“It figures. We’ve been watching The American Revolution. I’ll wager George didn’t shovel at Valley Forge. I’ve got this. You’ve still got a cold. Besides, it’s downhill.”
“Wear my hat. Take a break every 10 minutes and remember you’re 76. If you need an energy boost, here’s a bag of peanuts.
The recipe is yours if you promise to read the story
Photo by the author
This is an old story I’ve freshened. Like this pie, it’s a treat to consume every few years. Today is National Pie Day, writes Sunita Chakraborty, which makes this retelling a must, just as the Christmas season begs for our mother’s most famous dessert.
Dody Gardner made three meals daily for three boys, Paul, Peter, and Pat, and our father, Paul Sr., in the 1950s and 60s. That’s roughly 24,000 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.
The consensus favorite dish was her Chocolate Marvel Pie, which she served on Christmas Eve. Why Marvel?
That’s the name on this ancient recipe card, carbon-dated to 1953, give or take a year or two.
Photo by the author
Her unique cursive handwriting style was taught briefly in Catholic Schools in southeast Iowa in the 1920s. You are right; it is hard to read. I was 15 before I could fake her signature on my report cards.
The translation is below. Patience is the pie’s secret ingredient. And yours, to earn the recipe. Santa’s watching.
When mom died in 2017, at 96, I said I wanted two things from the estate: This wax Santa Claus.
Those are blood stains, by the way, as my late brother Pat did not give up the card easily. He always said I should listen to Donald Trump. So I did and hired The Donner and Blixon Law firm. Who uncovered a heretofore unknown precedent. The oldest son gets first dibs on the pie recipe.
Rebecca and I plan to serve it later this week to two Catholic nuns who will be visiting to see the annual Luther College Christmas Pageant. They are 80-year-old sisters, friends of my late aunt, Sister Marilyn Thomas, who died in 2017 at 103. Fawny, as we called her, last came to this concert in her centenary year.
I don’t know whether they’ve turned cheek on Martin Luther, but they do love Lutheran music.
Her pie would come out of the refrigerator a little runny on a rare occasion. Whenever that happened, I’d helpfully quote Julia, who said the test was the taste, not the look.
Patience was not my mom’s strong suit. Nor mine. This pie requires it. I’m sure Buddha had something to say about pie and waiting.
You’ve cooled your heels long enough.
The Recipe
Melt and blend 1 cup of chocolate chips, 3 Tablespoons of sugar, and 3 Tablespoons of milk. (We use Nestle Tollhouse semi-sweet and half-and-half).
Cool.
Add four egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add one teaspoon of vanilla.
Beat until stiff four egg whites.
Fold into the chocolate mixture and pour into a 9″ baked pie crust.
Chill for several hours. (Channeling Buddha, we let it sit in the refrigerator overnight)
We garnish with a dollop of fresh whipped cream.
Raw egg whites, you wonder—your choice, of course. My family has been eating this pie for going on seven decades, with no fatalities or even tummy aches.
She was a big, buxom woman with a loud voice. He was a weaselly, wispy-whiskered man with tattoos slathered on every exposed part of his body, before skin art went mainstream.
In over sixty years of living next to this house with a shared driveway, my mother had never experienced neighbors like this.
“How did they afford this house?” I asked my brother Pat, who lived five miles from our childhood home. “Her parents bought it for them,” he replied.
When I asked Mike, my Mom’s retired cop friend, if he had ever met people like this, he said, “Only when I’ve arrested them.”
My father, who had died 20 years earlier, would have labeled them white trash. In the two long years they lived next to Mom before their marriage collapsed and they moved, Pat and I called them much worse.
The problem was that our mother was 90 and still driving. Her garage and their garage shared a common space big enough for our childhood wiffle ball and basketball games. Soon after they moved in, they began parking their car outside their garage and just off to the side of Mom’s exit path from her garage.
The first time Pat noticed this, he knocked on their door to introduce himself and ask them to move their car into a parking space that would give Mom plenty of room to back out. That’s what all her neighbors had done for decades and what our family had done with two cars when their three sons were growing up.
“She’s got plenty of room,” barked the tattoo man. “And she hardly ever uses her car,” added his larger half. At this point in the story, you’ve got to understand something about my late brother, who died earlier this year of liver cancer.
Even later in life, he was a formidable physical presence, well-weathered from his college pitching days. And, in his work as a Sherwin-Williams regional sales manager, he was used to dealing with hard-nosed contractors. In other words, he was not easily intimidated. And he wasn’t by this pair of Bonnie and Clyde pretenders.
But nothing he said or intimated worked: “She’s got plenty of room.”
2. The Angels
Until this happened.
It was late at night during the summer of 2014: “Your mother fell outside her house. We’re sitting with her in her kitchen. Your number was on her kitchen table. She’s got a cut on her forehead that we’ve bandaged,” said Bonnie to Pat.
When Pat arrived 20 minutes later, he took Mom to the emergency room. It was around midnight. Returning two hours later, he noticed a light on in their house. As he was walking Mom down the sidewalk in her backyard, her newly winged angels appeared at the back stoop, wondering how she was doing.
Pat thanked them.
“It’s like they were different people,” he told me the day after recounting this incident.
Six months later, they were gone, and the house was sold to a young man who always parked his car in the garage.
Over that half-year, the Jekyll-and-Hyde couple continued to park their car in the middle of their half of the driveway.
THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN FOR MEDIUM’S DAILY CUPPA, A PUBLICATION WITH A STORY LIMIT OF 150 WORDS.
I love crafting a story, what Anu Maheshwari describes as “something new entirely, with our perspective and style.”
Even though not many people will read this tale, and a few of those will be family and friends.
A small audience, like the attendees at the women’s basketball game in the first photo, who also stayed to watch the men’s teams.
Photo by the author
My former employer, Luther College, is a small, liberal arts school in northeast Iowa. It gives no athletic scholarships. Luther’s athletic department includes 22 teams that compete against other schools: 11 men’s and 11 women’s.
Caitlin and Magic played with an unusual passion, which catapulted them to the top. Scholarships, endorsements, and large crowds accompanied their journeys.
The athletes in the photos compete with a purity of motive that earns our admiration and cheers.
THIS STORY WAS WRITTEN FOR THE MEDIUM PUBLICATION, THE CHALLENGED.
*
Rodrigo S-C asks what we have in common with our mother and father.
They’re with me now. I’ll ask.
Introduction
I left home in 1972, at 23, a wobbly bird, at best, leaving the nest.
Six decades later, my parents still accompany me everywhere, freely offering advice in the spirit of ‘It’s your life, but here’s the way I see it.’
They used to be inside me, where I sometimes confused their voices with my own.
Today, they’re out in the open where I respectfully listen, even welcoming their advice, no longer defensive, because, all along, they really meant that the first clause was more important than the second.
2. Mom
Here they are, in two-dimensional flesh, in the early 1950s, just before their third son, Pat, would arrive. Peter and I are crawling on the living room floor in the house where my mom lived for more than 60 years.
Dody and Paul Gardner from a family album
Do you see the boat-like figure on the mantle reflected in the mirror? It contains dirt and a plant. A decade or so later, it would fall on my aunt Maryalice’s head. Her husband, Al, my mother’s brother, and she were visiting from Des Moines for Christmas. Maryalice would survive with just a cut on her forehead, but died in 1972 of diabetes. One year later, Uncle Al married Jackie, his secretary at Standard Oil.
Mom took an immediate dislike to her, which was naturally reciprocated. She, my mother, sized people up ruthlessly, rendering quick-trigger judgments that abated, when they did, only very slowly. For poor Jackie, it took a decade.
Whenever I meet someone for the first time, Mom’s voice speaks loudly, clearly, and definitively. She truly believes she’s protecting me.
3. Dad
Thirty years later, after raising three boys, they look more relaxed.
Photo from a family album taken in the mid-1980s
Sadly, this wouldn’t last, as my father would be diagnosed with cancer a year or two after this photo was taken. Before that, I remember a Sunday after Thanksgiving, when I was visiting for a few days. Mickey, a cousin and the son of Jean, one of Dad’s sisters, and a part-time actor living in California, had stopped by to see my parents.
It was early evening when Mickey knocked on the door. The dishes had been cleared from the dining room table, and Mom offered pumpkin pie and coffee. The four of us sat down.
An hour later, Mickey was still talking. Abruptly, my Dad pushed his chair back and said, “It’s a little late for me, Mickey, but it was good to see you. Say hello to your mom when you see her later tonight.”
I was the next to fold, about fifteen minutes later, leaving my Mom holding the fort. She always said she liked Mickey from the moment he was born.
Today, and, really, for my adult life, I also tire of company at night. Rebecca’s the same, but, like my Mom, more naturally accommodates. When guests linger too long, Dad’s impatient voice arises in righteous indignation, and I get restless.
4. Conclusion
Unless, knowing what he plans to say, I politely and firmly send him to his room, a soundproof room just as my Dad did to me when I was a mouthy kid.
If I were ever to meet you, dear reader, for the first time, again knowing my Mom is lurking, ready to render a verdict, I would use another tactic, one she used with me a long, long time ago, when I was naughty. She froze me out, no talking, usually for a day or so. So I tilt my head away from her, no eye contact.
Both mental tactics work.
And they’re fun.
Freeing my adult self to make my own judgments and decisions.
Something that would make my wonderful parents very proud.
When I request an image from an AI tool, why do I start with ‘please’? I suppose it’s more civilized than virgin sacrifice—a magical ploy from a position of weakness.
If Mr. Chatman gently admonishes me, as in ‘I’m not allowed to create an image of a public figure doing that,’ I immediately fold with, ‘Sorry.’
And why do I think of my technology tools as Mr? I’m as woke as you are, the rest of the day.
I recall seeing, at 19, the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, with murderous HAL in control. A brilliant astronaut unhooked him.
Computer geeks are always the smartest guys in the room.
The photo is from the Luther College archive and was taken in 1983
I wonder where all of this will end. I’m tempted to ask Mr. Chatman. But I don’t think I will.
Instead, I’m closing Mr. Mac, turning off Mr. iPhone, and putting on my thinking cap for a walk outside.
I fold my arms when I don’t have much to say, and others do.
Steve, in a plaid shirt and who listens to the Messiah every year, is making the point to Jim, in a Kofta sweater and who plays guitar in a church band, that Classical music is superior to other forms from other times.
Jim doesn’t buy it: ‘We may still be listening to The Grateful Dead in 100 years.’
‘But not 400,’ retorts Steve.
Spotting an opening for someone with a music-lite education, I point to the scene in Mr. Holland’s Opus where Richard Dryfus, at the piano, teaches his high school students about a musical scale by playing Bach.
‘The Ionian,’ chips in David, who brought two additional Messiah books, ‘that was the scale.’
‘Mr. Holland played them The Lover’s Concerto, a sixties hit,’ offered Bob. ‘It’s my favorite movie.’
Photo by the author of a Veterans Memorial across the street from our home
TO MY READERS OF PAULMUSES.COM WHO WONDER WHAT’S UP WITH THIS, ALL THESE STORIES THE PAST TWO DAYS. THEY’VE BEEN WRITTEN OVER THE PAST FEW WEEKS AND APPEARED ON MEDIUM. YESTERDAY, I MOVED A BUNCH TO MY BLOG SITE.
THIS ONE WAS WRITTEN SIX DAYS AGO. MY FAVORITE COMMENT WAS THIS ONE.
As a veteran, I love this post. I love protest. I would do the same. Thank you for sharing this.
*
On this National Holiday honoring veterans, the waiter served our meals wearing a red apron over his khaki dress uniform, spit-shined black dress shoes, and three lines of ribbons on his shirt pocket.
It was a Rotary Tuesday lunch at VFW Post 1977 in my hometown.
After barbecue pork sandwiches, the club president asked veterans to stand, and 11 did out of the 30 in attendance. When the applause concluded, the rest of us stood and joined them in facing the American flag.
A couple of others and I removed our caps. Most put their hands on their hearts, and then we recited.
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
My right hand stayed at my side; I did not utter the words ‘under God.‘
Mine was a silent protest of two parts of this civic ritual. My reasons remain private, a right as an American, protected by those who have given their lives, whom I honored with my gentle dissent.
Photo of the Tuesday morning crew by Food Pantry Director Matt Tapscott
After the sermon, Jesus said, “Give them something to eat,” and then turned a few loaves of bread and two fish into food for thousands.
For our community in northeast Iowa, the miracle of providing sustenance to those in need comes from volunteers.
Meet the Tuesday morning crew. It includes nurses, an optometrist, a dentist, a basketball coach, a college president, a farmer, several small business owners, a banker, and, I’m guessing, a candlestick maker.
When a pantry client fills out a registration form, they put their name, address, and the number of people they live with, period, as in nothing else is asked.
Yesterday, we handled 1200 pounds of food donated by grocery stores and 2000 pounds from a regional government distribution center.
In 2025, the pantry will distribute 330,000 pounds to 2,000 families; its website and signage are in Spanish and English.
Above all, Jesus and other spiritual guides need someone on earth to stock the shelves.
There’s probably a natural explanation for the eagle that safeguarded Decorah’s (in northeast Iowa) No Kings 2 protest march on Saturday, October 18. 1000 people gathered below, in front of the courthouse, not far from the river and the forest.
Photo by the author
But I believe even the eagle has chosen sides. She’s not the only one.
Photo by the author
All ordinary folks, like Rebecca and me.
Photo by Mike Cardinal
Straighten that backbone, Paul. It’s all hands on deck in the old USA. For our community, I estimate we’ll have twice as many people as No Kings 1 on June 14.
We joined millions to speak with one voice through our disciplined and amicable dissent. As of this morning, there were no reported incidents of violence anywhere across the country. (source)
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
As our group of Americans walked along the sidewalk, the half mile to the courthouse, most cars honked in support with more thumbs up than I could count. There was one guy in a red pick-up truck who burned rubber, to hoots and hollers. And another fellow who slowed down and said, steadily and in a calm voice, “We don’t want you people in our community.” He was met with laughter, good cheer, and a ‘Protect our Constitution’ chant.
Photo by the author
We sat next to a white, middle-aged guy who was with his wife and young son. I asked him why he was here.
It’s about the cruelty to immigrants, man. And the corruption. I want my son to grow up in a better America, to be able to look up to the President, regardless of party.
