbsp sugar

3 C unsifted flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

4 unbeaten eggs
2 C sugar (Note 2)
1 C cooking oil
1/2 C orange juice (Note 2)
1 Tbsp vanilla (Note 2)

Preparation

Prepare the apples:

Core and peel the apples, and slice into wedges no more than about 1/4″ thick. Mix with the cinnamon and 3 Tbsp of sugar.

Make the batter:

In a medium bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. (Note 3)

In the bowl of your mixer, beat the eggs, sugar, oil, orange juice, and vanilla all together. (If you haven’t already done so, now would be the time to grease and flour the baking pans.) Then add the dry ingredients to the mixer bowl, and mix just enough to blend thoroughly.

Assemble the cake:

Pour about 1/6 of the batter into the bottom of each of the 3 greased-and-floured pans, using about 1/2 of the batter in all. Layer in apple slices vertically as tightly as you can. Pour another layer of batter over the apple slices, and end with another layer of apples wedged in tightly.

Bake at 350 degrees for 1-1/2 hours (90 minutes), or until a cake tester comes out dry. (Note 4)

Wrap in foil and freeze the whole cake (as Aunt Shirley did), or cut into 8 or 9 slices, wrap each slice individually in wax paper, and freeze in a zipper freezer bag (as Dan and I do). Or eat it all up without freezing–it will keep about a week in the fridge.

Notes

(1) In the history of this cake, there has been some disagreement about the number of apples. John used 5 cups, about 1-3/4 pounds. Helen used 6 apples. Aunt Shirley said to use much more than Helen did. Dan and I are on Shirley’s side on this. Cram them in. It just gets better.

(2) Shirley and Helen used 2-1/2 cups of sugar, but I find this much too sweet. I side with John on the sugar; 2 cups is plenty. Shirley and Helen used 1/3 cup of orange juice, but John used 1/2 cup. I’ve tried them both; either works fine. As for the vanilla, John used only 2 tsp; Shirley and Helen increased this to 2-1/2 tsp. I am a vanilla extremist, so I use 3 tsp (1 Tbsp).

(3) There is a strong divide when it comes to process. The article in Gourmet magazine alleges that John went through an elaborate procedure worthy of the magazine’s title, specifying what went in first, second, third, and so on. Shirley and Helen, on the other hand, just said, “Beat all together until smooth.” I’ve tried this a number of ways, and I’m generally in the Shirley camp. However, I’ve noticed that in the presence of the orange juice, the baking powder starts activating. So I like to wait to add the dry ingredients until everything else is ready and the cake can be assembled.

(4) John used a tube pan and baked the cake for only 50 minutes to an hour. Helen baked the cake for an hour and a half, but I don’t know what kind of pan(s) she used. Shirley baked the cake for 1-3/4 hours. Maybe my oven is different from hers, but I find that 1-1/2 hours works perfectly for me, every time.

My sweet little Garden City Beautification Award

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All unbeknownst to Dan and me, my mother submitted our garden to the Newton Community Pride organization, a nonprofit loosely affiliated with our city government, for an award. Each year, Newton Community Pride gives out a number of these. So behold, last week we got a letter in the mail saying that we’d won!

Our first thought was that there must have been some kind of mistake, and we’d have to give it back.

But no. They read me the description over the phone. “A steep hill was terraced into a gorgeous triple-decker garden complete with waterfall.” There aren’t too many like that. Definitely had to be ours.

 

 

Tonight I went with my mother and my delighted landscape architect Vicki Hibbard to the awards ceremony. Where I was presented with a professional-looking certificate suitable for framing, and my picture was taken for all posterity.

 

A hurricane story

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As I sit writing this, Hurricane Irene is blowing outside. So far, it’s not as bad as we feared it might be. A lot of rain, yes, but all in all, not very windy. But then, it’s only 11am, the time that the National Weather Service predicted the real winds would start, so we might see something yet.

As always during rainy, windy weather, I remember a story about Adam. Adam was only three years old in September, 1985, so he probably doesn’t remember this story. That’s why I’m the one who has to tell it. He had just started Montessori School a few weeks before, where they were learning, among other things, all about the seasons.

And that’s when Hurricane Gloria blew through. September 27, 1985.

Now, Gloria was a Category 4 hurricane with winds up to 145 miles per hour. There was a storm surge of almost seven feet–thank heavens it was low tide!–when the storm made landfall in southern Connecticut. Gloria dropped up to six inches of rain in Massachusetts and left over two million people without power. The storm killed eight people and did over $900 million in damage in New England. The name ‘Gloria’ has been retired.

While the storm was raging, I was–pretty much where I am now–on an upper floor of my house in the study by the window, working on my computer. But Gloria was raging. It broke whole large branches off the mature maple by the side of our house. These branches fell on our roof with a shaking thud, clawed their way down the roof slope, landed on the roof of the screen porch below with another thud, and slid from there down into the yard.

It was terrifying.

Afraid that a branch might blow through the window or worse, the storm might take the roof off the house, I shut down my computer and went downstairs to the first floor, where I found Dan with Adam in his arms, the two of them in the kitchen standing well back from the windows watching the branches falling from the screen porch roof into the yard.

“Daddy,” Adam asked, “is this fall?”

Well, yes, Adam, the leaves are falling down off the trees, but normally they come down without the branches still attached.

 

If you don’t use your head…

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My mother is packing to leave Florida, where she has spent the winter. She just came out of her bedroom shaking her head. “If you don’t use your head, you use your feet,” she said.

I looked up from my computer and smiled. “That’s what my mother always used to say.”

“These days,” my mother said, “sometimes you also have to use your car.”

My mom and me 03/12/2011

Momentous Event

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We interrupt the regularly scheduled program of Block Island sunsets to bring you a photo (yes, I will stick with just one) of this weekend’s momentous event–my son’s (and now my new daughter’s) wedding. Of course, this is the Best Wedding Photo Ever. Not to mention the most photogenic and lovable couple. I am not biased about this. Just saying.

Adam and Clair

Feeding the movie queue monster

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Dan and I are having trouble keeping our Netflix queue full. We just don’t hear of good movies to add to the queue as quickly as we watch the movies that are already in it. Most of the methods we’ve tried to find more movies we might like haven’t succeeded very well:

  • Adding movies that look good in the trailers that come with other movies. This system works well for weeding out movies we *don’t* want to see, but there are some real duds out there whose only good moments are those incorporated into the trailer. Great trailer, lousy movie. Who was to know?
  • Adding movies to the queue based on recommendations from friends. You’d think this would work really well, but we were surprised. Some of our extraordinary, smart, and delightful friends recommend the most ordinary and dull movies. In particular, we’ve learned never to trust the “hot” movies that everyone is seeing and talking about right now. By the time they make it to DVD they are no longer “hot” and often of little inherent worth.
  • Using the Netflix recommendations (“Movies You’ll ‘Heart’”). The results of this, as nearly as I can tell, are totally random and useless.
  • Adding movies directed by the same person as other movies we like. This isn’t a bad system if the director is consistently good. For example, Ridley Scott was, for the most part, a great success for us. However, any director’s oeuvre is limited, but our Netflix queue never ends.

But finally we have hit upon a system that works.

We ask my mother.

She is unerringly on the mark.

It’s gotten kind of scary. Dan always puts my mother’s recommendations at the top of the queue. And we always really like them. I think my mother is nervous now about recommending additional movies to us. The stakes keep getting higher.

Her most recent success was Vantage Point, a movie that tells the story of an attempted terrorist coup from a number of different but unexpectedly related perspectives, each layer adding depth and complexity to the story. It’s also a nonstop action movie that would do the TV series 24—the only ongoing TV show that I like—proud.

The movie that this reminds me of the most is Crash, which portrays the multifaceted interactions in the lives of a number of complete strangers in Los Angeles, some of whom meet by automobile crash or hijacking and some of whom never meet. We actually saw Crash twice, and enjoyed it both times. Frighteningly, this was another of my mother’s recommendations. Tonight I discovered that there is a name for this type of movie, and there are members of the genre Dan and I haven’t yet seen. Food for the queue monster.

Other movies that share this quality are Memento, Run Lola Run, and Babel. We liked all of these, too. I wish there were a Web site where you could enter the names of some particular movies, and it would tell you others that are in some way similar.

But meanwhile, Mom, you’ve scored again. Please keep those recommendations coming.

And, dear reader, I’m open to *your* recommendations, too!

On Raising a Writer

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This is way cool! Please check out my guest blog posted today at L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Wright’s Writing Corner. My son Adam was born with an innate and strong storytelling ability. This post is about nurturing that talent. I hope you enjoy it.

And if you’re interested in fantasy, check out Jagi’s new book, Prospero Lost.

Guys and girls

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The writer Jagi Lamplighter, author of Prospero’s Daughter, recently received some flak on her blog after reporting on a panel she participated in at Worldcon. The panel was about diversity, and some of the blog’s readers took offense at her referring to a fellow panelist as a “black girl”. Apparently, “black woman” would not have been so derogatory. Yet Jagi says that she refers to all women as “girls” and means nothing by it.

I believe her. I refer to all people of any sex as “guys”. I do it all the time. Always have.

This used to drive my father crazy. “Do you guys have any plans for the weekend?” I might ask. My father would draw himself up to his full height and dignity and respond, “Your mother is not a guy!”

I didn’t mean anything by it. Still don’t.

But this little flurry on Jagi’s blog has me thinking. First, about my father, who has been dead for over two decades now. I still miss him.

And second, about why I should call everyone “guy”. And here’s what I think: At some level, I think of myself as a guy. As in “just one of the guys”, not as in interested in women. And I do have some “guy” traits: I’m more rational than emotional (of course, we women know that men are often more emotional than rational, but you know the stereotype); prefer blue to pink; dislike frills, ribbons, high heels, dresses; prefer science fiction to romance. You get the idea.

Now, if Jagi thinks of herself as a “girl”, then of course she means nothing when she refers to other women the same way. But our mutual colleague, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, author of Yesterday’s Dreams and other books, said it better than I could.

“Hard to make everyone happy when they are pre-disposed to taking offense. Of course, as writers, these are the types of things we should take note of for future use.”

I like in particular Danielle’s complete vagueness on how we should use these things.  🙂