Let Us Tell Yours
Celebrating fathers, ours and yours: for their strength and vulnerability, their kindness and their courage; for carrying us as children and letting us fly as adults.
This Father’s Day listen to their stories; share their memories; and love them for who they are and all they give us.
As I grow older, my hair gets frizzier, and there’s many a morning when I like to pull it back and up into a cheap facelift. As I anchor it with a few bobby pins and a claw clip, I often think of Grandma Randall. She had smooth silver hair, not at all frizzy, and she’d sweep it up in one deft twist which poufed naturally in front into a slight pompadour. As a young girl, I admired her gesture of careless elegance, and marveled that the twist stayed put all day long.
Grandma was from Louisville, Kentucky, a southerner and a farm girl who did most things with a certain dash. She was also cranky and fundamentalist. You avoided getting into a long conversation with her; you might end up, as I did once, being forced by guilt into memorizing the first chapter of the Gospel of John.
Maybe Grandma’s critical nature prevented us from prodding her for more stories, or maybe we took it for granted, as children will, that we already knew all there was to learn about her life, but I regret not asking more, now that there’s no one left to witness or explain. I’m left with her pretty old hands on the silver twist of her hair, the wonderful peach cobbler she threw together one hot summer day when too many peaches ripened at once, her slightly bow legs she said were from horseback riding, and those delicious molasses cookies she made from memory.
Oh those cookies! How many times have my sisters and I said to one another, “I wish we had Grandma’s molasses cookie recipe!” But I never saw Grandma work from a recipe. Her molasses cookies were as big as my palm and a half-inch thick, soft and cakey, an aromatic dark brown. Did she use the sorghum she sometimes brought us from down south? I wish I’d taken the time to learn how she made them, to show my love that way. As I twist up my hair, I think of the small things we leave behind us, and the importance of witness. As the Gospel of John says, “In the beginning was the Word.” Words save memories; be sure to leave some behind. Be sure to collect them. Especially now while we’re all stuck inside with so little social interaction with those we love, get them to make a video of each other making the treasured brisket recipe, the family favorite O’Henry bars, mom’s inimitable pie crust. Tell us about your results.
And while memory plays tricks and makes many things impossibly delicious, here’s a challenge for you. Can you replicate Grandma Randall’s large, very dark, cakey molasses cookies? Maybe it’s regional?
What follows are two not quite it molasses cookie recipes. One is from The Silver Palate Cookbook. They’re addictive, but too flat and too chewy to be Grandma’s. The second is an old standby from Joy of Cooking, too small, too light colored, just not Gram’s. Neither can replicate Grandma’s recipe, put together by handfuls instead of using a measuring cup, by guess and by golly, from her long practice of 80 plus years. Got another offering?
Contributing writer Megan Johnson Randall is a retired English teacher who holds a master’s degree in creative writing.
Molasses Cookies
The Silver Palate Cookbook By Julee Rosso & Sheila Lukins
24 large, flat cookies
12 tablespoons (1 ½ sticks) butter
1 cup granulated sugar
¼ cup molasses
1 egg
1 ¾ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon ground cloves (I adjust to ¼ teaspoon as cloves can be overpowering)
1 ½ teaspoons ground ginger (I adjust to 2 heaping teaspoons)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
Old-Fashioned Molasses Cookies*
The Joy of Cooking By Irma S. Rombauer & Marion Rombauer Becker
About 40 2-inch cookies
Drop the batter from a teaspoon onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake 8 to 12 minutes.
*Please note that this recipe is a perfect illustration of Rombauer’s injunction to always read the recipe through before beginning. But never fear: no buttermilk? Cake flour? See her invaluable chapter on Substitutions.
A friend of mine emailed me an article today on cleaning house for the coronavirus. Armed with sprays and wipes I vigorously scrubbed all the high-touch surfaces I could think of while trying hard, as instructed, “not to be neurotic about it.” Fifteen minutes into my manic marathon, my stress levels rising, I shelved the wipes and reached for tea and shortbread. I was gonna need a better project.
Hunkered down at home, we’re all scrambling to find ways to get through this crisis and maintain our sanity, our spirits and our sense of self. And while being stuck inside is hardly an opportunity any one of us would have wished for, it does give us time to do things we might never have considered. Sure there’s binge-watching Mad Men or re-reading Jane Austen, but for me neither stretches the boundaries of novelty. And as the world spins wildly around me, I’m not inclined to file photos or organize my kitchen cabinets. So let me suggest a project that will set your imagination free, throw you back into the past, or jolt you into the future. A project that’s all about you: creative writing.
One of the first and best books I ever read on the subject, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, talks about writing without any expectations, “to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination.” Let go of your paralyzing constraints. What will people think? How do I begin? My spelling is terrible! And instead, dive in:
If nothing else, letting your creative side run free might take your mind off the world outside the window. Remember, some of our most treasured writers were witnesses to the toughest times.
True North: A Love Story In Five Maps recounts a couple’s courtship through their travels and adventures.
The journalist Isabel Wilkerson once said the trick of getting ordinary people to open up about their lives is to create what she calls “accelerated intimacy” between her and her sources. Don’t ever lead the interview, she cautions, instead let it develop like a guided conversation.
I thought of that the other day when I sat down to interview a young couple for a Short Take they’d commissioned for their first wedding anniversary. They were easy-going and eager to talk, but describing the ups and downs of a love affair can quiet the most effusive among us. In their case, we were lucky, they’d come equipped with props: five maps.
As they told the story of the maps, connecting each to a moment in their courtship, they visibly relaxed into the conversation. What started as a formal interview quietly shifted gears into something less guarded. Of course letting a couple steer the narrative can feel a bit like watching a game of street basketball — he starts to dribble, she steals the ball, he recovers it, pauses, and passes back to her — but the process brings out the best of both partners’ tale-telling abilities as they pick up the thread of each other’s storylines and expand on the other’s thoughts and memories. It’s a delight to record.
In the best of personal interviews, what begins as a dry series of introductory questions quickly morphs into a fun and often even funny narration. It can be irreverent, intense, emotional and curious, but most often provides the makings of an openhearted narrative — a love story to cherish. — Caitlin Randall
The basketball analogy is apt. The subjects of our book — Jesse and Betsy — are athletes, and when they are in motion, they are at their least self-conscious. And so I embraced their suggestion that they be photographed while going for a run. Not only did that free them from worrying about how they looked on camera, but it created an air of spontaneity that resulted in images that pleased us all. Certainly their dog, Banjo, helped lighten the mood.
It was only after the portrait session that I read Caitlin’s text for the Short Take and began designing Jesse and Betsy’s book. Its subtitle, A Love Story In Five Maps, was a given, but the concept didn’t come together until I actually saw the maps that Jesse had drawn. His very literal interpretation of a compass rose — complete with thorns — was as romantic as it was clever. I thought, What does the rose point to? What is the heart’s desire? The answer was our title: True North. — Peter Crabtree
Leap Year, that weird calendar oddity that only comes every four years, has inspired a slew of stories and superstitions. The most famous — February 29th is the day women can ask men to marry them — was conjured up in Ireland sometime back in the 5th century.
Legend has it that an Irish nun known as Saint Brigid of Kildare bitterly complained to Saint Patrick that too many women were waiting too long for men to propose marriage. The country’s patron saint agreed to give women one day in the calendar — conveniently one that falls only every four years — when they could ask their longtime suitors to wed. If the man said ‘no’ tradition demanded that he buy his spurned girlfriend a silk gown. I wonder how many rejected women felt they’d won the better end of that deal.
For a woman to propose on any other day among the 365/366 in the Gregorian calendar was and, to a certain extent, still is considered a major no-no. Astoundingly, society clings to the notion that a marriage proposal is a male responsibility. The idea is so culturally pervasive that a woman dropping down on one knee to propose is still a rarity. The image of a ‘desperate woman’ prevails.
So what do you think? Does it really matter who proposes to whom — or why, or how? And a shoutout to all the modern women out there: Would you or have you popped the question? We’d love to hear your stories!
Here are a few famous women who have done the proposing:
At first blush, writing about romance may seem as easy as, well … falling in love. It isn’t, even for the hopeless romantics among us. At The Story Project we have the lucky advantage of penning the stories our clients tell us. It’s not up to us to devise romantic plot twists, adorable “meet cutes,” or emotional grand declarations. That’s best left to the Hollywood RomCom writers.
Our job is the not-so-small matter of coaxing couples to talk (yes, it’s mostly the men that duck for cover). And then there’s the challenge of writing a story — from first glance to “I do” — that captures the essence of their romance.
As a Valentine’s Day gift to the wanna-be romance novelists among you, or just those of you inspired enough to compose a truly personal card this year, here are some of our best tips for writing about love:
— Steer clear of clichés. “It was Kismet” or “we fit together like pieces of a puzzle” are as old as the hills (excuse the cliché) and read that way.
— Write in your own voice. Any attempt to parrot Jane Austen’s genius, or for that matter, Danielle Steele’s sauciness, reads like what it is: a stale imitation.
— The “meet cute,” Hollywood’s name for a charming, sometimes ironic way for a couple to meet, is one of the most used tropes in film. It’s also one of the most difficult to write. Skip it. A first encounter doesn’t have to be adorable or embarrassing to grab your readers’ attention. Sometimes reality works fine. I once asked a colleague how she met her husband. “We met in the office,” she said shrugging at the dullness of it. “We hated each other. It took two postings and three countries before we fell in love.” You gotta ask: how did that happen? There’s usually a good story behind every match, even if it’s not the made-in-Hollywood variety. Ask around if you need some inspiration.
— Search for words that really express the sentiment you’re trying to convey. Her “twinkling” blue eyes and his “amazing” physique are not exactly descriptive. Then again there’s this: “The elevator whisks me with terminal velocity to the twentieth floor.” Terminal velocity? Ugh, but the author made a gazillion bucks from it. See 50 Shades of Grey.
— Trust yourself. Consider what you really want to say and be brave. Putting it out there takes courage, but then again, so does falling in love.
If you need more inspiration, keep an eye out for The Story Project’s upcoming Short-Take telling a clients’ love story, True North: A Love Story in Five Maps, posting on our website (with permission) this coming week.
Have a Happy Valentine’s Day!
A moment of silence please for those among us who will sit down this holiday season to awkward conversations, prickly interrogations and unwelcome political jousting. Do we really need another round of Uncle Harry’s latest conspiracy theory gleaned from Facebook? And how many times in one year can Aunt Tilly ask when she’ll dance at your daughter’s wedding?
Despite the plethora of suggestions out there to guide us through the political and social minefield that is 2019, The Story Project is offering it’s own List. We begin by suggesting that everyone at the table or around the fireplace turn inward. Make the season a true family event. Here are five questions to help get you started:
• To Your Grandparents: How did you meet each other? Was it a long courtship? Did your parents pray for a wedding or beg you to break up?
• To Your Parents: What was the best-ever family vacation? What was the worst? How did you celebrate the holidays when you were young?
• To Your Siblings: What’s your favorite Christmas/Hanukkah/ holiday memory? And your funniest?
• To Your Kids: What traditions, favorite dishes included, do you most want our family to continue and to pass down to your children?
A few things to remember:
• Avoid yes or no answers by asking open-ended questions. For example, you met Grandpa in New York? How did that come about?
• A good interviewer gives the subject space and time to answer. Sit back, relax and let the stories wash over you.
• It’s about fun and tapping into family memories. If you ask heartfelt questions and listen deeply, you never know where the conversation will lead.
The Story Project team wishes you a holiday season full of memories and wonderful stories to tell.
Robert Frost moved to Shaftsbury, Vermont, in 1920, intending to establish an apple orchard. During his nearly two decades there, he wrote some of his best-known poems, including the iconic “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
In his honor, the Bennington Museum will mount a major exhibition next year, Robert Frost, At Present in Vermont, examining the poet’s life and work in the context of the landscape and culture of Bennington County.
In a prelude of sorts, the museum’s current exhibition, A Snowy Evening, features 31 regional artists responding to the poet’s work. Among them is Story Project co-founder Peter Crabtree, who contributed “After Frost: Do, Does, Did.”
Peter’s artist’s statement follows:
Did I really watch him on TV that January day in 1961 when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated, or was it later, in some grainy newsreel footage, that I first became aware of Robert Frost — stooped and white-haired, like some kindly grandfather — reciting from memory his poem “A Gift Outright” to mark the occasion? Either way, the impression that he had always been an even-keeled, mild old man would stick with me through high school and only be shaded somewhat by the mandatory reading of “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.”
But in fact, a closer examination of the poems Frost wrote while living in South Shaftsbury reveals a person lashed by some dark inner weather. Read “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” “Spring Pools,” and “Acquainted with the Night” and you realize that impermanence was much on his mind and that the darkness must have followed him throughout his life.
And so this piece, “After Robert Frost: Do, Does, Did,” pays tribute to that man and his method. No one photograph could do justice to the way his poems work — building image upon image — or the passage of time, or Frost’s clear-eyed, unsentimental observation of the way we live as part of, rather than apart from, nature.
— Peter Crabtree
A Snowy Evening runs through Dec. 30, although a closed-bid auction for the works in the exhibit ends Dec. 22 at 4 pm. (The winning bid will be split, with half the proceeds going to the artist and the remainder to the museum.) For more information about the event and to see the other works in the show, please visit http://bit.ly/snowyevening
At this time of year, the question of stuffing can get territorial. There are those who want to try something new every year—cranberries, giblets, walnuts, wild rice, apricots! — and those who, having found their perfection, never want to mess with it from year to year. I fall into the latter camp—with tweaking.
I don’t remember if our mother always made her Italian style stuffing for Thanksgiving; I think there were more conventional early years of plain sage and onions. But for me, her chestnut and sausage version was the apotheosis of flavor and texture, and so it has remained. We forget how a little thing like stuffing can represent a radical departure in a family. Our traditions are wrapped up in family lore and the stories we tell around the dining room table and changing that by even a teaspoon can stir the pot.
As eldest sister, I have a long history of watching Mom. Looking back, I’m amazed at all we took for granted: her talent, her wit, her Italian persona. Mom was not Italian, but had lived with a family in Perugia for two years. This came about because Mom, a bit passive and accommodating as I saw her in the context of her marriage, always wanted to be an artist. But her parents insisted she go to a liberal arts college where she would become “well-rounded.” She would have more to say as an artist, they insisted. She paid them back by majoring in history of art, learning Italian, and going to Italy right after WWII. The experience shaped more than just her stuffing making. Peeling chestnuts late at night, she might tell you about the count who asked her to marry him in the most backward, passionless way, or her artist lover, as if you were her girlfriend as much as her daughter.
Nowadays you can find plain cooked chestnuts already peeled in jars or sealed packets, but in the 50s and 60s and 70s, adding chestnuts to stuffing was a labor of love involving raw nuts. First you had to slice an X on the bottom of each nut with a sharp paring knife so that steam could escape. We were the kind of family that never had a sharp knife. It was a chore that seemed interminable.
Next, you roasted them in the oven. Here, Mom had an advantage: a Garland restaurant stove, bought at auction by our architect father to accommodate six kids. Once they were done to perfection (always dicey to get that part just right), came the hardest part of this long job—peeling. I don’t know if you’ve ever bought a bag of hot chestnuts from a street vendor in a New York City park (I hear those days are long gone), but they don’t peel easily. They’re like little brains, with lots of convolutions and a thin inner skin. I remember late nights of peeling and talking, and the distinctive velvety texture of the inner shells. My mother must have been exhausted by Thanksgiving morning.
She would have ordered a 24-lb turkey, and we ate earlier in those days, so she would get up at 4AM to stuff it, sew it shut, and slide it into the oven in time for midday dinner. We’d wake to the smell of roasting turkey and aromatic stuffing as it slowly filled the house, building anticipation—of cousins and aunts and uncles and lovely Grandma coming, of delicious food. It was a mouth-watering smell full of the promise of warmth, laughter and feasting.
While you’re prepping Thanksgiving dinner, during the meal, and in the drowsy groaning aftermath, ask your older relatives for stories. Get details; get recipes.
Life is such a little arc, as my mother would say. Too soon, the stories will be gone forever.
The proportions are flexible; how big is your bird?
1 pound or so of Italian sausage (must contain fennel seed), removed from casings if necessary
2 large onions, chopped
Sage and rosemary and thyme as you like, but I find any stuffing is best with a little more seasoning than you’d think, since the flavors meld together in cooking, and could become indistinct. I use fresh garden herbs, usually still in the garden at Thanksgiving.
2 cups peeled, cooked chestnuts (Yipes! Don’t use marron glacés, they’re sweetened for desserts!)
Dried, stale bread cubes
Mom baked bread throughout our childhood, having been introduced to good bread in Italy. We never had Wonder Bread and found it horrifying — no bite. These days, one sister bakes beautiful artisan loaves, but I, having discovered I have celiac, use homemade gluten free cornbread. No one complains.
Fry the sausage in a large pan, breaking it up with a spatula. Do not drain. Add chopped onions, and when the onion is soft, the bread and herbs. You might add up to a stick of butter to moisten, but remember, the best stuffing is that cooked inside the turkey cavity, where the juices moisten it. If you have leftovers that don’t fit, add a little giblet stock to moisten, and cook covered.
Contributing writer Megan Johnson is a retired English teacher who holds a master’s degree in creative writing.
On a recent Sunday, snow whirling outside, I scoured the house for something to read, hoping to curl up with a good thriller. Tucked in among a motley collection of still unpacked titles — picture books, college texts and weighty political tracts — I discovered a dog-eared copy of HMS Ulysses, the classic adventure story of combat in the North Atlantic. Captured by the cover image, a World War II cruiser steaming through stormy seas, I began to read the yellowed pages. This was my father’s war. The treacherous routes drawn up on the book’s nautical map would have felt familiar to him. And as I traced those journeys it struck me how little I knew of his harrowing years at sea and the memories he carried with him into old age.
The novel follows the fortunes of a merchant convoy’s terrifying voyage to Russia’s Arctic outposts and the deadly game of cat-and-mouse they play with Nazi U-boats and bombers. Hardly the kind of narrative I regularly devour. So I was more than a little surprised to feel the wave of longing and regret the story triggered.
It was the vivid descriptions that moved me: mountainous rogue waves and Arctic temperatures of -60 F, clouds of frozen sea spray and torpedo explosions bunched together in rapid-fire succession — three hits in three seconds — that ripped and shredded metal, catapulting sailors into the icy waters.
Through it all I pictured my dad. A ship’s engineer, he survived 30 voyages across the Atlantic, including four missions to Archangel and Murmansk. He was my son’s age, 26 years old, when he sailed those deadly waters, running the North Atlantic gauntlet to Russia. More than 800 ships, 40 convoys, followed that route between 1941 and 1945, risking everything to deliver supplies to the Soviet allies. Of those, over 100 never made it home, marking it as one of the most dangerous duties of the Second World War.
When we were kids my father shared few tales of his adventures in the Merchant Marine, shrugging off that time as the long-forgotten past. Near the end of his life he sometimes talked of a Christmas Eve when the crew watched helplessly as a nearby tanker was torpedoed, its sailors burning to death in oily Arctic waters. But mostly he kept those horror stories to himself.
There was one scene he’d tell us kids, often with a gruff laugh: “It was late night and I was on deck having a smoke. We still didn’t have our orders. I hoped we might be headed for Scotland, maybe get to go to shore, drink a warm beer, dance with a girl.”
Standing in the biting wind, braced against the ship’s heavy pitch, he offered a fellow sailor a cigarette. The two men peered into the winter sky, searching the stars to plot their voyage. It didn’t take long to calculate. “So much for Scotland,” the sailor said, tossing his cigarette over the stern. My father sighed as he trudged back to the engine room and his duty. “It’s Murmansk. Again,”
As a child, my take away from the story was that my father could navigate from the stars. As an adult, I find myself considering all that my father left unsaid. What was he thinking as he stared out into the darkness, facing the certainty of piercing cold days and countless nights without sleep, the possibility of Arctic storms, and the unremitting fear of sudden and violent death? I wish I’d urged my father to tell me the story of those remarkable days. I wish I’d recorded his adventures and documented his memories, decoding how they shaped him in later life to pass on as a gift to future generations.
Maybe it’s the missed chance of witnessing my father’s story that’s made me passionate about telling other people’s histories. I’ve seen firsthand that the stories left untold are forever lost, and that those told second-hand are corrupted in the retelling, each time with more lapses and more inaccuracies until finally, drifting from generation to generation, they simply fade away.
Talking to people about their lives — hearing their remembrances, often deeply personal and emotional — is an extraordinary privilege. It’s a privilege that is now my work. The job begins with listening, but it’s in the writing that a unique theme emerges and personal histories are woven into a larger story. A timeline for a life can be constructed, but it’s placing our life stories in the crowded arc of human events that gives them meaning for future generations and adds an invaluable dimension to our own family story. It’s those stories that we cherish most and hope to pass down to our children and grandchildren.
— Caitlin Randall
