Baking Bread and Showing Love

Disparate memories come together to offer lessons on showing love. Boomer reader Doreen Frick connects meaningful bits from childhood and adulthood.

Back in the day, Dad experimented with baking bread. It may have begun when my new husband, Wes, was working at a bakery and Dad rented the space back there to have Wes bake a host of loaves for Dad to give to people he loved.

That was Dad. Always thinking and perfecting his recipe. I thought it was fun, and that little experiment turned into a bunch of bread machines on Mom’s kitchen table warming the house with the aroma of baking loaves.

I’m not sure who cleaned up after Dad (though I’m quite sure it was Mom!), which was fine, since everybody in my family knew it was Mom who did the picking up, putting away, making order out of disaster areas.

Then one day many years down the road, I came into the house and saw Dad mopping the floor. Emptying the dishwasher. Taking the clothes out of the dryer.

Mom took a seat and let Dad to everything. I don’t know that she knew she used to do all those things; the Alzheimer’s had begun taking things away from her that we all thought defined our mom, and Dad picked up where she left off, and managed just fine.

Oh yes, we girls helped. And yes, he brought in help, but for a man who never even put his clothes in the hamper to be washed, he showed us all what can be done when one needs things to be done.

Mom outlived Dad, and in the end, held his hand as though she were a friend visiting a sick friend. Not that this was a bad thing, just a different experience for us all to see. We “kids” had a lot to learn (I was in my 50s by then), and learn we did: over time, over talking it through, while writing our stories, playing the music Mom loved, and letting the words stay out of the way.

I needed to write all my thoughts somewhere, and rereading them today reminds me of bread baking, and laundry being folded, and floors mopped, and two people who fell in love during a time of war, growing old together.

For that is life: we bake, we clean, we pick up, we love. And that is writing, it seems to me, finding the words to get it all down before I too forget.

a simple packet of ketchup brought a memory …

Dad once told us a story of the cold winter day
when he and his pal from Girard (school for
fatherless boys) walked through Philadelphia with
next to nothing in their pockets.

They stopped at an automat where they got a
mug of steaming hot water (possibly that was free),
then Dad took the ketchup sitting
on their table and added it to the water
and made tomato soup.

Last night I looked at my bowl of SpaghettiOs (my
son Joey’s go-to favorite as a child and even now
as an adult) and thought to myself about the joy of
a simple meal; warm, tomatoey, filling. I pulled
a V-8 out of the fridge, and hiding behind it
was this packet of ketchup, and suddenly I felt like
the richest girl in the world…

Doreen Mary Frick is the author of Hodgepodge Logic (1999). She has written previous posts for Boomer, including “A Neighbor Named Alice” and “My Grandmother’s Dream.”

Read more childhood memories on showing love and other contributions from Boomer readers in our From the Reader department.

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