Road Trip

Emma’s Pie

/ wvfurandroot / 12 Comments
Finish up with something sweet.
Finish up with a little something sweet.

We’ve all heard it – life’s short, eat dessert first.

I had a dancing buddy that actually did. One of the very first times we went out, he ordered dessert in lieu of an appetizer. I believe it was chocolate mousse.  [He’s an interesting guy.  I should call him – we haven’t been dancing in forever.]

While I often say that I don’t feel (intellectually or emotionally or spiritually – my body is another matter) older than I did at 25, I am much more aware of the passing of time. Even at 25, there seemed to be eons between Christmas seasons. Now? It feels like last week. Hell, it feels like last week that I was 25.

The other day I had a powerful urge for coconut cream pie. The nearest place was the Bob Evans. Chez Bob’s for dessert always creates a dilemma. I like their French silk pie as much as their coconut cream. As I walked over, I made the bold decision to skip lunch altogether and have both.

AND is my favorite word.
AND is my favorite word.

My love affair with coconut cream pie began in January of 1970. I’d never had it before. En route via luxury ocean liner from Hawaii to California during one of our many relocations, we were assigned a table, dining times, and a waiter.

Dean, the waiter, quickly bonded with my brother and I. My mother was horribly seasick, my father didn’t do breakfast, and my 10-year-old self and 7-year-old brother would arrive for breakfast and lunch alone. In 1970 it was believed safe for children to run around unattended.

Brother and I before the ship's hat contest.
Brother and I before the ship’s hat contest.

I think Dean enjoyed us. If memory serves, he was about 25. One evening early in the cruise before Mom succumbed to violent seasickness, Dean suggested coconut cream pie for dessert following dinner. My father encouraged me to try it.

Oh my. It was, hands down, the best thing I’d ever put in my mouth. From then on, I had coconut cream pie at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, and at various times during the day when I wandered into the dining room. It got so that Dean had the pie waiting for me lest they run out before our seating. I ate my Twiggy-style bodyweight in coconut cream pie during that cruise.

Hawaiian student.
Voracious reader, even then, and newly minted pie connoisseur.

At our last meal, Dean presented me with an entire pie, carefully wrapped in a pastry box and tied with a ribbon. He knew from our conversations that we were looking at a 3000 mile cross-country drive and figured I’d enjoy some pie.

[In Texas, some guy took a look at the Hawaii license plates and asked my Dad how we got that car here?. My dad looked him in the eye and said, “That’s the longest bridge you’ve ever seen.]

I have fond memories of nibbling at that pie late one night as we navigated St. Louis in a snowstorm, my head poked into Pippi Longstocking by flashlight.

I made that pie last for miles.

I’ve adored coconut cream pie ever since. I am also uncommonly fond of French silk pie (and mousse, for that matter) all of which is pretty odd because I’m not generally a dessert person – two pieces at Bob Evans notwithstanding.   Ordinarily, I’d much rather burn those calories on appetizers. [Some day I’ll tell the Greenbriar story and my “free” meal.]

The oh-so-chic parents for the Marine Corps Ball.
The oh-so-chic parents for the Marine Corps Ball.

After St. Louis and various other locales along Rt. 66, we finally ended up in northern Michigan at the paternal grandmother’s house. It had been so long since I’d seen her that I had no memory of her. Essentially, I was meeting her for the first time. My dad, unbelievably, had not told her we were coming, preferring to surprise her.

My my, was she surprised.

And, my oh my, is Michigan ever cold in January – particularly after the tropics.

Emma was a baker. In fact, she was the pastry chef at what passed for that area’s haute cuisine restaurant – not that they ever gave her such a title, officially. The restaurant was famous for their chocolate bottom pie and nobody could make it as well as Emma.

Life's Short - trust me on this.
Life’s Short – trust me on this.

In violation of the rules regarding the secret recipe, Emma made it for holidays and whatnot. A widow and subsequent divorcee with 8 kids, it was common knowledge she’d never be able to afford to take the kids to the restaurant. I doubt she ever made much more than minimum wage. I think she felt entitled to take that recipe home.

But she never gave the recipe out.

Chocolate bottom pie is a confection of luscious vanilla cream filling, chocolate, nuts, flaky pie crust, and whipped cream. The sum is much, much more than the sum .of its parts. It’s actually

simple to make.  It toppled, quickly, coconut cream pie’s short-lived status as the best thing I ever put in my mouth.

Emma would allow you to watch her make it, forbid you to let anyone else see, and thus the recipe wanders through the family. My mother makes a down-and-dirty version utilizing boxed pudding and still it’s fabulous. Between Dean’s coconut cream pie and Emma’s chocolate bottom, how I vowed to learn to bake. All of Emma’s baked goods were exquisite, but it’s the pie I remember most.

It took me years, but I can churn out a chocolate bottom pie that will make you weep tears of chocolate joy.

Emma
Emma

Emma was a wonderful woman. A sturdy woman. A resilient woman. Without any help, she raised those kids in abject poverty while working in an upscale restaurant for minimum wage – the restaurant she made famous with her pies, the restaurant she couldn’t afford to take her kids to.

Emma was not the sweet grandmotherly type. She was tough as nails. She had to be. But her laugh was something to experience as was her ire. Her cooking – her cooking was sweet. She is the end of an era.

She died on Sunday and I should be packing in preparation for leaving for her funeral tomorrow morning

She loved her children and they loved her.  Three of her children preceded her in death.  The remaining five still love her with a passion. 

Tomorrow is going to be hard.

We’re glad she didn’t suffer long. And we’re glad to have had her as long as we did.

Emma
Emma

Tomorrow brings another, much shorter, cross-country trip to Michigan. I think it’s going to be difficult for my parents.  Emma was an icon for both of them. I’m going as much for them as to say goodbye.  More than likely, like my 10-year-old self, I’ll be stuck in the backseat with no coconut cream and, certainly not, chocolate bottom pie.  But there will be a great many memories and good conversation.

And, no, I don’t give out the recipe for chocolate bottom pie. 

I promised Emma, I wouldn’t.

Dive Diners and Seedy Motels

/ wvfurandroot / 10 Comments
My favorite motel on the Mother Road

Growing up, we did Route 66 from beginning to end a couple dozen times.  At least.  My dad, being the man he was, insisted that each run down the Mother Road be done faster than the time before.  We did not sightsee.  We did not stop and shop.  We did not eat in restaurants or stay in hotels.  We made time.

A lot of our meals were taken from vending machines in gas stations.  Truck stops were a favorite.  (To this day, I will choose a truck stop over a chain restaurant if I’m looking for home-style food.)  My dad likes to joke that my brother and I learned early not to ask “are we there yet?” – but to ask “when will we need gas?” 

The need for automobile fuel was the only earthly reason for stopping until Dad was so bleary-eyed he couldn’t see the road.  It was then that we pulled into a motel.  There was some discernment in our choosing, but not much.  I don’t remember seeing a lot of loose women or ex-cons in the places we stayed, but we did not stay in anything even approaching the sanitized motels of today. 

[Come to think of it I do have memories of Magic Fingers massage beds.  Maybe at 6, I couldn’t recognize a woman of loose morals.]

It was a real treat to stay in the Wigwam Motel.  I’m not sure, but I think we stayed in the Arizona Wigwam when the opportunity presented itself.  But trust me, the Wigwam was pure luxury compared to our normal road digs.  I’m pretty sure we only stayed there because otherwise I would whine for 500 or 600 miles – the Wigwam was my idea of the epitome of luxury accommodations.

Driving cross-country as often as we did, I became a connoisseur of diner cuisine.  We usually ate at the closest eating establishment to the motel.

Somewhere along the way, I became a fan of patty melts. 

Not perfect, but still good

There’s an art to making the perfect patty melt.  I’ve never managed to make a perfect one, though God knows, I’ve tried.  The absolute best patty melts are to be found in the places the Health Department shuts down for gross violations a couple times a year.  The next best place to find a good patty melt is at the IHOP, but they’re inconsistent.  Sometimes they’re greasy chin dripping, onion breath fabulous.  Other times they’re better than what I do at home, but not much.

For the uninitiated, a proper patty melt consists of a good quality ground beef patty, grilled onions, American cheese, and rye bread all cooked in the same fashion as the traditional grilled cheese i.e. fried in butter.  When done properly, it’s the perfect gestalt of heart-attack-on-a-plate and good eatin’. 

Usually, they’ll offer you fries or onion rings (sometimes both) to go with your patty melt.  I prefer hash browns.  Real ones.  Grated and grilled until crispy with tomato and onion mixed in.  If you haven’t already discovered it, let me tell you that the Waffle House, hands down, has the best hash browns.  IHOP is a distant second.  The Waffle House also has patty melts but they’re inferior to IHOP’s.  If I could get it all home hot, I’d order the IHOP patty melt and the Waffle House hash browns and just eat at home where I could moan, groan, drool, and roll my eyes all I wanted to.

I stopped at the IHOP tonight for a patty melt.  I sat next to some folks who were evidently on a road trip.  Dad poured over the map, Mom looked ready for a Valium, and the kids were fighting about how much room the other was taking up on the booth seat. 

Nostalgia set in.

The patty melt was a disappointment tonight, but it was still damned good eatin’.  You have to work pretty hard to screw up grilled onions, rye bread, cheese, and hamburger.  I had the urge to find a seedy motel and check in, but it’s no fun alone.  Sometime I should tell the story of the really seedy motel in Zanesville, Ohio, and what a fine time HMOKeefe and I had.  There was a picture of Jesus on the wall, mold in the bathroom, iced vodka,  and a plastic chair outside the door.  Wish we had pictures.

Don’t ask about the time Boston Boy ordered shrimp in Richwood.  Flatlanders.  . .gotta love ’em.

[Hot Damn!!!  There’s a Wigwam in Kentucky!  Woo Hoo!  I am so going to go there.  Soon.]

The Sleeping Hillbilly: Writer’s Block or Simple Inertia (A Case Study)

/ wvfurandroot / 9 Comments

Back when I thought I was just a hillbilly wannabe.

Back when I thought I was just a hillbilly wannabe.

It has occurred to me that what I have been labeling writer’s block may just be simple inertia born of sleep deprivation. This thought was born of pondering why it is that if I miss 10 hours of sleep over two days, it takes me 42 hours of sleep to catch up.  Of course the answer is 42: bonus points if you know why.

I was rip-roaring and ready to take over the world on Monday when I got a phone call from Chef Boy ‘R Mine announcing a surprise, imminent visit. His visits are rare enough and due to the continued shenanigans at Hell’s Kitchen of the Moment, he is fixin’ to move to Charlotte.

I suppose the move to Charlotte was inevitable, but when I got him back after two years and four Floridian Hell’s Kitchens of the Moment, I was hopeful I could keep him close. Not gonna happen. Besides, it seems de rigueur for younguns to spend part of their youth in Charlotte. It’s a rite of passage or something. While the direction of the Hillbilly Highway keeps changing, the existence continues.

My people outmigrated from Appalachia so many years ago that for a time the younger generation was completely ignorant of our hillbilly roots. It wasn’t until my family moved here in the early 70s, left again, and then came back in the mid 80s that I started exploring why it was that I was just so comfortable here – why it was that a Californian born military brat with no roots who had never tasted pinto beans outside of a Mexican restaurant felt completely and utterly at home. That old saying – there are two kinds of people who leave West Virginia, those who come back and those who want to – didn’t seem like it should apply to me, but it did. The seven years of exile from the hills between high school and young adulthood were great fun, but I talked incessantly of getting back here. And I did just in time to raise Chef Boy ‘R Mine here.

Prior to that, home had been that collection of people known as my immediate family. I discovered that while I had been reared in military towns all over the United States, my rearing had been supervised by parents who had parents who had parents with deep roots in Appalachia. The behavior that made us stand out in Camp Lejeune and Quantico and Kaneohe was so muted by generational atrophy that it wasn’t even noticeable here. (I’ve been working on that – I hate not being noticed.)  Home is now both a group of people and a place.

You’d have thunk one of us would have cottoned on when the family friends we developed were the pharmacist originally from West Virginia, the co-worker from Tennessee, my mom’s BFF from Kermit. There were other friends, of course. A lot of them were from Michigan and it wasn’t until I studied Appalachian history and culture that I learned about the Hillbilly Highway to Detroit/Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti. I recently learned that one part of Ypsitanti is called Ypsitucky. Both of my parents were from that area of Michigan and they simply thought the connection was a Michigan connection. Pshaw. That I’ve picked West Virginia to bond with should be no surprise. It’s the only state entirely contained within the Appalachian Region and I’m an all or nothing kind of person.

When I worked at the newspaper in Waukesha, Wisconsin, I was awfully puzzled when all the paperboys/girls brought me birth certificates listing Owensboro, Kentucky as their place of birth. [Johnny Depp is the only pretty-boy type of famous person I’ve ever salivated over post-junior high. It tickles me pink to know he’s from Owensboro.]

So, anyway, I’m enjoying my adult (and I use that term loosely) son. After the slamming door phase of his teenage years, it’s heady stuff to sit at the table with him after one of his spectacular concoctions and kill a bottle (or two) of wine. This last time we were up until 1:30 discussing the events of his birth. I haven’t been up at 1:30 unless I woke up at 1:29 to pee since. . .since. . .since I don’t know when.

Unfortunately, I had to be somewhere the next morning. I had to be there with all my synapses firing and a spring in my step. Morning is not my friend and this was a daunting enough challenge without starting sleep deprived (and more than an hour late as things turned out). That night when I finally got to my hotel room, instead of diving into bed, my roomie and I were up far too late talking about this and that. She’s roughly my age, working full-time and going to grad school full-time. She was as tired as I.  [<–Well lookie there!  Excruciatingly correct grammar.  I should fix that.] Yet we stayed up talking about a scintillating conversation she had with a controversial legislator in the hotel’s business center. One thing led to another and it was midnight before we turned the light out. (She was on spring break and we’ve dubbed this out-of-town sleepover Girls Gone Wild: The Menopause Years. Pitiful.)

I had to be at the Capitol rotunda by 7:00 a.m., so it was another brutal morning made more so by the agony of trying to find parking in the rain. When I finally got home later in the afternoon, I crashed into bed for a nap. Woke up to eat and went back to sleep.

The following morning, I overslept. I put in a full day of work and came home forcing myself to wait until 7 p.m. to go to bed for the evening. By 7:11 p.m., I was nestled in bed with a trashy novel and asleep by 7:30. I didn’t wake until 8:30 yesterday morning.

I sat at the laptop for hours yesterday morning trying to summon the creative energy necessary to blog about some current events that are driving me crazy, but I couldn’t get going. I checked Facebook. I checked Twitter. I cruised other peoples’ blog postings. I cleaned out my email box and set up some new filters. I took a nap. And then I took another nap. And then I went to bed at 9 p.m. before waking just a bit ago.

Trying to motivate, but getting (surprise!) side-tracked.

Trying to motivate, but getting side-tracked.

I’m still tired. I’m willing to bet that I nap at least once today. I still don’t have the energy to tackle the plethora of blog postings, news articles and videos, etc. that are making my hair burst into flames. I don’t know if it’s writer’s block or inertia born of fatigue. While I have no desire to return to my misspent youth, I do miss being able to be dynamic and functional on 3-hours of sleep per night, night after night. I wonder had I slept more between 1979 and 1987 if I’d be more dynamic and functional now. As a dear friend pointed out, I seem to wonder, ponder, muse, and cogitate a lot these days. I hadn’t thought it was a new habit, but my biggest failing during my youth was that I didn’t do such things with enough regularity. But hot damn and a fine cha cha too, I had a good time. Of course, now I think about stuff too much and thus get nothing accomplished. I’ve been seeking balance my entire life.

I’m hopeful that by tomorrow I’ll be ready to take over the world again. Trust me: when I rule the world things will be different.