Malted Milkshake
Mom: 2 Ways. I have these photos next to my desk. Happy Birthday, wherever you are, Mom!
Always a hard worker, here Mom is during her time as a Junior High English teacher in New York.
Mom’s Virgo instincts take over! She was a great organizer and keeper of the family treasures (and junk). Also, what the hell happened to my room? Where are the Duran Duran posters?
Mom wearing her author hat with Dad, promoting their book, Holy Smoke.
Party time! Neither of these are birthday images, but I like to pretend they are. Left is Mom at a party at Oberlin one summer (she used to attend Baroque camp with my sister). Right is Mom at my Dad’s aunt’s house in Upstate New York for Thanksgiving in 1966.
For Mom’s 70th birthday, my sister and I purchased a weekend for them at Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire. When I visited England with my daughter the next summer, Mom and Dad took us back to Hartwell for tea. My daughter clearly(!) ate too much sugar (and Mom loved every minute of it)!
For Mom’s 75th birthday (I think?) we sent my parents to lunch at a fab restaurant in London. They sent us this photo of them toasting.
Today would have been Mom’s 80th birthday. It never occurred to me that my Mom wouldn’t live to be 80. I sure wish she had.
Mom wasn’t perfect. (How’s that for birthday cheer?!). In fact, one of her biggest flaws was that she was a perfectionist. She was so methodical and thorough that small tasks became big ones and she couldn’t do anything half-assed. (I, on the other hand, can! I actually bought the domain name www.halfasana.com when I was teaching yoga because I’m all about sliding into home base.) Now, back to Mom. In some ways her perfectionism presented itself as charming. As evidenced by the title of this blog, Dale knew how to host and her events were always gorgeous, the food was delicious, and there was plenty of it. In some ways Mom’s perfectionism presented itself as quirky and slightly paranoid. She had a list on the bathroom cabinet of all of the medicines inside, with their expiration dates and side effects. When she would go on trips, my sister and I would receive emails with all sorts of info about combinations to the safe, where the silver was hidden, etc. My favorite message was something to the effect of, “If the plane goes down, I thought you should know that the dining table leaf is off being refinished. I know it would be a shock to not be able to find it.” I tell you what, if the plane went down I can pretty much guarantee that I wouldn’t notice or care about the missing dining table leaf! And, finally, sometimes Mom’s perfectionism presented itself as limiting to her creativity. If she couldn’t do it right, she didn’t want to do it at all. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Mom could do anything we could do. She was a musician with my sister, a writer with my father, and an artist with me. But, with her own projects sometimes there was some self-sabotage and that makes me sad!
This week I received a Dropbox file from my Dad with all of my mother’s notes for a book that she started and never finished. It was to accompany an exhibition of work by Southern women artists who were born between 1850 and 1900. The research and writing Mom did was incredible! And abandoned. I don’t know what went on inside her head but I think, in this case, her perfectionism got the better of her and she scrapped it. Only Mom knows the full story but after reading what does exist, I can tell you that the world is missing something wonderful.
The book’s intro essay starts off:
”When a show of Everette James’s collection of paintings by Southern women artists opened at the Chapel Hill Museum, many people asked ‘Why have I never heard of these women before?’ The short answer is ‘Because they were Southern women.’ Their careers and subsequent reputations suffered, in the first place, because they were Southern. Being women hurt them, too. And being Southern women was worse than the sum of its parts. To untangle these factors, we must look at educational opportunities, at economics, at art institutions, at attitudes toward women, at changes in taste, at changes in the study of art history, and at the collecting process itself.”
I find it fascinating that Mom could so easily see the obstacles these female painters were up against, yet couldn’t see the ones she was imposing on herself. Mom did have an awakening in her middle age. I remember her taking a job as a copyeditor at the UNC press. Being young at the time, I just thought that Mom wanted something new and probably wasn’t all that supportive of this transition because it messed with our routine. Now, as a middle aged mother, I can readily see and identify with the layers of subcontext in Mom’s decision to take this position. I think that Mom was desperately trying to claim her identity as a thinker outside of the home. Of course, she really didn’t need to prove this to anyone besides herself. We all knew she was brilliant.
When I was in college Mom started reading feminist theory. Maybe she was studying it before but I never noticed? However, it became apparent to me when Mom was reading the same books I was reading at my postmodern art school. While conservative on many levels, Mom was also pretty dang “woke”! She came a long way from small town East Tennessee where her father called her “Miss” and requested that she serve him 2 fingers of booze when he got home from work. (She confessed to me later that this used to unnerve her. How much was two fingers? Who’s fingers? Hers? His? She just poured and crossed her fingers!)
Maybe a year and a half after Mom’s death, I got a message from my father saying that he had found a letter addressed to me while cleaning out Mom’s desk. He didn’t read it, he just slapped a stamp on it and sent it to Texas. I tried to approach this weird gift with caution. You really don’t want to get your hopes up about a letter from beyond the grave. I kept telling myself, “it’s probably passwords to her computer”, or “it’s an inventory of valuables”. When it arrived, I took some time by myself to read it. What was surprising was that it wasn’t recent. It was from 1988 when Mom and Dad went to India for 6 weeks. I was a sophomore in high school at that time and was left at home, supervised by a friend of the family. (And, yes, I did have an ill-advised party at our house. With all of the antiques and possibilities for breakage, I hated every minute of it and decided to lie and tell people that my chaperone was coming home early so they would leave! I basically narced on myself! Real cool, Sarah…) Anyway, Mom wrote me this letter before she left the country, just in case something happened to her. It’s what I now know is called a “Death Letter”, people in the military write them to their families before they deploy. Since I was only 15 when she wrote it, the letter included a lot of speculation about who I might become. She also wrote about her wishes for me: a satisfying career, a good marriage, maybe children. And, at the end she wrote, “Please remember that I, who am a terribly picky, snobby person, loved you a lot and respected you immensely. I hope you can learn to trust your talents and be willing to take the risk of seeing where they lead you.”
I may be reading too much into this abandoned book of Mom’s but I wish she had trusted her talents and seen it through. She obviously has plenty of other accolades to her name, but this project was so special and so thoroughly HER. Also, I think she was being hard on herself with the “picky” and “snobby”. She just knew what liked and I’m glad that included me!
So, back to the birthday at hand. 80 years. Mom made it to 77. What she stressed as she was dying (and, interestingly, almost exactly 30 years earlier when she wrote that letter) was that she had had a great life with no regrets. She just would have liked to have more of it. To quote the Rolling Stones (whose drummer, Charlie Watts, died yesterday at 80), “You can’t always get what you want”.
Happy Birthday, Mom. xx
So, for today’s recipe, I’m sharing one of her classic faves: a malted milkshake. Malt is an acquired taste, for sure, but Mom loved it! In England she would eat buttered malt loaf. At home in the US, chocolate malted milkshakes were one of her favorite treats. Mom drank milkshakes up until her final days. My dad went through a beer making phase in the early 80s and we had a HUGE BARREL of malt under our butcher block for years. So, we tried “everything malted” for a while. Milkshakes were the only thing I could get with. (Although, this recipe uses malted-milk powder and not straight malt. Work with me here.)
MALTED MILKSHAKE
3 scoops vanilla ice cream – softened (about 8 oz)
1/2 cup milk – 1%, 2% or whole
1/4 cup chocolate, strawberry, or other syrup
2 Tablespoons malted-milk powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
pinch nutmeg--or use whipped cream to garnish
In a blender, pulse all of the ingredients on low speed just until smooth, about 20 seconds. Don't overblend or the shake will become soupy.
For a vanilla malted, increase the milk to 3/4 cup and omit syrup.
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