This year marks 100 years of being Thompsons for my branch of the family. It’s 15 years of keeping this online diary. My son who was just three years old when I started this, is eighteen now. Many of the people who got me started down this path, or gave me reasons to continue, are only present now in those of us they left behind.
As I’m writing this it is 13 minutes into December 26th. This morning, I made Christmas breakfast using Uncle Wayne’s secret recipe for biscuits and sausage gravy. The inside joke is that I know uncle Wayne’s secret recipe for biscuits and sausage gravy because his wife flat out told me what it was right in front of Uncle Wayne.
We were visiting Wayne in Georgia, enjoying his delicious buscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast made from a secret recipe he had learned while he was a cook in the Georgia prison system. Secret knowledge that only Georgia prison system cooks know. Wayne was telling us what a big deal that was in the solemn tones of a learned man of wisdom when she just blurted out the secret. Wayne wasn’t at all pleased about being undercut like that, but the cat was out of the bag.
My wife and I laugh every time I gather the secret ingredients and perform the sacred rites to make this highest form of sausage gravy.
My wife spent a good part of the day copying recipes out of her mom’s cookbook, preparing to send it off to live with her little sister. She talked about how it had way too many recipes that were made with canned ham, or hot dogs, and we compared it to my grandmother’s cookbook that seemingly made everything from lard.
The weather was unseasonably warm here, so we had a nice fire outside. I burned a bunch of junk ends and pieces of cut pine boards, old pizza boxes, and the remnants of a broken dresser. We talked about my dad’s incessant burning near the end of his life. He had this tiny efficiency firepit. It looked like a large metal drinking cup that he would jam any wood or old coal bits into and then sit back and watch it burn over and over again.
My 24 year-old son and I solved the world’s problems while we watched our fire turn to coals and the coals become ash. The consensus view at the end was that we would do what we could to bring people in rather than pushing them away, work towards understanding, and then hope for the best.
If there were things I could give everyone right now, I think they would be a warm place to be, food to eat, people to talk with, and a life full of things worth remembering.