It has been brought to my attention by my youngest child (lower left) that the expression I use of hers is not in fact “anywoodles” as in anyway but “anyhoodles” as in anyhow.  I was sort of fond of woodles and had gotten comfortable with it.  Dropped it in conversation here and there.  It was working for me.

But, life is change and some say change is good (I go back and forth on that one) so on this Mother’s Day 2012, I will laugh at my mistakes, big and small, (see orange person above guffawing) and move on.

With anyhoodles in my hip pocket, who knows?  The sky may be the limit.

I received an email from a reader that I decided to share with you since tomorrow is Mother’s Day and, aside from Hallmark, I think you can always say it best with flowers.  The reader explained very sweetly that he had two moms, “they are lesbians.”  I appreciated his candor and also it was helpful in case I might have assumed he had a mom and a step-mom. Anyhoodles (see post 2/26/2012), he had researched the care of cut flowers on a website that made them sound more high maintenance than a small herd of  hippos so I felt obliged to assuage his doubt and confusion and explain there is simply little better than a gift of flowers. Especially from a son. I wrote:

Dear Joe (name changed to protect the innocent),

I received videos of two commencement addresses by email this morning. I am sure I will receive more and I have to admit, I always look forward to them this time of year. All those fresh faces in the crowd, the speaker full of sage advice, usually witty vignettes about their own college years and most certainly earnest reflection.

One was Steve Jobs’s 2005 address at Stanford and the other CNN’s medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta’s recent address to the Class of 2012 at his alma mater, The University of Michigan. Both used numbered ideas, imaginary point bullets if you will, that outlined their version of how to handle, look at or best utilize one’s future.  Each urged their crowd of twenty one-ish,  fidgety, probably hung over college senior listeners to hope, dream, succeed, fail and embrace whatever lies ahead.

I was actually touched and inspired by both speaker’s thoughts.  Extremely different personae.  Practically polar success stories.  One traditional.  One anything but.  One born of college sweethearts who lived the American dream.  The other given up for adoption by a college relationship, taken in by a second choice adoptive family and nonetheless, also lived the American dream.

I listened to their reflections, their guidelines.  Both were extremely impressive but neither strayed too far from typical graduation speech text.  Find your dream and live it.  Live it new each day.  Love your family; remember your friends. Know that each day is a gift and could be your last, Steve Jobs’s  reflections on this obviously more haunting being recirculated posthumously.

I hear and read these speeches so differently now as a fifty plus year old someone than I did as a twenty something someone. I feel like the parents always nod in ardent agreement with these speakers as their children nod off. I know these kids are hearing bits and pieces as they check their cell phones and chat behind cupped palms.   They might even catch the thesis of the address but can they really employ or truly understand the advice at their stage of life?

They are so young.

So I am thinking these addresses as fabulous, well-delivered and well-intentioned as they are, are often more poignant for the parents than they are the students. For some of us, they stir up memories of roads not taken and long forgotten dreams that these students haven’t lived long enough to feel or understand. That said, maybe it is not such a bad thing.

Kids can hear these speeches and be inspired to take the twenty or so years they have lived and build a successful, fulfilling future that should include many decades.  And the parents can be reminded that they may only have twenty or so years left and, if they are fortunate, a few decades to finally do what really matters in their lives and make that difference that seemed so easy as an idealistic college graduate.

In spite of my somewhat conflicted sentiments, I hear/read commencement addresses and I feel recharged.

These particular commencement reflections got me out of my bathrobe before noon, inspired me to write this post after a month-long, road trip hiatus and will at least for the rest of the day make me more conscious of  how I am spending this particular 24 hours.

Check them out.  You may even get a week, a month, a year’s worth of kick-in-the-ass. I was just glad I took the few minutes each to watch and listen…And seriously, could Sanjay be any better looking?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJxmLSjoPYg

http://www.youtube.com/embed/D1R-jKKp3NA

I may have mentioned this before but it warrants repeating that my son in law has partnered with a high school friend to launch a clothing line, Salmon Cove.  Check it out at:  http://www.salmoncove.com

Since I have worked in  retail on and off during my life and most recently have simply worked at walking in stores and walking out with shopping bags, I am known in the family as somewhat, OK I am, a clothing aficionado.

a·fi·ci·o·na·do/əˌfiSH(ē)əˈnädō/ A person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about an activity, subject or pastime.

If diamonds are a girl’s best friend and a dog is a man’s, no wonder men think women are so high maintenance. You can pick up a great puppy for free at a local shelter but I can’t say I’ve seen Cartier handing out their baubles at no charge.

I stood at the corner, waiting for the light to change, a cold march wind whipping around me, blowing under my coat. I pulled my collar up around my cheeks and ears and willed the red hand to change to the white walking stick figure on the post in the median.  It was noon, walkers darting around and between each other on their way to or from lunch or a meeting.I was conscious of the growing crowd gathering around me at my corner and tucked my shoulder bag closer to my waist.  This is the big city with pick pockets and all.

I felt a tug at my elbow and looked down to see a man in a tattered wheelchair, wearing a flannel shirt, frayed at the collar, and a sweater too thin for the brisk spring weather.

“Can you spare a dollar?” he asked loudly as he pulled his moth-eaten hat down far enough to cover his ears.

“Homeless AND a wheelchair,” I thought.  “What were the odds.”

“Just a dollar, for coffee,” he said. “I’m cold.”

By now I was conscious of the eyes around me turning to look in my direction. I had just come from church so guilt and “the least of my brethren” stuff was all fresh in my mind. So I reached for the buckle of my bag and pulled out my wallet.

“I only have a twenty,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not to worry, mam, I’ve got change,” he said, sticking out a gloved fist to prove it.

Now this was slick, I thought, a beggar with change.

“Why don’t you give me the twenty and I’ll give you say sixteen or eighteen back, ” he added with a smoothness that was beginning to get on my nerves.

By now the welcome walking man was beckoning from mid-street but to my dismay, half the crowd stayed transfixed on the the curb beside me, all focus on me and the homeless man in the wheelchair.

Daunted by the pressure of the Obamaland eyes,  I handed the man the twenty and waited for my “change.”

Grinning with surprisingly gleaming white choppers, he handed me a wad of sticky hot bills, stuffed the twenty under his hat and used both hands to turn the chair in the opposite direction, practically doing a wheely as he disappeared into the closest alley.

Drama over, crowd dispersed, I shoved the money ball in my pocket and crossed the street to my garage, sure that “T-A-K-E-N” blinked in neon across my forehead.

I pushed the button for the floor named Cubs and listened to “Take me out to the ballgame” as the elevator, and my blood pressure, rose to the third floor.

I got to my car, slid under the wheel and reached in my pocket to pull out my “change.” I slowly unfolded four one dollar bills.

Not even enough to get me out of the garage.

He’s the kind of guy that gives homeless people a bad name.

Thinking about my childhood grade school, got me thinking about home and family.  When she wasn’t my first grade teacher, my Aunt Jeannette was a lovable, warm, and very funny human being. All the Kyles (my mom’s side) were funny.  Not, let me tell you a joke funny, but witty and quick in a subtle conversational way that you could miss if you weren’t paying attention. In the early 1930’s, Aunt Jeannette attended Columbia University in New York City to prepare to be a teacher.  She had read the Bible at least twice cover to cover, word for word, before she died at 96. She loved nature, especially birds.

I called her once about a bird song that was haunting me. As soon as I started to whistle the tune (yes, I can whistle a tune;that’s from my dad’s side) she knew exactly what bird it was. She was a gem and I miss her. But before I go all Tom Brokaw on you and tell about the husband she lost to a fluke jeep accident in WWII or the one she raised four adopted children with, let’s get to the point at hand, Skillet Cornbread.

Seeing Aunt Jeannette here in my Aunt Ruth’s kitchen, made me think about Kyle women and cooking. One of their best recipes I am sharing only because I am feeling especially generous today and the nostalgia is clouding my brain. Normally, I keep these family secrets to myself so the whole world can’t start making cornbread as well as we do.

Aunt Jeannette, and all her sisters, basically followed the recipe my Grandma Kyle used. Before you even attempt this cake-like, sumptuous bread, you must have a 9 inch cast iron skillet.  You can get an inexpensive one at Target or most hardware stores. In West Virginia, they sell them at the grocery store. I use a fancier Le Creuset one with brown enamel coating that I received as a wedding gift and like it very much, but any cast iron will do.

Ingredients:

1 cup white corn meal

1/4 cup flour

1 heaping tsp. baking powder (that in Grandma Kyle terms is spilling off the edges)

1 rounded tsp. salt (in her terms, high but not spilling off the edges)

2 Tbsp. sugar

1/4 tsp. baking soda

1 1/4 c. buttermilk

1 large egg

2 Tbsp. Crisco (yes Crisco, not butter flavored but plain old used to be Paula Deen’s favorite Crisco)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix corn meal, flour, baking powder, sugar and salt  in a medium mixing bowl. In another smaller bowl, mix baking soda and buttermilk together and let sit for a minute or two. Beat egg with a fork until combined but not frothy and stir into buttermilk.  Pour wet mixture into dry and mix with fork until smooth and not lumpy.

Heat on top of the stove until hot but not smoking, 2 Tbsp. Crisco in a 9 inch iron skillet. Pour cornbread batter into skillet and remove immediately from heat.  Batter should sizzle around the edges. Using an oven mitt, (I have made the painful mistake of omitting this little detail) place skillet in hot oven and bake for 20 minutes or until bread pulls away from the edges of the skillet and top is golden brown.  (Again, use mitt to remove from oven.)

Allow to cool for five minutes.  Gently loosen edges of bread with a knife.  Cover the top of the skillet with a dinner plate and (if the cooking gods are with you) slowly, gingerly flip the skillet onto the plate and the cornbread will slide out upside down and in a perfect mounded circle of golden brown.  If you feel it’s stuck to the skillet anywhere, use the gentle prodding with the knife trick again.

Cut into pie shaped triangles and butter (real butter) while warm. Serve immediately as anything–appetizer, dinner bread, with soup or drench it in honey and serve as dessert.

Or eat it for breakfast as cereal with milk like my Uncle Bill used to do.

Martin School was a two-room schoolhouse in West Virginia where I grew up. Built in the early 1900’s by my Grandpa Kyle, three generations passed through its doors before it was closed in 1968 and was used to store something far less important than young minds.

I attended Martin for first and second grades.  My aunt, Mrs. Jeannette Hale was the first grade teacher and the principal. Mrs. Phelan taught second grade across the hall.  My favorite employee come lunchtime was Mrs. Gregory, the cook.  Her tiny kitchen, about the size of a small closet, was at the end of the short hall between the two rooms.

She cooked a hot lunch every day which she served at our seats in the classroom, pulling the pastel plastic trays into our room on an old squeaky rolling cart, four trays at a time.  The menu varied but her personal best was tomato soup, grilled peanut butter sandwiches (squishy white buttery bread, of course) and chocolate cake with milk chocolate icing, warm from the oven and made from scratch.

Each room had a cloakroom at the back.  Only about two feet deep, it had a peg for each child’s coat and a small wooden shelf underneath for boots in the winter.  It didn’t have a door but a calico curtain that gathered on a rod across the entire wall of wraps and shoes.

Sometimes if a person talked too much or too loud during subtraction, Mrs. Hale would send you behind that curtain to stand until you could “regain your composure.”  I wasn’t sure what composure was but I didn’t have it in the classroom and had many visits behind the curtain. I would always make sure to stand close enough to the curtain so that my nose and shoulders and knees made the outline of my body on the classroom side, just in case anyone forgot I was there.

The curtain always felt slightly damp and smelled like the old string mop that leaned in the corner of our basement laundry room.  I could hear my aunt’s crackly voice as she slid the chalk across the blackboard.  I always hated it when I knew the answer to her subtraction question and Charlotte Legg was saying eleven take away five was four, for God’s sake. But curtain standers were never allowed to participate.

When my mother, now 88, attended Martin is had six grades divided between the two rooms.  She also had her aunt, Ina Kyle, as her first grade teacher. When my sister, who is six years older, went to Martin, there were three grades.  Martin had five grades in those two rooms when my brother, nine years older, went there.  He only stayed for four years, though. He skipped second grade, perhaps to get away from my aunt.  She was always harder on the nieces and nephews, probably for fear of showing favoritism.  If she didn’t send you behind the curtain, she would shake you until you were sure you could hear your brains rattle.  I had a habit of twirling my shoe with my toe in the heel.  Aunt Jeannette stopped that by taping my shoe to my foot and my foot to the floor. At least taped down, she couldn’t send me to the cloak closet.

Warm, home made lunches, the sounds and smells of chalk, crumbly gum erasers, fat yellow lead pencils and the comfort of family, recall a time of  childhood and innocence and make attending Martin School one of my sweetest memories.

But the true magic of Martin School reached far beyond its two classrooms.  The playhouse under the front steps had an earth floor and cement walls.  Old quilts divided the rooms. The kitchen stove was made of red bricks, no doubt left over from when the school house was built several decades before. The small playground in front was not covered in gravel but cinders, a by product of the state’s main industry, coal.  The simple swing set had two regular and one trapeze style swing, three feet off the ground, and later a multi-tiered metal jungle gym.

The real playground though was the forest covering the hill behind the school.  Some trees had Indian markings, large white knobs that stuck out like eyes, peering down as children played hide and seek behind the trunks.  But the best trees were the ones closest to the back of the schoolhouse.  They had thick woody vines that hung from their branches.  The bravest swingers would grab a vine, take a running start, jump off the hill and cross the small drop off that separated the hill from the back of the school.  The most expert of swingers could meet the school with their feet and push off with enough force to land back at the base of the tree.  Most of us, though, let go mid-swing and landed in the mixture of moss and dead leaves at the bottom of the shallow ravine.

The only rule of the playground was to stay within earshot of the sound of the big brass bell with the long black handle that Aunt Jeannette rang on the front porch when recess was over.  We all remembered the day Mike Means walked up that hill and disappeared over its crest.  He never came back to school.  Some kids said he ran away from school or maybe home. Even Aunt Jeannette didn’t know for sure what became of him. I suspect he had failed enough grades he was old enough to drop out, but we were all more careful to stay together in the woods after that.

At the end of recess, after my aunt rang the bell, Mrs. Gregory would step out onto the front  steps and pass out a snack as we filed by to return to our rooms. Sometimes it was salted cabbage, sliced, served raw and icy cold from a huge stainless steel bowl she held perched on her hip.  She always wore a cotton printed apron with a bib and lace trim.  If you complimented the color or style, she would smile her big gap-toothed smile and say she had made it herself.

Aunt Jeannette, Mrs. Gregory, Mrs. Phelan and Martin School are all gone now. But  the lessons they taught, the love of nature they inspired, the magic they created still live in my heart and the hearts of every student who attended that rare and precious school.

As for lessons learned,  maybe if I had taped my foot to the floor, it wouldn’t have taken me two days to write this post.