memories so thick
like presents to be unwrapped
what gets remembered?

One of my brothers sent out this old photograph the other day.

The photograph had been around our house when I was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan as long as I can remember.

And since I am about 1 and a half years old in this photograph, that was longer ago than I can remember.

The story was that some neighbor lady worked for the Grand Rapids Press and thought that a family picture would be a nice addition to the paper at Christmas time.

The caption in the paper read, “GLAD TIDINGS – The nine children of Dr. and Mrs. Robert Hoffman, Sligh Blvd. gather round …”

One of the oddities of this photo is that there were two more kids yet to come.

My Mom always said she thought 8 was a good number.

Being 8th, I really appreciated that.

I am sitting next to my Mom and how they kept me from sticking out my tongue I don’t know.

My sister Janet remembered that my Mom had to go out and buy Christmas Stockings for the photo shoot and didn’t get enough so my brother Paul had to use a gym sock.

But my sister Lisa responded, “Does anyone actually remember this? I must have been three years old at the time and have no memory of it.”

Of course you have to be old enough to have memories.

And Christmas memories are so thick that they have to be brushed away leaves in a fall windstorm.

But what makes a memory?

Here is a photograph from this Christmas.

Me and my grand daughters, Azaria, Ella and Lenox.

Lenox is a little older than I was in that black and white photograph.

I don’t remember that day.

Bothers me a little that Lenox might not remember this day though I understand.

Guess we keep the pictures around as clues or keys to the boxes where the memories are stored.

my father’s birthday
one hundred and one today
century plus one

I will always regret that I was not able to introduce my kids to their grand father.

But there it is.

Not much you can do.

But I can imagine what he might have done and might have said.

And I think he would have enjoyed where I ended up living along the South Carolina coast.

I cannot go to a restaurant down here and not say to myself, “Dad would have liked this place.”

Dad enjoyed food and he enjoyed a good restaurant.

It made him very happy to go a to famous restaurant and order what they were famous for and have the meal live up to the promise.

Conversely not much disappointed him more than a restaurant that FAILED to live up the promise.

Little did many restaurants know that they had had the kiss of death when my Dad would announce that he had “Crossed them off his list.”

He also had a way to look forward to a meal at a famous restaurant in a way that some kids look forward to Christmas.

And he planned many a family outing AROUND restaurants.

They fact that he 11 children just seemed to add to the challenge and the enjoyment.

At Zender’s in Frankenmuth (which we went to the day AFTER he took us all to see Mark Fidrych pitch at a Tiger Game) I think he got a kick out of walking up to the desk and placing an order for the FAMILY CHICKEN DINNER FOR 18.

When the parade of waiters and waitresses came out with platter after platter of Zender’s Chicken and fix’ns, Dad enjoyed the meal even more.

There was Ann Sathers (found by my sister Mary) in Chicago.

There was New Hellas Café in Greektown.

Include the Gandy Dancer and Angelo’s in Ann Arbor.

I wasn’t born yet but he took everyone to Brennan’s in New Orleans.

He also famously arranged his and Mom’s 25th wedding anniversary Sunday celebration at Win Schuler’s in Grand Haven, Michigan.

Again all of us were there including Grandpa and Grandma Hendrickson.

There was one drawback to this dinner though.

They had got married early in May in 1946 and in 1971, their anniversary, their 25th, happened to land on Mother’s Day.

Schuler’s took our reservation but they also took reservations from everyone else in Ottawa County that day.

To my 11 year old mind, the food was great but we sat in that restaurant FOREVER.

My Dad was not all about fancy either.

If he liked something, he really enjoyed it and he didn’t care where it was.

I remember once he called me when I was finishing up a school term in Ann Arbor.

I am coming to get you tonight. Can you be packed?

I was more than a little surprised.

I had had my last exam earlier that day.

I was planning on spending a couple days in Ann Arbor finishing up on all the things you need to finish up.

I was not packed that was for sure.

But Dad was my ride and I told him that I would be ready.

Later that same day as I was moving boxes out on to the porch of where I was living that term, my Dad pulled into the driveway.

One of the time-space things I wrestle with is that when Dad was driving down to Ann Arbor to drop off or pick us kids up, it have been less than 40 years that he had been at school in Ann Arbor.

I think back to where I was 40 years ago and yes its a long time and a lot of water under the bridge, but it still doesn’t seem that long ago.

He knew his way around Ann Arbor and I think he enjoyed that.

He enjoyed talking to the other students.

One of my room mates was leaving on his way to library to ‘study one more time for the final’ he told my Dad.

My Dad raised his hand palm out and swiped it down to the left and said, “Ahhh if you don’t know by now, you’ll never know it.”

Dad never knew how I took that message to heart.

Dad looks at me and my boxes and says ‘Load them up” and opened the back tailgate of the station wagon.

As I tossed stuff into the car he leans over the tailgate as says, ‘Thanks for being ready.”

I smiled at him and he had this goofy grin that showed up when he had something goofy to say or do.

Like the time he bought a new TV and snuck it into the house before Mom could see it.

While he plugged it in and worked on the cables he told me and my brother Pete to bring the old TV down to the basement.

He figured Mom would never notice.

And she didn’t.

Until my little brother Al said to her the next day, “how do you turn the new TV on?”

I knew something was up by the grin so I waited.

“I had to get out of there,” Dad said.

I waited.

My Dad then said that some lady had called from Church and needed Dad at a meeting.

Dad told Mom he couldn’t go to the meeting as he was driving to Ann Arbor to pick me up.

“So I had to leave,” Dad said with that goofy grin.

I just smiled back and finished packing.

Dad then said he had stopped on the way down and got himself a new McDonalds steak sandwich.

“They are only available for a short time,” Dad said.

“We can stop on the way home and I’ll get you one if you want.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“If you get one, I guess I’ll get one too,” said my Dad with his goofy grin.

We stopped at McDonald’s in Brighton, Michigan on a warm spring evening I think in 1981.

We sat together and ate McDonald’s Streak Sandwich’s.

And we talked a lot about nothing at all.

I think my Dad would have enjoyed the restaurants down here on the South Carolina Atlantic coast.

I can remember the way he described going to Baltimore seafood joints for crab served on brown butcher paper back when we would visit my brother Paul when he and his family lived in Maryland.

If he had been able to visit us here in Bluffton, I think he would have said he was ready to order a low country boil the minute he got out of the car.

And he would have looked at me and said, “You can order one too, if we go right now.”

And we would have gone to Hudson’s or Salty Dog or Crazy Crab and peeled and ate shrimp and had corn on the cob with redskin potatoes and sausage.

And we would have talked a lot about nothing at all.

I hope! Not struggling
with options at the crossroads
of madness and death

What gloom to start the New Year?

All in all true but the inspiration for today’s haiku came from the unlikely source of the first article of the New Year on the New York Times Cooking page.

Sam Sifton wrote at 10:31am on New Years Day, “Good morning. You aren’t, I hope, struggling this morning after a night of excess, considering your options at the crossroads of madness and death. If 2020 gave us anything it was an excuse — an order, really — not to gather on New Year’s Eve for its sad, sentimental dance of forced cheer and sweet Champagne, its endless hours before that dreadful song. Here we are in a new year, still very much like the last one, though there’s light now at the end of the tunnel and we dare to be hopeful sometimes, particularly today. We feel good, despite all!“

I am guessing that dreadful song he mentions is Auld Lang Syne  written in the Scots-language by Robert Burns in 1788.

What was Mr. Sifton’s recommendation?

“So maybe celebrate a little in the kitchen today?”

So I did.

My daughter gave me a cookbook on baking pie using a cast iron frying pan.

Cast Iron frying pans have long been what might be called a sore point with me.

The lady who owned the house I rented a room in when I was in college in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had a well seasoned cast iron frying pan that may have been her pride in joy after of a long odd life of running a college rooming house.

After each use she would scrub it out and then pour a large drop of olive oil into it and let it sit on the stove until its next use.

Part of my rent allowed me ‘kitchen privilege’s’ and I used that pan once a week.

On Friday’s I would get paid and I would go to this tiny house front grocery store that had a meat counter.

I write things like that and like ‘where I rented a room’ and I think, I AM OLD, GEEEE WHIZ.

Anyway I would have enough money to splurge on one steak and two loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter.

At home I would heat up that cast iron pan and fry my steak.

Removing it from the pan, I would pour a little water over the steak remains and swish it around.

Then I would eat the steak S L O W L Y and dip bread into the pan and sop up the juice.

I am sure no steak has ever tasted so good since.

And I have long thought it was the pan.

Over the years I acquired several cast iron frying pans.

I did not use them often but I felt better knowing they were there.

The pans made the move to Georgia with us but when they got unpacked someone yelled out loud, ‘How often do you use these things?’

I started to explain that it wasn’t often but I liked having them and maybe even started to wax rhapsodic on my time as a college student.

“So you don’t need them do you?” was the response.

And the pans were tossed into the trash bin.

Stunned and silent after moving 1000 miles and I was too tired to object.

Over the years my children have bought me replacement pans.

I have a corn pone mold, a loaf pan, and two frying pans.

I had never thought to use them for pie until my daughter got the Cast Iron Pie Cookbook.

With the idea to celebrate a little in the kitchen today my wife had already given the OK to ‘splurge’ and get a standing rib roast for New Years Dinner.

I baked an apple pie for dessert.

I baked it in a cast iron frying pan.

The rib roast roasting brought back waves of memories as smell will do.

A rib roast was the usual Hoffman Christmas day dinner.

My Dad would order as big a roast as the butcher could provide.

He would bring it home wrapped in white butcher paper, carrying it clutched to his body like a favorite child.

One memory I have was when the roast proved to be bigger than any pan we had in the kitchen arsenal.

My Dad announced he would have to cut it half and he went to the garage and got a saw and scoured it clean in the kitchen sink before sawing the roast in two.

He had spent three years in the army during WW2 after all.

We would all get up early as usual on Christmas morning and while we waited for everyone, Dad would put the roast in the oven and the roasting smell for me is the smell of Christmas.

Our roast was a success.

(As an aside it also was the most meat I have eaten at one time since moving to the coast. Can remember the last steak I have had. Shrimp, Oysters, Crab and other fish sure, but meat?)

Then there was the pie.

The pie was even more so of a success.

Somewhere along the line of my life, I think it was in a cookbook by the White House Housekeeper under Franklin Roosevelt, I came across the tip that when making fruit pies, cover the bottom of the pie shell with a layer of sugar before adding the fruit.

Odd that I would take a tip from the woman FDR called, Old Lady Nesbitt.

A woman long recognized for providing the worst food in White House Kitchen History.

The woman who Doris Kearns Goodwin said was possibly Eleanor’s revenge for Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.

But I always do it and I recommend it.

And when using a cast iron frying to bake the pie, this layer of sugar more or less caramelized with the apple filling.

Maybe from the heat of the pan on the bottom.

It was INCREDIBLE.

It was unexpected.

And unexpectedly good.

A great start to who knows what else what come this year.

Last year was better than the Derby Racer at Cedar Point.

So maybe celebrate a little in the kitchen today?