Pamela Jean Owens off-line

A lot of the time I can’t decide if I have great life or a crappy life. If I have to ask, does that say what the answer is? Just now for some reason I couldn’t get the “A” key on my keyboard to work. I kept trying over and over and then it would work, and now it is taking anywhere between one and 3 hits to get an “a” to show up on the screen. Being one of the most frequent letters in the alphabet, a sentence with no “a’s” in it looks pretty strange.

Am I just missing some small but essential “A” key that would make me intuitively know how to do life? Usually, in typing, you only have to backspace when you have made a mistake. When you hit “d” instead of “s” or you reversed “en” and typed “ne”  instead, which I regularly do typing my own last name, “Owens,” you just hit “backspace” enough times and you get a “do over.” But not being able to count on the “A”  key is different. You know you hit ll the right keys nd yet you look bck nd it appers you didn’t. See? So you have to keep backspacing and redoing it, even when you know you did it right. A lot of the time, that’s the way I feel about my life. And at 59, I am starting to also feel that if I don’t get it right pretty soon and have it stick, I’m going to be out of time, and life in the physical sense will be over.

Sure, I believe I’ll get pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, and chocolate cake and strawberries and meadows full of flowers too, and even streets of gold if I want them. And a mansion with all my loved ones will be waiting for me, shining with light. But I want pie now too, the good old mouth-watering kind like Mamaw used to make, and like she taught me to make.

Before I was old enough to learn to bake, I only had pie away from home. Either at one of my Mamaw’s houses, or sometimes at the cafeteria or the Toddle House. We had a lot of puddings at home, and cookies, and muffins, and the most amazing brownies ever baked. But Mother had baked so many of her famous lemon meringue pies when she was younger that she had developed a skin allergy to flour and couldn’t handle dough any more.

I always loved pie. I loved the way Mamaw Helton would let me help roll out the dough and cut it into strips to weave in and out on top of a cherry pie. And with the left over strips, she let me sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and bake them on a cookie sheet until they were golden and sparkly. I loved her chocolate meringue pies, with dark, dark chocolate filling and meringue peaks so high you couldn’t believe they didn’t fall over. She let me beat the egg whites with an old rotary hand beater, turning the crank round and round and round until it wouldn’t turn any more. It reminded me of turning the crank on the ice cream maker for as long as I could, and then watching Papaw or Uncle Bubba take over and turn it some more.

I learned to separate the egg whites from the egg yolks without letting a single drop of the yellow yolk hit the whites. I learned to stand on a chair at the stove with a big apron on and “stir constantly” the filling so it wouldn’t have a single lump. I learned how to cut the apples and arrange them in a crust and sprinkle cinnamon and sugar over them, then dot them with pats of margarine, or “oleo,” as Mamaw called it. Since I’d never really had butter, I liked margarine better and didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to.

I learned that cinnamon and sugar make just about everything better, even pinto beans. Maybe not the cinnamon for the beans, but definitely the sugar.

I don’t ever remember Mamaw saying to me, “Pammy, I’m going to teach you how to bake a pie.”  I do remember her sitting with me on the back porch stairs on Santa Monica when I was maybe 5 and teaching me how to tie Bonnie Braid’s dress sash in a bow. And I remember my other Mamaw teaching me how to properly open a book, standing it up on its spine and carefully pressing down a small section at a time, first from the front of the book, then from the end, back and forth, front then back then front, until I reached the middle and the book would lie open nicely for reading without breaking its spine. I still do that with books, or, if I don’t, I know I should have. I was definitely and deliberately taught how to tie a bow and how to properly open a new book.

But I don’t remember anyone telling me they were teaching me to cook, and yet they surely did. And once I knew how to do all of the parts of baking a pie, which happened somewhere between ages 10 and 12, I didn’t have to wait to go to Mamaw’s house or anywhere else to have pie. I could make it myself. Now I could go to Mamaw’s house and bake her a pie!

So even though both my Mamaws are in heaven, and even though the Toddle House and most of the cafeteria chains went out of business and even though I’ve lived the past 27 years in the North, where they don’t have cafeterias (except for sort-of in Chicago, at Valois’ “See Your Food” on 53^rd street, and at the Soul Food cafeteria in the basement of the State of Illinois Building, or maybe the other big building with the Picasso in front of it) — even with all of that, I don’t have to wait to have pie when I get to heaven. I can make it for myself right now. And my lovely daughter can make it, and does, and even her brothers, and certainly their beautiful girlfriends, both of whom are such amazing cooks.

I got the how-to-tie-a-bow lesson, and the how-to-open-a-book lesson, and the how-to-bake-a-pie lesson. Where did I miss the other lessons? The ones that would have made my life as simple and straight-forward as it seems like it should have been? Was I just asleep?

My life shouldn’t be hard. Nothing in my background would point to someone who would have problems becoming a real grown-up. I did not experience abuse or addiction or death or divorce or poverty or chronic serious illness or any of those traumas that people point to in their childhoods to help explain why they have problems in adult life. I was wanted, loved, supported, encouraged, and given every opportunity to have fun and just be a kid. No one in my family treated me badly and no really terrible thing ever happened to any of us. My growing up years were, in most ways, uneventful.

When some of my favorite authors like Annie Lamott and Melody Beattie trace their lives and their problems and their victories back a ways, they come upon abuse or addiction or abandonment or any combination of the same. They can tell their inspiring stories because they had so much to recover from, and they did, and now other women (and men) are inspired by hearing them tell their stories.

I didn’t have that kind of life. I was lucky, blessed, fortunate, among the privileged, although never wealthy. I had every thing I needed and most of what I wanted. So, does that mean my life isn’t interesting? Does that mean I have no right to complain or need recovery? I hope not. Because I think my story is not so unusual. I think lots of women (and maybe men) out there had very nice pleasant childhoods and still have a hard time being grown-ups. These stories are for those people, for the rest of us. And perhaps some people who have had hard lives will get something from them too. I hope so.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under My Story, This and That. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.