The way we were

A friend and I were reminiscing about our childhoods the other day and those old memories just came rushing back into my consciousness. I grew up in an extended family with my mom, dad, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunt and uncle all living under the same roof in a small town in Arkansas. Four women and two men so it was a pretty matriarchal family. The women pretty much ruled the roost.

They also did all the cooking and that's the thing I remembered first. They spent the biggest part of every day in the kitchen and they made some of the best food I've ever put in my mouth. I wish I had had the foresight to ask them to write down their recipes because I haven't tasted food like that since.

My favorite was "hardtack" biscuits; thin and crisp and when you added butter, they were out of this world. They also made chocolate gravy; some kind of chocolate pudding they cooked on the stove and then poured it over a slice of bread while it was still piping hot. Pork chops and fried potatoes, cooked together on the stove was another one of my favorites and their made-from-scratch cornbread was the best ever. Every 4th of July and Memorial day, we would get the hand-crank ice-cream maker out, fill it up with ice, rock salt and the other necessary ingredients and take turns turning the crank until the ice cream was ready. There's nothing better than home-made ice cream.

I think the secret ingredient to the incredible things they prepared in that kitchen was love. They put it in every dish they prepared and that's probably why I've never tasted anything as good since. There was an abundance of love in that kitchen and in that home every day of the 17 years I lived there.

We always sat down and ate together at the big dinner table in the dining room and would often linger for an hour or more after we finished eating, talking about the events of the day. You don't see that much anymore and it's too bad. A lot of potential problems were nipped in the bud at that dinner table and our family became more tight-knit because of it. There were no TV trays and no one ever ate alone. When I reached my teen-age years and became active in sports, there were many times when I couldn't sit with the rest of the family for my meals the way I had in the past but even then, someone in the family would sit at the dinner table with me so I didn't have to eat alone.

The women weren't political but my dad and uncle were both active partisan Democrats and that rubbed off on me, just like my politics have been adopted by my boys. My uncle was a judge the whole time I lived there and my father eventually became a judge in Little Rock.

No matter what was going on in my world as a child, no matter how hard the storm battered me and knocked me around, I knew I always had a port in the storm. I knew that when I walked in that house and closed the door that I would be sheltered and protected from the storm. I knew I would be taken care of and loved unconditionally and the sense of security that came from that awareness was their greatest gift to me. I wish everyone could have been raised in that kind of environment and felt the love I felt every minute of every day.

If they had been, I don't think the world would be nearly as hostile as it is.