Category: Family

A Tuscan April Fools: What Lies Beneath

Posted on by Caitlin Randall in Family, Holidays, Memory
The house in Tuscany.

My husband hung up the phone without a word. I listened to the stillness, glancing across the room at my father-in-law. His wide grin had faded and he looked suddenly nervous. We’d gone too far this year.

My in-laws had retired to a small town in Tuscany, just over an hour from Florence. Surrounded by olive groves, their house stood on a hill with show-stopping views over the undulating countryside. There were lemon trees in terracotta pots, a magical garden and a swimming pool with a view of a 15th century church. Postcard perfect.

Long before they sold the house, when our two sons were still in grade school, we would visit for a few weeks every spring. At the time, we lived in London and it was relatively easy trip for me to make alone with the boys, my husband meeting us later in the vacation. For my father-in-law it was a prized chance to reconnect with his grandsons. Not long after we’d arrive he’d pull out a list of plans and projects: tractor rides and trips to a favorite pizza place were always slated. Our April Fools’ pranks were initially low-key — my father in-law would tell the boys that the Easter rabbit was lost in the olive grove — a joke that sent them scurrying outside where he’d surprise them with a quirky present hidden in one of the ancient gnarled trees.   

I don’t remember when the two of us ratcheted up the practical joke, turning it into a full-fledged caper, but I do know the target shifted from the boys to my husband. I never imagined my father-in-law to be a good liar. A straightlaced Midwesterner who’d travelled the world as an oil executive, he hardly fit the con artist mold. But that year the spirit of Hilaria must have enveloped him, enough to concoct an April Fools’ fable worthy of P.T. Barnum.

When my husband called that night to catch-up on the day and talk of plans for his arrival the next week, my father-in-law answered. In a deadly serious voice he told my husband that something upsetting had happened. “Three guys from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage had come to the house unannounced this afternoon.”

Pitch perfect, the prank continued: he described the visit, their note taking, the walk around the 18th-century villa, banging the walls in the basement. By the time he was finished, I was almost convinced there had been a visit. 

And then the climax: Direzione generale Archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio would be digging up the garden, the basement and possibly even the pool grounds in search of suspected Etruscan ruins. For decades to come they’d be unearthing whatever lay beneath. My husband fell for it fast and hard. I took the phone, embellishing my father-in-law’s whopper. By then we simply couldn’t resist carrying on, until … until he told us he’d leave London for Rome the next day, that he’d call an Italian lawyer to try and protect the property from years of archeological digging … until, it wasn’t funny anymore. To his everlasting credit, my husband laughed when we called back — two remorseful April fools stammering “gotcha” and “we’re sorry” all at once.

Twenty years on, it’s still a tale told when our sons visit near Easter time. The story stirs memories and talk of my in-laws’ house and the precious holidays the four of us spent there, exploring the Italian countryside and relishing the beauty of that fairytale place.

Of the memories we cherish most, the best are often made in the places closest to our hearts that seem to harbor spirits of their own. The spirit of my father-in-law’s villa, part of my children’s childhoods and a vanished time in our lives, still lingers. One of my sons has an oil painting of the house hanging in his student digs. It’s a part of our family narrative, like an old friend that touched our lives and shaped our views, letting us see the world in a more beautiful light.  

And no, we never did unearth a single Etruscan artifact.

The view from the pool.

Stories Told In The Darkest Days of Winter

Posted on by Megan Johnson in Family, Holidays, Memory, Reading
A clipper ship, not unlike my grandfather’s, navigates a storm at sea. (Currier & Ives, courtesy Library of Congress)

It’s New Year’s Day and I’m shucking half a dozen of my Christmas oysters, sent this Covid-time by my son and his wife in Portland, Maine. They were too far away to make it here safely for Christmas, so the oysters were meant to fill in. Feeling very lucky, I suck down one silky oyster after another, sweet, cold and briny, and follow each with a slug of iced vodka.

Jonathan Swift remarked, “He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.” I’ll bet it was a woman; oysters just lie there waiting to be gathered. Their defense is holding tight, but they’re not hard to pry open with the right knife. The way our minds turn often in the same groove, as I pry, I think of my father, whose earliest memory was of sitting beside his father on the cellar stairs, his father shucking and eating oysters and occasionally giving one to the boy. They were kept cool down cellar in a small barrel. Dad must have been too young, or too overawed by his father, for the ick factor to spoil their companionable sharing. By the time Dad was 4 ½, polio had struck and they say my grandfather could no longer touch his eldest son, his namesake. Grandfather believed the Bible: the sins of the father had been visited upon the son.

Suddenly I remember that on Christmas Day my brother, Paul, sent an email about Grandpa Randall. We were taught to call the absent man Grandpa, but we never knew him. He was an old man in his seventies when he sat on those stairs with his son. Our grandmother was his 4th wife, the others having died in childbirth or of the kinds of diseases that killed people before penicillin. Known in his world as Captain Randall, he died in his eighties when Dad was eight years old.

In the email, ignored in the rush of Christmas morning, Paul tells how he’s been reading one of Grandpa’s ship’s logs that had been saved and passed down. In the log, Paul deciphers his worry about finding a good crew. While at sea, he misses his wife Florence, but once at home, longs for the sea. Paul and I laugh about that seesawing of desire, how we miss the hullabaloo of family right now, but are like cats with their fur rubbed the wrong way after prolonged holiday exposure, too many sweets, and booze. Captain Randall had little hullabaloo then; he wasn’t blessed with four children until his seventies.

But Paul is interested in that concern about crew for a reason. He thinks it might shed a light on a terrible tragedy. Earlier in his life, Captain Randall hired his younger brother Austin, promising his mother to look out for the boy. Rounding Cape Horn on a run to  the west coast, a huge storm sprang up. Austin had scrambled up the mast to help down another sailor who was frozen in place during a desperate effort to reef sail. The ship lurched, there was a cry, a hurtling shape “flew from the yardarm and quickly passed astern,” Paul wrote me. The last Grandpa saw of his brother was his arm waving goodbye amidst those roiling seas. “Not waving, but drowning,” I think, now that I am old myself.

Prying at the story now, Paul wonders if the other sailor had been a greenhorn who froze in panic? One of those not very good crew members Grandpa worried about in his log? Or, as often happened, were his hands literally frozen to the shrouds by icy spray? And Austin–how long was his fall, how wild his cry in the fierce wind?

When we were children, we wanted a lifeboat. We didn’t understand that more men would have been risked, and in vain in those mountainous, freezing waves. We didn’t understand that a large sailing ship cannot simply stop and turn around on Cape Horn.

These strange, wild stories that are told and retold and parsed again in families—prying open half a dozen oysters can bring them back as we seek the meat of the story, what really happened, how a man whose ship’s logs were mostly a dull running tally of expenditures and weather, how did he feel that terrible cold day? How did it change him, and my father, and all of us? We keep our stories close, and they are never far from us, especially in the darkest days of the year—of a pandemic year—when our thoughts as naturally turn to death as to the well-loved living.

Captain Randall’s ship log from 1877. (Courtesy Paul Randall)

OFF MY BOOKSHELF: THE ART OF GIFTING BOOKS

Posted on by Caitlin Randall in Books, Family, Holidays, Memory, Reading, Writing
Caitlin Randall

Some people have a knack for match making. In my grandmother’s case, it was a talent for matching books to people. Every Christmas for as far back as I can remember, she’d give a book to each of her 22 grandchildren. She’d zero in on our passions, think hard about our reading habits and often choose volumes we’d never have imagined reading ourselves. Her rule was to pick books she thought might intrigue us, rather than books she thought we should read. She introduced me to The Borrowers, A Wrinkle in Time, Harriet the Spy, Sherlock Holmes and the first narrative I’d ever read about life as an enslaved African-American. Rarely did she miss the mark, making her present one of my favorites to open on Christmas morning.

I’ve carried on my grandmother’s tradition, giving books to my husband and two sons every Christmas, although maybe not with her exceptional eye and insight. For me, picking out the gift — sifting through a stack of possibilities in a quiet corner of a bookstore  — is half the fun. But like just about everything else in 2020, shopping isn’t normal this year. The rush to buy presents is shaping up to be a mostly online experience, taking the pleasure and a good deal of the creativity out of the custom.  That’s mostly true for book buying as well, leaving us with the prospect of scrolling through online book blurbs — mind-numbingly boring and enough to derail the even most beloved holiday tradition.

“When I was a child, books were both an escape and a sanctuary. The characters in some novels felt so real to me … that I worried they might leap out of the pages at night.”

Michiko Kakutani

So this year, I’ve suspended any thoughts of happily wandering through my local bookshop and committed to buying online. To get me through it, I’ve opted for some elaborate present prepping.  It starts with a cup of tea, or better yet, hot chocolate. Curled up in my favorite corner of the couch, a cozy throw tucked in at my feet, I formulate my buying plan. 

I begin with a few lists I trust:

The Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/lifestyle/2020-best-books/

The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/books/times-critics-top-books-of-2020.html

These offer critics’ choice for the best fiction and nonfiction of the past year. It’s a good beginning, but I often find myself wanting something deeper, a viewpoint that considers the history of great books not just those trending over the past 12 months. With that in mind, a recent addition to my bookshelf is proving a wonderful resource: Ex Libris, 100 Books to Read and ReRead by Michiko Kakutani.  

The Pulitzer-Prize winning literary critic shares 100 personal, thought-provoking essays about books that helped shape her life. The introduction is an eloquent ode to books and reading. “Why do we love books so much?” she asks. They are, she says, like time-machines that can transport us back to the past, bring us into the future and carry us to  far parts of the globe and even more distant places in the universe.

“When I was a child, books were both an escape and a sanctuary,” Kakutani writes. “ The characters in some novels felt so real to me … that I worried they might leap out of the pages at night …”

I felt that too as a child, but longed for them to take the leap. When I first read Harriet the Spy, I wanted to be Harriet — daring, adventurous, a detective and a journalist in the making. I carried a notebook for months, keeping detailed accounts of  “strange events” occurring in the neighborhood. If only Harriet had stepped from the pages of her book and asked me to join her gang!

Kakutani’s recommendations are wide-ranging and often surprising — a collection that runs the gamut from Muhammad Ali to T.S. Eliot to Vladimir Nabokov to Dr Seuss. There are favorite classics and timely new novels, memoirs and essential works in American history. It’s a fascinating compilation; a book to guide even the most prolific reader and help source the perfect present for the book lover on anyone’s list. Indeed, Ex Libris, richly illustrated by Dana Tanamachi, itself makes a wonderful gift to the bibliophile in your life.

Once inspired, it’s easy to get down to the business of buying a book quickly and efficiently, selecting and ordering within minutes of landing on an online bookseller’s website.  And let me say here that at The Story Project we highly recommend buying through www.bookshop.org where 75% of the profits support local, independent book sellers. We’re fans of The Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT, where you can shop in person (masked) or online, and The Bennington Bookshop, the oldest independent bookstore in Vermont, open for in-person shopping  (masked).

Happy reading and a very Merry Holiday Season to all!

The Haunted Attic

Posted on by Caitlin Randall in Family, Holidays, Memory
Father and daughter ghouls march in the annual North Bennington, Vt., Halloween Parade.

For a brief time my sister Honor was famous.  It wasn’t her wit, her sense of adventure or even her heavy blonde hair that drew the crowds. She had the good fortune to be born the day before Halloween and to live in an old Victorian house with a raftered attic, creaking floorboards and a reputation for strange occurrences — all of which collided to spark the ghoulish imaginations of three of her siblings.

For as far back as I could remember an invitation to her birthday party was the hottest ticket in town. Kids scrambled for them, knowing what their parents didn’t: that this wasn’t a child’s Halloween party with Casper-like ghosts and hovering adults trying to pass off a bowl of peeled grapes as eyeballs. This was a test of nerves and a chance to be scared. Really scared.

I can’t claim to know how my two brothers and oldest sister took control of the attic tours — an event that quickly eclipsed all other games, even a prize-laden scavenger hunt — but every year they got progressively more creative. It began with a story, inspired by my grandfather the sea captain. But it was my oldest brother Marty’s artistry that fictionalized and embellished an already dramatic life.

Born in 1844, my grandfather went to sea at 17, a Yankee cabin boy in the Civil War. By the time he was 25 he was captain of his own three-master schooner, building and sailing six more in quick succession. He built the house where my siblings and I grew up for my grandmother, his fourth wife. Thirty years younger than her husband, she gave him four children, the last born when my grandfather was 80.

Marty and my sister Megan knew a great story when they heard one and used the bare bones of this one to craft their own grisly yarn. The sea-captain angle was irresistible and they concocted a tale involving a lost leg, a tragic death rounding Cape Horn and a ghostly return to the only home Captain Randall ever knew. Marty got to play the Captain, hidden in one of the attics shadowed alcoves with a wooden peg leg and a mariner’s costume that got more sophisticated with each passing Halloween.

Guests were led one by one up the vertical staircase, some retreating before they reached the top. I can still remember standing on the last step, the late afternoon sunlight gleaming through the oval attic window, it’s colored panes turning the dust motes a sinister shade of red. It was Megan’s idea to add sound to the scene by playing an old recording of King Lear on slow speed. The voices, more like moans, were as good an imitation of a ghost as anyone could imagine. Kids were led from station to station, where they pulled on a “corpse’s” leg and heard the gory tale of how they died. When they reached my oldest brother, they would duly pull his peg leg, only to have it come off in their hands to ghastly howls from the ghost.

Once they’d been at it for a few years, a new recruit was brought in. Jim was our nextdoor neighbor, one of four boys, an extraordinary athlete and a reckless daredevil. It was his inspired idea to drop down from the rafters with a noose around his neck, scaring one girl so badly she famously leapt down the attic stairs all in one go. That was the year, and presumably the antic, that brought the haunted attic to an end.   

Stories of Honor’s Halloween parties have been fodder for our family narratives for decades, following a script we’ve all practiced since childhood. As the youngest of the six kids, my recollections tend to be heavily discounted. I look back on those events through the eyes of a six-year-old, in awe of what my siblings were capable of creating. Was that attic as terrifying as my memory still insists? Probably not. But even if the physical details are blurred, the emotional power of that haunted space stays with me, a story that never dies.

Happy Halloween!

A Wedding In Complicated Times: From Blow-Out Event to Minimony

Posted on by Roheela Malik in Family, Love
Photos: Infinity Photography

As the mother of three daughters, two of whom had been planning their weddings before the pandemic started, I never imagined we’d see the first ceremony staged on our back porch. We come from a family that loves big parties and a tradition where weddings can go for days with as many as 300 guests. My own wedding boasted around 200 guests. So how could I guess that we’d have to whittle down my eldest daughter’s guest list from 130 to only seven people in attendance, a number that included the bride and groom.  

Clearly, the pandemic has turned our lives inside out, challenging expectations and putting plans on hold. When life demands a compromise that’s what you have to do. Or, as the Chinese proverb puts it: “The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher.”

My eldest daughter’s wedding was to be in mid-October but she postponed it to next year as many of the guests would have been traveling from overseas and from across the country. She and her fiancé didn’t want to compromise anyone’s safety. Their big wedding might be delayed until the pandemic was over but they decided not to delay moving on with their lives. A ‘minimony,’ or a mini ceremony, was what they chose to do. It would be a special day no matter what!

My daughter wanted to keep her original wedding dress for the big celebration next year so we scrambled to find something suitable for this event. The search began online and we were soon inundated with boxes arriving and being returned. Finally in desperation, she and I donned our masks, and made the one and only visit to the mall. It was as if the dress was just waiting for her – a simple but elegant dress in a delicate opal grey. To me the dress was my daughter personified – understated but beautiful.

@kneadtheeats

Their wedding florist arranged flowers, in soft hues of white and champagne interspersed with eucalyptus, for this much-abridged event. My youngest daughter who has turned into a baker-extraordinaire through the pandemic, announced she would make an elderflower and lemon wedding cake – inspired by Megan Markle and Prince Harry’s cake – a responsibility I would have balked at, but she jumped at the chance.

On the day of the minimony the house was filled with the seven of us. The bride and groom were present – check. The florist arrived with gorgeous flowers to deck the porch – check.  The cake was finished and decorated – check. The table was beautifully set for the wedding dinner – check. And all completed before heading over to the mosque for the imam to officiate the mini ceremony.

Back at home we had some lovely photographs taken of our tiny wedding party and then we cozied up for dinner on the porch and cake cutting. A Zoom call with the grandparents and the extended family would further mark this celebration, even if a few relatives were muted as they talked over each other.  Surprisingly, we were having a good time. The intimacy of the minimony allowed us to relax and have fun in the comfort of our home. I watched my daughter and my new son-in-law as we all lingered at the dinner table. Despite the chill in the air and the darkness descending, their faces shone with love for each other and sheer happiness. The joy around the table was palpable. It was a day we’d all cherish forever.

As the first of my daughters got married I wondered how she would tell the story of her special day. How would all the countless couples who have postponed 2020 weddings to then concoct mini ceremonies and impromptu events record their wedding-day memories?  My thoughts turned to reflections of my own wedding, looking back after thirty years of happy marriage. Most of us remember vividly what happened on our big day, but to describe our feelings from that moment takes more effort. I know from my work at The Story Project that even young couples, eager to describe their courtship, need gentle guidance to help them fully capture their story. As I think about my wedding and my daughter’s mini ceremony, I’m reminded that it’s worth the effort to remember, to piece together the memories and emotions of one of the most precious moments in our lives and record our stories as they should be told now and for the future.

Infinity Photography

Remembering What Matters Most

Posted on by Caitlin Randall in Family, Memory, Uncategorized, Writing

I ’ve done a lot of thinking about my own mortality these past few months, in the thick of the pandemic. Like most people, I’m not easy with pondering my own demise, and even less comfortable planning for it.

But I’ve discovered that thinking about death has forced me to consider what matters most in life: family, friends and long-held passions.  It’s been an unexpectedly comforting meditation, unearthing old memories, untold stories and life lessons I’ve picked up over many decades. It struck me, not for the first time, that while we often define our lives by the material treasures around us, it’s the life lessons we learn, the wisdom we gain and the stories we pass on to the next generation that truly define our legacy.

My musings got me thinking about ethical wills, a particular kind of storytelling where the focus isn’t on the timeline of a life, but the values that bind us together.

The ethical will has been around since Biblical times. In fact, there’s a reference to the tradition in Genesis 49 when a dying Jacob calls his sons to his tent, determined to give each of the 12 some very specific advice.  

One of the most famous early ethical wills, written in the 11th century, comes from a Spanish doctor, Judah ibn Tibbon. The document, which runs over 50 pages, is packed with detailed advice for his son Samuel on an slew of subjects, from telling him to study medicine and the Torah, to ordering him to honor his wife. Apparently eager to leave no stone unturned in Samuel’s life, the anxious father even spelled out how his son should care for the family library:

Never refuse to lend books to anyone who has not the means to purchase books for himself, but only act thus to those who can be trusted to return the volumes. Cover the bookcases with rugs of fine quality and preserve them from damp and from mice, for your books are your greatest treasure…

Modern ethical wills have come a long way from those ancient scrolls. To start, they come in curiously creative packages — films, digital recordings, handwritten letters, illustrated books, a collage of beloved photos, a laundry list of ideas — and can be addressed to anyone the writer thinks should read them. I heard of one case in which a young mother, diagnosed with terminal cancer and longing to leave her two daughters her best advice, bundled together a packet of letters for each girl to read on the most important days of her life — 21st birthday, graduation, wedding, becoming a parent.

Recognizing the emotional clout of ethical wills, lawyers are increasingly adding them to their estate planning toolbox too. As the Vermont attorney William Deveneau explains:  

For the most part we leave the decision to write an ethical will up to the client, but we do tell them that if they want their values, life lessons and advice to be passed on to the next generation, they need to put it in writing or it’s unlikely to ever happen.

This is especially true, Deveneau says, if there’s potential for a quarrel when the legal will is read.

If there’s the possibility that the [legal] will might infuriate people, I suggest including an explanation. I’ve found that explaining the values and emotions behind the decision can help soothe conflict among the descendants.

Sometimes an ethical will goes well beyond a family legacy, posing instead as a speech that powerfully addresses the writer’s hopes and dreams for the next generation. In this month of cancelled graduations, I’m reminded of Steve Job’s poignant commencement address at Stanford. Standing before the Class of 2005, believing in that moment he’d survived cancer, Jobs bequeaths the graduates his lessons on life. Emotional and inspiring, the man who changed the tech landscape forever told the crowd that coming close to death had forced him to look at what was most important in his life. Don’t settle, he urged them, do what you love.

…Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition…

The speech ends, as any will should, learning from the past and looking toward the future: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

I Wish I’d Asked

Posted on by Megan Johnson in Cooking, Family, Memory, Uncategorized
Megan Johnson Randall in her Vermont kitchen.

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

  1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
  2. Melt butter, add sugar and molasses, and mix thoroughly. Lightly beat egg and add to butter mixture; blend well.
  3. Sift flour with spices, salt and baking soda, and add to first mixture; mix. Batter will be wet.
  4. Lay a sheet of foil on a cookie sheet. Drop tablespoons of cookie batter on foil, leaving 3 inches between cookies. These will spread during baking.
  5. Bake until cookies start to darken, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from oven while still soft. Carefully slide foil off baking sheet. Let cookies cool on foil.

Old-Fashioned Molasses Cookies*

The Joy of Cooking By Irma S. Rombauer & Marion Rombauer Becker

About 40 2-inch cookies

  • Beat until soft: ½ cup butter or shortening
  • Add gradually and blend until light and creamy: ½ cup sugar
  • Beat in: 1 egg ; ½ cup molasses
  • Have ready: ½ cup buttermilk
  • Sift together: 2 ½ cups sifted cake flour ; 1 teaspoon baking soda ; 1 teaspoon each cinnamon and ginger ; ¼ teaspoon cloves
  • Add sifted ingredients in 3 parts to the sugar mixture, alternately with the buttermilk. Beat the batter until smooth after each addition. Add: ½ cup chopped raisins

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.

We’re Offering a List, and Checking it Twice….

Posted on by The Story Project Team in Family, Holidays, Uncategorized
Fairdale Farms in the Snow, Bennington, Vt.

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.

Charles Graham, Christmas Eve. Image courtesy Clark Art Institute. clarkart.edu

The Arctic Convoys: Navigating My Father’s Untold History

Posted on by Caitlin Randall in Family, Memory, Military
Convoy crossing the Atlantic, 1942 (Courtesy The Library of Congress)

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.

Dad as a young man

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.”

Off Montauk

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

Sun and sea: the sailor at home