Friday Photo: What’s in a Name?

2012 Elementary school trip, Crayola Factory, Easton, PA

I have been Miss Grove for three years now — well, officially.  I suppose I have technically been Miss Grove since the date of my birth, but the first time a student entered my classroom in 2009 and said, “Good morning, Miss Grove.  My name’s Amber; I’m a junior.  It’s nice to meet you,” I found it so charming that I emailed my mom. (“A student called me MISS. GROVE. Isn’t that cute?”)

I have been many names in my life, each with a different flavor.  Sylly G was my name in middle school, coined by my friend Marie when I was trying to have some kind of an attitude. Seel-via, silk-laden and elegant, was my host mom’s pronunciation of my name in 2005 when I spent a semester in Avignon, France.  My students in Talange, France, in 2007 called me Madame (or l’américaine” because they could never remember my first name) which made me sound snobby, or so I thought, but it was also a distinct gesture of respect.  So Miss Grove has been.

A name can be a reason for camaraderie, and a title can be a mark of distinction, but I also noticed that a name can also make or break intimacy.  During my first years of teaching, I used to hesitate to call myself by my first name whenever I was telling a story because saying “Sylvia” out loud in a room of people who call me “Miss Grove” required the merging of my worlds, my perceptions of myself.  Sylvia does cartwheels while jogging by the Susquehanna River, but Miss Grove, in high heels and a serious skirt, would not.

However, it seems that the first step to being a good teacher is showing your humanity, your normalness. One difficulty with being a teacher was realizing that there is a distinct line between the students’ perceptions of my life and theirs, and I wanted to show them that the difference was very small. (I too know what Rock Band is, have favorite rides at Hersheypark, have opinions on pizza toppings, and have read The Hunger Games.) The best advice I ever received about teaching was that it is a reciprocal experience — I learn from the students as much as they learn from me — and that education never ends.  Therefore, I became Sylvia in the classroom whenever I was telling a story about my first interviews for The Patriot-News or when explaining my musical background; I was Sylvia as I talked about tutoring at the Central PA Literacy Council or learning to talk to the homeless woman named Denise at my laundromat on Calder Street.  I am Sylvia because I want to prove that education is not just isolated to Miss Grove and the classroom.

Today, I announced that I am resigning from high school teaching to pursue higher education in the fall, and I realized that Miss Grove, as I know her, will be gone.  But what I learned from her during these three years of sharing her existence—how to expose myself to students, to laugh, to be vulnerable, to think creativity, to be challenged even by those younger than me, and to listen—shall carry me through for the rest of my life.

After I stepped down from the lunchroom stage at the high school, clutching a Kleenex and trying to tell the students they had made a difference in my life, a junior named Derrick approached me and said, “Thanks for the stories.”  What I hope he meant was, “Thank you for being Sylvia.”

Honey Nut Cheerio Childhood

I stopped eating Cheerios somewhere around middle school.  This was because somewhere around this time, Post Foods released their Selects line of cereals, which included products with alliterative names like Cranberry Almond Crunch and Blueberry Morning. These cereals were chock-full of nuts and dried fruit and appealed to me much more than a mono-color cereal stuck on a single letter of the alphabet.  However, last week, I found myself standing in an aisle at Karns in Lemoyne with a glossy box of Honey Nut Cheerios in front of me.  At 21 ounces, it was the size of a small wall, the kind I used to hide behind when building cereal-box forts at the breakfast table, and it was a box that I hadn’t taken note of in years.  I threw the box triumphantly into my cart and marched toward the check-out counter.

Who knew that Cheerios float on the top of your milk instead of sinking to the bottom like granola?  I do.  I used to pretend that Cheerios were little inner tubes, thrown into a milk pool for a colony of children who lived in my cereal bowl.  As a five-year-old, I ate the Cheerios in layers, from the powdery dry Cheerios on the top of the mound, unspoiled by milk, to the moist rings beneath that held up the weight of the others.  These Cheerios sopped up milk like sponges and clung to the bowl’s edges until you broke them apart with a spoon.  Once I had eaten the Cheerios down to a single layer, I’d marvel at the difficulty of separating one Cheerio from the others, for in my milk colony, one Cheerio needed to stand solo on Sunday mornings because he was preaching. I’d eat all the O’s around the preacher and then note how the last remaining O would scoot naturally to the edge of the bowl, driven by hidden milk currents or loneliness; then I’d eat him with a certain definitiveness before drinking the remainder of the milk and wiggling out of my chair to play.

Cheerios has recently dedicated a portion of their website to explain why children still love Cheerios, citing that the cereal is, among other things, a comfort food, a food to play with, and a family tradition.  I loved breakfast cereal, Cheerios included, because of imagination.  In my world, the big biscuits of Post Original Shredded Wheat that my Grandma Charles flaked apart and drizzled with honey were actually bales of hay.  (The cows on the family farm had packaged them up for us to eat as a sign of secret rebellion, and I was the only one who was noticed.)  Sifting flour over Chocolate Whacky Cake — one of the first Mennonite-inspired items I learned how to bake — I created a landscape of falling snow flecked with cocoa powder dirt that I then flooded with oil, vanilla, and vinegar, drowning all those who lived within.  Even after cleaning out paintbrushes into a glass of water that turned an odd shade of purple, I would carefully pour the liquid into the kitchen sink and wonder if the people who lived in my drain (they were imprisoned) would drink the water because they thought it was grape juice and die of poisoning. (They would have deserved it.)

But where has this imagination gone?  As a high school teacher, I push myself to be in touch with the way I used to feel as a child — the curiosities, the misunderstands, the aggravations — in order to better relate with my students, and I’m realizing my imaginative timeline in a way that I hadn’t sensed before: the me I’m trying to tap into (the one of hay forts and secret clubs) changed drastically around the time of lockers and junior high lunch.  Due to peer pressure, the need to become critical and logical, and the different commitments of a teenage life, it seems like a child’s active imagination shifts to something more internal, perhaps, or for some, disappears entirely — although I do vaguely remember pretending that my life was a movie up until high school.

“A Child’s Creative Mind,” a blog post written by Pamala Kinnaird, explains that imagination is a very important tool — it aids children in exploring their relationship with themselves and the world around them, allowing them to better understand their own likes and dislikes on a hypothetical level.  Through imagination, the mind’s ability to create something out of nothing seems to me to be deeply connected to an individual’s later ability to think outside the box, develop new solutions to old problems, and push boundaries.

But how do we, as adults, as teachers, tap into this?  Michelle, author of the blog “Scraps of My Geek Life,” presents one solution. “Where does our imagination go?” she writes.  “Do we lose our imagination as adults or are we just afraid to let it soar? I hope we are just afraid to let it soar because that means if I let myself think freely, all that great imagination I had as a kid will come flowing back to me.”

She taps into the idea that losing our childhood imagination is connected to fear.  We all need to see the world as attainable and to be able to distinguish fact from fiction.

But I still want to see Cheerios as inner tubes and Shredded Wheat as bales of hay. If imagination can’t start at breakfast, where will it?

Fasnaughts and King Cake: Pre-Lenton Traditions in Central PA

Taking the Cake: Talange, France, January 2008

For us in south-central Pennsylvania, the day before Lent is known as Fasnaught Day, a tradition which we celebrate along with parts of Germany, Switzerland, and the Alsace region of France.  In times past, these traditional doughnuts were made to clear the kitchen of sugar and lard prior to the fasting season of Lent.

However, the Harrisburg area is getting a new pre-Lenton tradition, as reported in The Patriot-News on Wednesday, February 15: the king cake.  According to the article “King cake gets the Mardi Gras started,” this cake stems from a tradition imported straight from Louisiana.  It is oval; is often served in purple, green, and yellow frosting; and is embedded with a bean or plastic figurine to represent the baby Jesus sought after by the three kings, or magi, after his birth.  Traditionally, the person who was cut the slice with the figurine was crowned the king or queen for the day.

The Louisiana tradition is imported from an older one rooted in France, Belgium, and Spain.  I knew this cake in France as a galette des rois, sold pre-bagged with paper crowns from the Intermarche across the street and through a thin overgrown alleyway from the Lycee Gustave Eiffel in Talange where I lived.  When eating this cake, I felt that the term “cake” in the American sense was a misnomer; it’s more of a sweet brioche whose appeal lay in the possibility of becoming royalty for one moment.

I shared this cake with my friend Tobias on a cold hilarious night which involves us somehow acquiring two king cakes (note the two crowns) and wearing them both. Because of this, I’m skeptical of the central Pennsylvania version which is smeared with enough frosting to rival a coloring book — I remember this as a cake from simple times.  If the day before Lent is the season for indulgence, I’d rather use the king cake as an occasion for remembrance.

Friday Photo: Roses & Work Clothes, Shippensburg

The basement of my parents’ house is an area that my mother does not allow guests to see.  The walls are covered with crumbling horsehair plaster; the floor is cement; the lights are bare-bulb dim.  Here, however, is where my father’s farm clothes hang beside a bouquet of dried roses like a symbol of my parents: worn and warm, smooth and safe, together.

Winter 2009

Winter 2009

 

Friday Photo: A Plowman’s Perspective of Harrisburg Snow Removal

Third Street, Harrisburg, at 1:30 A.M.

This article first appeared in the January 2011 issue of TheBurg, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

It’s 11:35 PM on Wednesday, December 7, and I haven’t left home at this odd of a weekday hour since Black Friday. I bend over my steering wheel and crane my neck toward the sky: still no snow.  Front Street is as clear as a country road, a sleek damp ribbon studded with lampposts.  The black jogging path runs beside a silver Susquehanna.  It’s a picturesque scene, but the weather forecast has been clear: snow advisory for Central Pennsylvania from 7pm to 7am tomorrow.

When snow is on the forecast, most of us slide into a familiar routine: check the quantity of milk in the fridge, the level of gas in the tank. For most of us, the routine stops there, except for the occasional glance at the sky. This is not the case for Harrisburg’s Department of Public Works, for whom the words “snow day” have an entirely different meaning.

Tonight, four men—Dave Spiroff, Enola; Rodney Keller, Hummelstown; Randy Sauder, Harrisburg; and David Jordan, Susquehanna township—have just arrived for work.  I join them in a utility building on South 19^th Street which is backlit by fog and orange light. Director Ernie Hoch sips coffee and shakes my hand, and the men greet me with a nod. “This is my A team,” says Hoch, by way of an introduction.  “These are the guys that I call first.”

During heavy blizzards, up to 45 men, CDL licensed or otherwise, can be called upon by the department to help clear the city of snow, rotating over 12 hour shifts.  Most snow removal strategies are systematic, including prioritizing primary and secondary streets, and mapping out the city into 8 sections to focus the work. However, trying to determine where to push the snow, or struggling to fit a snowplow down Penn Street, can make for white-knuckle work.

“There’s always that one street that you’re driving down with your heart pumping Kool-Aid,” says Spiroff, who has worked with the city for 16 years.

Tonight, expectations are minimal. The one- and five-ton salt trucks have already been loaded, the goal being to salt ramps and bridges and to keep a close eye on the roads near the river, where it’s colder. The crew scatters, taking their places among the city, and Hoch and I duck into a pick-up truck and drive up Cameron Street.  We’ve barely driven five minutes before Hoch checks the weather on his phone. “I actually think the snow’s passed over us,” he says suddenly. There is no regret in his voice. “I’m not disappointed.  It’s better to be proactive. The streets will be clear by rush hour.”

I will be awake again by 6:30 and part of that rush hour traffic that will move swiftly through a bitter cold sunrise.  The students that I teach will be disappointed to have not had a delay, and I will secretly regret that I can’t sleep in, either.  However, it’s clear that this privilege of safe driving has everything to do with the four trucks that are out on the streets right now, circulating like quiet watchmen, tracing the city silently beneath a snowless sky.

Friday Photo: Christmas iCaroling

It’s two days after Christmas, the day that my extended Grove family gets together to exchange gifts wrapped in glittery paper and eat homemade ice cream cake off my grandmother’s Lenox china.  We’ve just finished our traditional supper of potato roll sandwiches, seven-layer salad, Kay & Ray’s potato chips, and homemade Chex mix served buffet-style, right to left, across Grandma’s kitchen counter, and I have just commented to somebody that I can mark my growing up like a timeline by recalling my annual reaction to this 25-year-old menu: the elementary school year I first put mayonnaise on my potato roll sandwich, the high school year during which I abstained from mayonnaise, the college years when I ate everything like normal again.

My mom, the piano teacher, has just sat down at Grandma’s upright piano to play Christmas carols.  One my one, my family puts down their dinner plates and surrounds her to sing, my father with his rich bass, my aunt’s contralto, my two brothers’ bass and tenor, my 90-year-old grandma’s warbling-yet-on-pitch soprano, and the alto and soprano parts that my mother, sister, and I seamlessly trade back and forth like playground candy.  Our voices blend like Brethren-in-Christ memories, smoothing over rough textures and varnished pews.  My immediate family used to sing together in front of the church on Sunday mornings, a fact which I’d almost forgotten, but by my mom’s elbow with my siblings pressed in around a hymnal that predates all of us, I somehow feel that if we were all to rise out of our seats and through the ceiling, our singing could shield us in a world of no sadness like a cord of three strands not easily broken.

I glance over my shoulder to find my boyfriend Jon standing slightly away from the group, his iPhone out, intently studying the screen.  “Who are you texting, hon?” I say, feeling hurt.

Jon glances up at me, surprised.  “I’m following the words,” he says, and then he joins in to the fourth verse of “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” an eager magnificent bass. I turn back around to face the open hymnal before me, a smile playing on my lips as we’re joined by my sister’s fiancé, and I flap my arms to get us all to laugh and sing the chorus a bit louder, lifting all of us into the night.

Friday Photo: Markets Around the World

I am fascinated by stores: sparkling cheap jewelry made to look expensive only in bright lighting, polished plates in geometric shapes, the shelves of spices in the baking aisle, the spines of new books.  I adore entering a Sheetz and twirling amid the Twix bars to my right, and suddenly being distracted by the Chex Mix to my left then realizing that I could buy any flavor of Red Bull that I want.  I don’t even know if Red Bull has flavors, but it doesn’t matter!  It’s all within reach!  Look at the colors!!  Everything’s possible!!!

On this Black Friday, it would seem appropriate to comment that I’m an ideal shopper, except for the fact that I only love looking at stores, not buying the products within them.  In my opinion, a group of people can be best understood through the act of buying and selling, because this action discloses a culture’s needs and priorities, perceived or otherwise.  In Chile, stores selling similar products are located in the same area of the city — a mall of hair salons, an alley of hot dog vendors, a street of antiques — to increase efficiency.  In France, bakeries open early because fresh bread is bought almost daily. In Italy, I’ve heard that it’s bad luck for a street vendor to lose his first sale of the day, so he’s often willing to negotiate for a lower price.  In Trinidad, boiled corn, still in the husk, is available on the side of the highways — you just veer off on the shoulder and roll down your window.  When buying and selling, convenience, need, creativity, and want all come into play.

On Black Friday in 2007, I was stuck on a crowded train between Luxembourg City and Brussels with a woman who was on the phone directing a jewelry purchase in New York.  Today, however, in honor of my friend Kara who posted a similar set of photos on her blog, I post a few photos of markets around the world, where what’s on sale reflects somehow we somehow all live through our consumerism — for better or for worse.

buying breadfruit in Trinidad

shopping district in Lille, France

cheese market in the Netherlands

calves for sale at the Greencastle Livestock Market in Greencastle, Pennsylvania

buying morning newspapers in Santiago, Chile

Friday Photo: World War I: Personal Photos of the Battlefields

One week ago was the anniversary of the end of World War I — the Great War which took 10 million lives.  On November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed in a train car in the woods east of Compiègne, France, a train car which I visited by bike with Lynn Palermo during our backpacking trip in July 2010. This trip took us along almost 270 miles of the Western Front, 76 of which we walked.  Through our footsteps, I realized that war is not just an event on the news or in the history books; it is disease that cripples a nation in a way that is only still visible in its landscape.

To fully appreciate the following post, first read this article by Mail Online which showcases some stunning photography by British photographer Michael St. Maur Sheil of the scars left behind in present-day France.  I recognized many of his scenes and have duplicated my own photography below.

shadows shifting on the grass-grown trenches at Beaumont-Hamel, France

early evening twilight at the Thieval Memorial, one of Great Britain's largest war memorials, commemorating 73,537 fallen English and South African troops

Hawthorn Ridge mine crater near La Boisselle, created by the detonation of 40,000 pounds of explosives

underground trenches at Arras, France, underneath la Grande Place

explosives dug out of the field of Philippe, a farmer and a Couchsurfer near Albert, France, with whom we stayed for the night

a German national cemetery along la Chemin des Dames north of Reims, France, of 6,000 crosses marking 12,000 dead

Truth and Lies: A Emailed Memory from France

Below is an unedited email sent home from Talange, France, dated October 22, 2007.  The story is regarding an incident which took place on October 21.  This reprint is dedicated to the story’s four-year anniversary.

Winter has come to this area of France exactly three days after I realized that it was fall.  On Tuesday, I accompanied a class on a field trip to eastern France (the region of Alsace), and it was then that I was surprised to see that the leaves were changing colors in the mountains.  I was going to write to you and say that Talange is so industrial that I can’t even see the seasons, but today after several hours spent shivering in the cold in eastern France, I have a larger story to tell.

Sometime earlier this week, I became strong on the idea of hunting for what is really France.  I realized I have been on a quest to capture what France is so that I can see it and taste it and consume it all, but when I scrolled through my photographs, I was not convinced that I was doing anything justice.  My photos are basically focused on what everyone would expect to see from France: the stained glass of the cathedral in Metz, a florist’s face at a market, the arrival of a train at a station.  I started wondering (since I do not have my German roommate yet, I spend most of my evenings wondering) if the whole perception of France that I am trying to give to others is off-base.  Not all French cities are picturesque and cobblestoned with restaurant menus in fancy script. France can be surprisingly dirty; the high-rises are cheap and thin-walled and colorless; and the Talange skyline is one of smoke stacks and electric lines.  Am I really no better than the tourists the come, take pictures, and leave only trash on the city squares?

near Bethune, France, 2010

I was in Strasbourg this weekend, the capital city of France’s easternmost region called Alsace, to visit an American friend named Hillary.  Alsace is the easternmost sliver of France that has been heavily fought over between the Germans and the French, so Alsace carries with it the Germanic charm of wood-timbered houses, red blossoms in flowerboxes, and good beer.  Hillary and I spent the afternoon exploring a nearby village called Colmar, eating tarte flambés and drinking coffee to keep warm.   I was loving it until I saw tourists with cameras glued to their faces and then I couldn’t stop wondering if the buildings were timbered just to please the people who pay to see it.  At that point, I started looking for an Alsace behind the Alsace that everybody sees—a France behind the France, as if there was a secret nation that lies behind the tourism and the money, only accessible to the foreigners if you really merit being part of it.

Sunday, I went into the city alone to explore before taking my train back to Talange.  Strasbourg is beautiful—home to the European Parliament, the Heiniken brewery, and also the most gorgeous cathedral and city centre that I have found yet.  Built out of rose-colored stone, it soars at a breathtaking height over a central square.  I leaned against a lamppost on the square in the shadow of cathedral, holding a bag of hot roasted nuts and watching the crowd thicken and thin.  An accordionist and bass violinist tightened their scarves against the cold and played traditional songs in the corner of the square.  Cigarette smoke curled up and disappeared into the winter sky.  I looked at the tourists and tried to divide them into the half of Europe that I was trying to know, the daily life Europe that hides within Europe, and to separate them from the Europe of the tourists with a painted exterior.

Suddenly, through the crowd, I spotted a woman, begging for money.  She was definitely not French, wearing a scarf around her head, and she had no gloves despite the cold.  She stood out sharply against the wealth of the tourists, the beauty of Strasbourg, and the magic of a chilly day.  I wondered if she was experiencing Europe with a non-painted exterior—the type of life that does not make a good photograph or a good story.  As if she knew I was thinking of her, she came over to my lamppost.  I handed her a banana and a tin of tuna, which was my lunch.  She did not leave immediately, so I asked her if she was okay.  She was not beautiful, and her French was broken and halting, but she answered me, told me about her children.  Her passport was Romanian.  Her name was Romina.  She smiled when she heard the accent of my name.

She asked me again for money, but I stood and gathered up my bags and told her that we were going to a supermarket.  I had ten euros and I was willing to buy her some groceries.  We left the square together, and she told me that her oldest daughter’s name was Andrea, like my younger sister.  I told her too that I was a foreigner.  I told her that I was homesick and scared sometimes but that I had work and enough to eat.  In a moment of silence, I realized that the night before, I had slept on a line of chairs in Hillary’s apartment since my luggage had accidentally gotten locked in the train station, so maybe I understand poverty more than I let on.  I noted to myself also that I still do my laundry in my bathtub to save money, and that I really need to get over the urge to horde every scrap of paper that I gain just so that I can say that I own something.  Romina and I were halfway to the supermarket when I reached for my purse to explain something to her, and I realized that my purse was gone.

“Romina!” I cried.  “Quick, back to the square!”  We were several blocks away, so we hurried through the cold, Romina moaned and asking worried questions the entire way there.  When we returned to the square and looked to where I had been sitting, of course the purse was gone.  I glanced sidewise at her.  Had she taken it?  Certainly not.  She knew that I was going to buy her food.  I had trusted her, but I had held my purse to my side my entire time.  I had listened to her story because I listen to other people’s stories.  I noticed a felt a lump in my jacket and realized that it was my cell phone.  “Look!” I cried to Romina.  I started dialing the United States to cancel my credit cards, but then as soon as I turned around, Romina was gone.

Her sudden disappearance melted my confusion into anger.  Of course it had been her, a part of me said.  She wouldn’t have left you otherwise.  How could you be so stupid?  You are never supposed to talk like people like that.  Another part of me echoed back: Don’t you dare say people like that.  It couldn’t have been her.  You had been cautious.  Then something in me screamed, “Sylvia, think about your PURSE!  You have NOTHING!”

And it was true.  I had no idea where the police station was.  I had no money to buy a train ticket back to Talange.  I had a limited number of minutes on my cell phone and a limited number of battery power, and when both of those ran out, I had no way of buying more, but I needed to cancel my credit cards before I lost all power on my phone.  I had given my food to Romina, so I had not had breakfast or lunch.  My luggage—including my passport—was locked in the train station, but I did not have the proper paperwork to retrieve it.  When I hung up the phone with my father, I had paced so quickly away from the square that I no longer had any idea where in the city I was.  Alone in a foreign city with growing cold, the cell phone in the palm of my hand was the only thing that I had.

A taxi driver heard me out and gave me a tram ticket for free to get back to the train station.  A young girl explained which tram to take and when.  When my brother called me back with the numbers of who to call to report theft, I ran up to complete strangers on the sidewalk to use their pens to copy down the digits on scraps of paper.  I managed to call Hillary and ask her to bring me twenty euros.  I spoke with my French credit card company and blocked my credit card, just before the power died out on my phone.  Hillary’s money got me a one-way ticket to Hagondange; I filed a report with the police which took a lot longer than it merited.  While waiting in the office, shivering, blowing on my hands to keep them warm, the thought suddenly shot through my head: is this France, unpainted? The sheer randomness of it all, the interaction with so many various people, the telephone calls across the globe—all of that mingled in with the roasted nuts on the square.  I felt raw, humiliated, almost violated.  How could I have searched to understand something larger but in the end, had it only made me no less than a vulnerable foreigner, a tourist, a target?

“Madame?” said the officer behind the counter.

“Oui?” I said to him, and it hit me that we had been speaking French the entire time.

“Sign here, please,” said the officer, and I took the pen from him, punctuating my signature with a strong, angry, triumphant, sick flourish.  I will not know if it was Romina, I don’t know exactly if I have concluded anything about a real France or stereotypes or poverty, I am still sick and angry and disappointed and hoping that whoever took my money really needs it.  I am safely back in Talange, getting new keys made for the apartment and trying to be at peace for having lost my American driver’s license, but I realized that in the panic of the moment, it was French that had come from my mouth and not English to the Strasbourg police, the French bank, the taxi driver.

Ironically, after everything, I had forgotten how to be scared of French.  It had been a flawless French day.

Friday Photo: Silver-Platter Sauce Chicken

So what’s this colorless Central Pennsylvanian meal doing on my parents’ wedding china?  It’s the meal of my 27th birthday, of course, of brown buttered egg noodles, “sauce” chicken, and freezer corn.

I had requested this same meal for my birthday when I turned eight (or was it nine?), a fact that I only remember because that year I had taken to writing an entire account of my birthday week on a typewriter — epic.  Even though I currently can’t find this diary, I still am fairly certain — just because the very act of just writing it down solidified memories — that my birthday in 1992 (or was it 1993?) was on a Tuesday because on Monday my mom had made pork chops, which look just like “sauce” chicken in the oven.  This fact had distressed me greatly because I thought she had screwed up and was making my birthday meal a day early.

From the moment I heard it frying in the kitchen, “sauce” chicken was one of those dishes that made me exceedingly happy as a child, even happier than Pizza Hut Pizza or homemade hamburgers.  According to my mother, the recipe for “sauce” chicken came from my health-conscious Grandma Charles under the strange misnomer of “BBQ Chicken.”  It consists of chicken thighs rolled in wheat germ, fried, and doused in a homemade sauce of ketchup, mustard, sugar, and Worcestershire sauce.  The dish gained its current name because the crispy wheat germ and ketchup and mustard congeal into this wonderfully clumpy sauce, although now I admit that clearly someone should have given me lessons in writing recipe titles.  (To give you a perspective, “egg stuff” is another family favorite.)

If food displays the cook behind it, my birthday meal indicates humble roots: cornfields, butter browned in a cast-iron skillet, and my formerly-Mennonite grandmother.  But I love it nonetheless, especially when rimmed by fine dishware, a silver platter of a childhood.

“SAUCE” CHICKEN (original email from my mother, dated June 14, 2011)

6 chicken thighs (plus or minus) — skin off, wash and roll in wheat hearts or germ and fry a little in canola oil, both sides.  Place in baking pan and mix together sauce to pour over:

1/4 cup ketchup
1/2 cup water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp mustard
1 tablespoon sugar
a little Worcestershire sauce

Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.