With the holidays on the horizon and All Saints’ Day just behind us, it’s natural to think of gathering for meals and of people long departed.
My Grandma married four times. Number four stuck. Granddaddy Simpson, tall, lanky, and soft-spoken (until he got a good old common-meter hymn going, then bets were off), was a retired Navy chef who loved cooking for family. When he and Grandma married, later in life, we became as much his family as his blood relatives. He called the youngest of us “the babies.” He loved making sure “the babies” were fed.
Without warning, Granddaddy would drive from Columbia to Rock Hill, his Buick Regal V6 announcing his arrival in the driveway, and I’d almost push Mama down to get to the door.
Granddaddy came bearing gifts. For me. Sweet potato pies, still warm underneath foil and nestled in cardboard boxes for safe travel.
Granddaddy knew this particular baby loved sweet potato pies with a heavy splash of lemon, preferring, unlike most, a bite of citrus to cut through the traditional nutmeg and vanilla. Without fanfare, Granddaddy would hand the pies through the door, kiss me on the cheek and get right back into his car for the hour-long drive down U.S. 21. Sometimes he wouldn’t even say hello. He rarely even came into the house. Just a kiss and a lemony pie that nobody but me wanted.
It seemed a point of joy for Granddaddy Simpson to make this pie, with potatoes dug from his garden, baked in his oven, peeled by him at his kitchen table, steam from the potatoes rising toward heaven, where that man surely is now.
From the time he and Grandma married in 1984 until the time he died, at Christmas in 1999, when my younger daughter was the newest of the babies, there was a just-for-Tina sweet potato pie: in a box at Mama’s house, reunions and revivals, when we gathered to quarter a hog, or cooling under cheesecloth on Grandma’s kitchen counter.
You knew who was expected at meals by what Granddaddy cooked. With these foods, a message: “I see you. Let’s celebrate how unique you are in this infinite universe, how loved you are.”
In the November issue of the Outlook, we explore how the act of a meal - gathering foods, preparing, blessing, serving, sharing, receiving - places us squarely in the middle of what Jesus did so many times, and what Jesus told us to do. As Larissa Kwong Abazia writes in “Breaking. Disintegrating. Scattering,” God’s kingdom always comes.
“We are built for hunger: the pangs that tell us it’s time to eat, and hand-in-hand with that are those empty heart pangs — longing to be filled with face-to-face communion,” writes Beth Brown Ables in Volume 1 of A Place Here: Thoughts and Recipes For Nourishing Community. “Food is a bridge to community: to understanding, to peace and comfort.
“To love.”
Dartinia Hull
Managing Editor
Presbyterian Outlook |
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