Listening to my Mom talk about her early days cooking is like listening to Normal Rockwell talk about drawing stick figures the first time he picked up a crayon as a wee young pup. It’s funny to think of the great artiste at his first beginning, when he was still crude and fumbling in his attempts, just like you and me, long before the air sparkled with the wondrous possibilities of what might be every time he approached a canvass with paint-daubed brush poised to work magic. We only think of him then, after he had matured in his art, when anything might emerge as he began applying oil to cloth, and it was sure to be amazing whatever it was.
With that image in mind of what he eventually became, it’s hard to imagine a time when Norman Rockwell couldn’t draw, even though we know that everyone has to begin somewhere. We all crawl before we run. Even Michelangelo had to start with crayons long before there was any reason to crane your neck back to gaze upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel high overhead. Well, maybe not crayons, since in the sixteenth century they were as yet only a twinkle in Mr. Crayola’s eyes—or maybe in his distant ancestor’s eyes. But Michelangelo probably chiseled a lot of stick figures in marble prior to chipping the first shard from the block that would eventually become The David.
Well, my Mom is the Michelangelo of the culinary arts. She’s attained that level of genius. If Pope Francis ever decides to redecorate the Sistine Chapel in food (after all, if a shepherd should smell like his sheep, what better way than by suspending a plump, aromatic meat loaf from the ceiling? Assuming of course that his flock eats as much meat loaf as we do around here), my Mom will get the commission. I can just see a delegation of cardinals from the Vatican squeezed onto the old loveseat in my Mom’s living room, arrayed in a row of red sashes and crimson beanies, sipping coffee as Mom pours refills straight from the pot. They would lean forward and urge her earnestly: “The Holy Father needs meat loaf . . . in The Eternal City . . . hanging from the ceiling . . . of the Sistine Chapel . . . can you do it? And may I have another of those delightful cherry tarts?” Mom would pass the plate of cherry tarts (which she decided to serve for their red color—she always serves occasion-appropriate fair like that), and answer: “Anything for the Holy Father! But one question: why didn’t Pope Francis just pick-up the phone and call me?”
But, as amazing as her Culinary Zen is today, and hard as it is to imagine Mom as anything less than Master of the Kitchen she has become, to hear her tell it there was a time when she couldn’t crack an egg. Like her story about making tuna casserole and forgetting to add the tuna. “We were sitting there eating,” Mom says, “and it just tasted funny. I couldn’t tell what was wrong—but it wasn’t good. But your father was just sitting there eating away, with never a word, and suddenly it hit me. ‘For goodness sakes!’ I said, ‘There’s no tuna in this tuna casserole! And it tastes awful!’ But still your father still didn’t say anything. I had to take his plate away, and when I took the plates to the kitchen to scrape them in the trash, sure enough, sitting there on the counter was the can of tuna—unopened. Oh, I could have kicked myself.”
Or the story of her cherry turnovers that came out so hard “you could have used them for bricks,” as Mom describes them. But again, “Your Dad just sat there holding a cherry turnover that was hard as a stone dunked in his coffee, waiting for it to soften up enough to take a bite out of it—which took about five hours.” If pressed by Mom to contribute to the tales of gruesome gastronomical failures, all Dad will ever offer is something along the lines of: “I like something that can hold-up to a cup of coffee.” “You mean,” Mom will translate, “something impervious to liquid, air, and molten lava.”
But that’s something I finally noticed about Mom’s epic stories of early cooking catastrophes: Mom is the only one who ever tells them. Dad has never said recounted a story of a meal gone wrong, or said anything at all that was critical of Mom’s cooking—or disparaging of anything else, for that matter.
Scripture tells us: “Shame not a repentant sinner; remember, we are all guilty.” Sir 8, 5.
Of all the people who don’t need to be reminded of past difficulties, shortcomings, or failures, chief among them is the person whose commissions or omissions they were. That person remembers. What they need now is the chance to put the past behind them and move forward, to a future free and open to new beginnings, new possibilities and new hopes. That’s what God does for us (“As far as the east is from the west, so far have our sins been removed from us.” Ps 103, 12), and what God calls us to do for each other. And it’s those second chances that let all the Norman Rockwell’s and Michelangelo’s and Moms and Dads out there, and all of God’s people wherever they are and no matter their calling in life, blossom into the masterpieces God created them to be.
Jake Frost is the author of Catholic Dad, (Mostly) Funny Stories of Faith, Family and Fatherhood to Encourage and Inspire, also available as a $0.99 e-book on Amazon. He is a lawyer in hiatus, having temporarily traded depositions for diapers and court rooms for kitchens to care for his pre-school aged children. He comes from a large family in a small town of the Midwest, and lives near the Mississippi River with his wife and kids.
Art/Photograph: “Chapelle sixtine” by Antoine Taveneaux – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons-http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chapelle_sixtine.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Chapelle_sixtine.jpg