Passing it down

I am having my best girls over tonight for Happy Hour. I do this about once a month 'cause I just love having my girls over. We drink wine and eat snacks and just laugh. It's one of the best feelings in the world. Laughing that is.

This is something I hope to pass down to my daughter, both my kids - how to simplify the hub bub of life with dinner and drinks and good friends.

While prep'ing snacks for the girls, I realized my son probably wouldn't want brie cheese and/ or hummous tonight and he had pizza last night so what should I make for him? Then I remembered...he asked for pan-a-cakes. That's what he calls them Pana-cakes. I thought, if I can have my wine on Friday night, why can't he have panakes? He can.

As I pulled out the ripened bananas I had a flood of memories wash over me.
I learned how to make banana pancakes from my Grandma Alice - Alice Smart. A Doctor of History. The first Black woman to receive a doctorate from Washington University, St Louis. This brilliant woman loved showing me stuff. Just random stuff that I totally took for granted as a small child.
My father's mother lived on Windermere Place. I will never forget this because I spent so many years there - exploring the house, wandering the neighborhood, going to block parties. Block parties - whatever happened to block parties? Windermere Place was a fantastic block in a wonderfully magical neighborhood. We had neighbors who were all respected and affluent members of the St Louis community. Hell, right next door was Chuck Berry and his family. This wasn't cool or special because he was the rock and roll legend, but because he and his wife called my Grandma, "Big Mama". All the neighbors did. She had a reputation, not as Dr. Smart (as was also my grandfather, but a medical Dr), but as Big Mama - the neighbor who cooked and had social events and was a "Marm" of the neighborhood.

Of course this was all lost on me as a child.
As a child I thought ripened bananas were gross. What kind of nutjob puts old bananas into perfectly good pan-a-cake mix? But, I always ate them. Then one day as an adult - my bananas ripened, and something inside told me to put them in the freezer. So, I did. Then one day the same feeling inside made me take out those bananas and repeat the process my grandmother had shown me so many times. My kids loved them. Delicious - somewhat foreign concept of breakfast, but so good and it didn't occur to me until today that I was passing it down.

Big Mama taught me to travel, she taught me to speak perfect English, she told me to go to college in Boston (long before she died), she taught me to be a writer, she molded my path in so many ways and I wonder if she knows how much I love banana pancakes right now.