Heart Kicking

A friend recently posted on Facebook that he just got his heart kicked again.   A reminder that heart break happens to us all.   One of the great levelers of the playing field for all is love with its peaks and inevitably its valleys.   This friend of mine is amazingly handsome, eyes so deep that you drown every time he even says hello.   Beyond all the physical attributes is a heart as big as all get out.   Generous with hugs and smiles he lights up the darkest corner in any space.   So it is always so hard for me to imagine anyone could hurt this beautiful creature; but like I say, Love makes victims out of all of us at one time or another.

Ironically Judy Garlands drops on my playlist singing Almost like Being in Love and I wonder when a hopeless romantic like me fell out of love with being in love?   I still discover the remains of the romantic in me from time to time; but unfortunately I discover them when I’ve allowed myself to start to have expectations and hope about how things are going in my own relationship and then the inevitable shoe drops and I become aware of the reality and boundary of this kind of romantic dreaming and scheming.

I understand now why all of my friends who were in long term relationships and marriages always told me that it takes “work.”  I guess those of us who are the hopeless romantics think things should be sort of a magic carpet ride at least 50% of the time.   I foolishly thought that all this heart break and being kicked in the heart kind of stuff would be a part of my history when I dated all those losers and found the Prince.   All of a sudden I would have rewritten happy endings to Funny Girl and The Way We Were with my shiny new mind blowing relationship.

The truth is it is pretty mind blowing.   Mind blowing that at the end of the day, when all is said and done and I’ve stepped out of my fairy tale bubble bath that it does, after all, take work.   The other mind blowing thing is that you are in this relationship and you still get your heart kicked around.    Wasn’t all that bullshit supposed to end the minute you cross over that dating stage into the “together forever,” stage?   Reality Check my darlings, at least for me, you can get your heart kicked even by the alleged "Mr. Right."    Friends I’ve known that have been together for twenty years gives me even more startling facts that indeed even after that amount of time they still get their hearts trampled on from time to time.   WTF?

Sometimes I worry that I must be building up all these walls because I notice things that used to ruffle me barely even register in my heart and tear ducts anymore.   But then something will come along and I find myself feeling kicked in the heart and I guess it is at that point that I can take heart that if I’m feeling it that strongly then I must not be heartless after all.

I am slowly learning that not everything has to live up to my fantasy and somehow balance that with still trying to maintain some sort of romantic hopefulness.  The great thing about love is that it comes in many forms and just like a generator when the storms of life have cut off the main power we can rely on the love of friends and family to back us up.  No matter how many times my heart has got the shit kicked out of it and seemingly shattered into unfix-able pieces it was love in some form that held the glue.  

 To my friend who is feeling a fresh round of heart kicking I guess this wasn’t necessarily a very uplifting comforting piece; but he can take heart that he isn’t alone and that the benefit of having so many friends is that he has that much love he can lean on and count on.  This ole Southern Fried Diva sure is sending him much love.   Hugs baby doll!

Takes A Licking and Keeps on Baking

Norman Rockwell helped capture and perhaps made iconic the place that food plays in the nostalgia of Americana.   This Independence Day in 2010 in particular finds me looking to a bit of comfort in things Americana like Norman Rockwell, visions of apple pie, kids running through the fountain of a city fire hydrant, or memories of me and my childhood dog wading through the ponds and creeks in the mountains back home.

Food itself always seems to be a source of comfort.   A common denominator we can all seem to agree on and come together over.   In times like these I found great comfort in the dinner party we had last night.   Good friends, Southern food, good stories, and lots of laughs.   Rockwell captured food as an American thread in this diverse patchwork quilt we call the United States.   Several Iconic Rockwell paintings come to mind:  the young boy and the cop at the lunch counter, the grandmother and grandfather serving Thanksgiving turkey, or the young boy bowing his head in grace with his grandparents over the dinner table.   Yes, maybe it seems like drippy sticky sweet images; but I cannot help to be comforted by these images.

The pictures bring back my own memories like me standing on chair in my granny's kitchen as she made cake letting me steal licks of the batter.  

I think it is these memories and nostalgic notions that are in fact our country's strongest bond.   If we lose our ability to look upon these images and memories and find comfort then I think the terrorist win.   As we move forward as a country we have to bring all the history with us.   How do we learn if we do not take a look at history and see our failures as well as our victories.   No nation exists without the good and the bad.   All nations, free or otherwise, have all had less than glorious moments; yet I dare say all nations also have traditions that bind even the most diverse factions together.  

The fourth of July means many things to many people in America.   Fireworks, flags proudly displayed, watermelon and picnics, remembering the brave that fell in war and saluting the brave that march forward.  In every fourth of July celebration today around the country I doubt there will be one event in which food is not the center of function.   We are a country that likes to believe that we keep on keeping on no matter what and  I believe we can and will.   For me I will hold the memory of my granny in her tiny kitchen sweltering in the humid Mountain summer stirring up her homemade short cake as the roar of a fan desperately turned to give a bit of relief and the smell of red ripe strawberries filled the air.

Doubt In The Cake

I have often heard it said that, "proof is in the pudding."  For me it is in the cake.  Allow me to digress a bit.   I started really cooking around the age of 8.   Of course my first few efforts were really attempts to mimic the foods that I would watch my Granny & Mama make.   I remember the first time I decided I was going to cook a full meal by myself, I had turned 8, it was summer & my parents were enjoying a Saturday morning sleep in, expecting the kids would be safely tucked away.   I woke up at 6 AM and made my bathroom visit all sleepy eyed and looking forward to jumping back into bed; but midstream an idea struck me to cook breakfast.   Now luckily this story is not a story of the house burning down; it is actually a story of utter shock that an 8 year old that could barely reach the stove did not burn down the house or himself and in turn fried eggs and bacon with some burn but not inedible.  The parents were too amazed I think to consider punishment and instead sat down and ate their breakfast.   Emboldened by my first success I recreated the same breakfast for many weekends to come until the eggs were not as crispy as the bacon and the bacon was no longer charred and so I decided it was time to branch out into making Granny's biscuits.   Baking would hang me up and cause anxiety for years to come.   It was not until I was older that baking a cake did not cause a case of the "quits," to hit.

My family, a true Southern family steeped in good ole backwoods Blue Ridge Mountain fatalism helped profound my sense of doubting myself in all things, not just baking.   My mom's favorite saying which still resonates in my head from time to time is, "well, don't get your hopes up."   Now I know that is just a mom trying to help her child not get their hopes so high that they get crushed when things don't come out exactly as the child wants it to.   But for many years that little saying kept me from starting projects or finishing projects.  

In those adult years when I decided to push through my anxieties and sometimes overwhelming crippling doubt I discovered just how pervasive and malignant doubt can be to the human spirit.   It brings a huge swell of pride and accomplishment every time someone compliments me on a cake, pie, or brownie.   For many years my doubt kept baking a big mysterious scary lion I could not tame.    Maybe it was the reruns of Julia Child's cooking show on PBS or my discovery of Ina Garten (a.k.a. The Barefoot Contessa) on the Food Channel; but both went a long way in dismantling my mountain of fear and doubt surrounding baking.  

Doubt in my life is not a conquered monster long gone.   It remains a malignant part of my complex make up that is from time to time a raging ravishing cancer reeking havoc on even my every day chores.   However,  I am  happy to report that a good portion of the time it becomes more and more a disease in remission with every little triumph and small hill I might traverse.   The one thing I realize is that doubt, with all its debilitation is as only powerful as one makes it.   There is always the possibility that your cake won't rise or your apple pie won't win the prize but the amazing power you create within yourself when you TRY will trump that old doubt monster in submission.   Ask anyone who is addicted to my Outrageous Diva Brownies or Pound cake and I say without blushing they are winners, proof that doubt has no place as an ingredient in any recipe.   Proof, for me, is in the cake!