"The Recipe"

If you happened to read my post [here] on Great Projects Afoot, you might have thought I'd forgotten all about a life project by now, one that would help me again look at the glass not only as half-full but full of sparkling fizz and pink bubbles.

Or did you think I was now ignoring the subject? Hoping you wouldn't ask me about it?

It was 1995 and R.H. and I were at one of those estate sales where the crowd sweeps you along and the prices are exorbitant. Still, you hate to leave without buying anything. On our way to the garage, where R.H. hoped to find tools, we passed through the kitchen where determined women were snatching up all the pretty 1950s dishes and cookware.

One item sat alone on the counter by the door to the garage, ignored. A worn green recipe file.

Something made me scoop it up and pay ten dollars for it. Inside were stuffed newspaper clippings of recipes and a bunch of the old recipe pamphlets put out by companies pushing their products.

All of this was nice but what made me squeal with delight as R.H. drove home were personal letters and pages of scripts from a local Nashville television cooking show that had been popular in the 1950s. They belonged to the hostess of the cooking show that my mother had watched when I was in elementary school. There were pages of typed menus for these shows, including one for a Christmas special.

I wish I could show you a picture of these but I need to find them first. Until I thought about posting about it I assumed they were still in the file, up in my closet. I looked everywhere for them the other day with no luck. Not too surprising as they've been put away since 1995. That is when the purchase of this recipe file gave me the idea of writing my first short story.

I wrote it in two weeks and sent it off to a magazine published by a religious publishing house in Nashville where I had worked before we had our first child. To my surprise, they accepted my story of a pregnant woman from Massachusetts, whose hobby was restoring old cars, who moves with her husband to the South where the purchase at an estate sale of an old green recipe file--my very file--helps her to believe that she can learn to like this strange place called the South. Everything she needs is in the green recipe file.

Other than the births of our children and grandchildren, this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me. Receiving copies of the published issue was more thrilling than being given a bag of diamonds.

To think, an actual artist had been paid to illustrate my story, "The Recipe." And they gave four pages of their magazine to it!

I immediately got busy on another submission, this time a Christmas article on the Advent wreaths I made each year. It was accepted too, so obviously the next step was to write more short stories and articles and attempt to get them published by other magazines in order to build a resumé, right?

Go ahead and laugh when I tell you that what I did instead was to begin writing a novel. I spent two years on it and it was promptly rejected by another publishing house, even with a letter from a friend to his editor friend there. Embarrassing then but I would have been even more embarrassed today if it had gone to press. Know what I mean?

[Holly's Song: "Why does everything always have to be just right for you, Mom? Why do we all have  to pose like we're a perfect family having a perfect Christmas year after year? You know it's just an act we put on."]

I wrote another book, in collaboration with my daughter, a mixture of fiction and non-fiction about Thanksgiving Day that took two years to write. It was rejected by two agents. I bought a fancy binder for that one and get it out every November for my own enjoyment.

[Johnny wondered why it was that Osmie Tuttle seemed to walk exactly like the Broad-breasted Bronze turkeys he raised at Tuttle's Turkey Farm. Even Osmie's neck resembled his oldest gobbler, Old Methuselah, the terror of 

Tuttle's barnyard.]

Next I began working on a saga of three families that began in 1840 and was to go through the early 1950s.

[The three Carrollton men who rode the crop--grandfather, father, and son--viewed with contentment the land, fallow and cultivated, forest and swamp. Their keen hooded icy blue eyes assessed everything thoroughly, the formal gardens as well as cow pens. Orchards as well as gin house. Nothing escaped their eyes, not barns or dairies, not the gristmill or smokehouse or the slave cabins.]

I got to 1911 and then one night was inspired to write an offshoot of the saga, a light romance about a fat man falling in love with a beautiful woman in 1952 Nashville. A woman who has discovered a revolutionary new theory of weight loss. I loved that book. I spent three years on it. Never submitted it. Instead I discovered blogs and realized how much sheer talent was out there. Bummer.

[We sat on the porch glider and listened to the radio while hoping to catch an evening breeze, moths beating their wings against the screens. The June moon was nearly full and the scent of honeysuckle was in the air as Vladimir Horowitz's recording of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata played. Halfway through the music, Martin held my hand....]

So I decided to blog instead. Instant gratification. I love blogging. It's so much fun to write and work on blog posts, with R.H. taking the pictures. But the truth is that some of the joy went out of my life when I put aside my old writing, my first love.

Grudin's quote on my post "Great Projects Afoot" made me want to write again. And so I began, after making space on an old green table in the bedroom and spreading everything else across the foot of the bed every morning. No excuses now, everything is waiting for me.

I don't have a lot of time to write. There are other things to do. Isn't there always? But it's the thing I most look forward to every day, an hour here or there. The joy of writing my stories. And this time no worrying about the seemingly impossible hope of landing an agent or a submission being accepted. This time, if I feel that one is ready, I'll try the e-publishing route that others are doing now, sheerly for the exhilaration of seeing it there. (Not that I'd turn down an offer from Hollywood for the movie rights, you understand.) I might even have to buy one of those gadgets that you read books on now. Otherwise, as my friend Tammy at The Peanut On the Table reminded me, some day my granddaughter might want to read her grandmother's books. I hope so.

There it is, my Great Project Afoot. I see the pink bubbles again already, and isn't that what really matters? Don't we always want a recipe for them? 

"People with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in 

day-to-day concerns.

They do not easily grow sad or old."

Robert Grudin

[I promise that my next post will be short, very short.]