Red, White and Blue, 2nd try

My last posting was only partially complete again. Aghhh. I am reproducing the main text here, hopefully. This is about one particular 4th of July...

It was a big deal when the Bicentennial rolled around in 1976. It was going to be the biggest and best 4th of July ever. A large local park filled with old Sycamore trees named Verdugo Park was the focus of the festivities in Glendale that year. It wasn’t unusual for people to arrive at dawn to reserve spots and picnic tables during the summer, so the park was pretty full when we arrived.

Mom had packed a big picnic lunch and had a little surprise for us as well. With enthusiasm and a big smile on her face she produced 6 big matching red white and blue Uncle Sam top hats for us to wear. Stephen who was 11 then took one look at them and said, “No way am I going to wear that. What if someone saw me? My friends would be laughing at me for weeks.”
Mom, a bit crushed, tried to talk him into it and eventually persuaded him saying that none of his friends would see him. I don’t know why she made that claim seeing that we were going to go to a very public place or why Stephen eventually bought it. But we generally did what we were told, and we weren’t supposed to talk back to our parents.

So, there we were at the park, decked out in festive red, white and blue outfits, eating our picnic lunch while wearing matching Uncle Sam hats. We were an all-American family with two boys and two girls and both Mom and Dad in patriotic clothes having a 4th of July picnic. A roving photographer came by and took a few shots of us together and then some more of us later as we played in the park and joined in the group games. We had a lot of fun and Stephen didn’t bump into any of his friends while wearing his hat.

The next day while we were eating a leisurely breakfast outside, Mom went to the front door to pick up the newspaper. Because it was Sunday it was really big. Laughing to herself, she thought that she would tell Stephen that our picture was in the paper. She opened the paper and saw a huge picture of our family on the front page of the paper. Of course we were all wearing our Uncle Sam hats. Cackling as she does when something strikes her as REALLY funny, she came outside waving the paper saying, “You won’t believe this, but we are on the front page of the Glendale Newspress and the LA Times!”

Stephen was understandably horrified and received some teasing for the pictures. The rest of us thought it was fun to have our photo so prominently displayed. Lynn and Thomas also had other pictures by themselves on following pages. I think that it took Mom a little while to gain back Stephen’s trust as pretty much everyone in Los Angeles saw those pictures.

There was another incident that occurred while we were eating out on the patio, this time when Stephen was in his college years at UC Davis. He was home for the summer and Mom had made his favorite dessert: apple pie. After months of dorm food he was very glad to have some of Mom’s home cooking, especially his favorite dessert. We had all smelled it cooking and had seen the beautiful apple pie in its glass pie dish sitting on the counter cooling. We made sure that we saved enough room at dinner to really enjoy it.

Mom went inside to bring out the tray that had the pie and dessert plates on it. As she stepped through the screen door the door caught on her sleeve and the tray started to wobble. We all stared at her as the tray dipped from side to side as she struggled to regain equilibrium. In her effort to not have the whole thing drop she managed somehow to slam it into the wall, shattering the glass pie dish into the pie, and the pie into the wall before the tray fell from her hands. Wordlessly she turned around with huge eyes, not believing what had just happened. We too were momentarily speechless. It was as if the whole thing had happened in slow motion but we were frozen in our seats, unable to assist her.

Eventually, when she found her voice, Mom just kept saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” It was a small tragedy, but a tragedy none the less. Mom makes really good apple pie, and to see it slammed into the wall before we could have a bite was very hard to take. We would have eaten it off the ground, but the glass dish was shattered in it, and as good as the pie would have been, it wasn’t worth the chance of eating glass.

I think the moral of the story could be GET UP AND HELP OUT; if one of us had AT LEAST opened the door for her she would not have ended up throwing it against the wall. Actually, most of the time we were fairly helpful with dinner, but I guess not always.

What makes this story even harder for Stephen is that a few weeks before he came home from college he called Mom for her apple pie recipe so that he could make it himself. That was pretty enterprising for a college guy and it took him a bit of effort to shop and peel the apples and make the crust and put it together. Enough effort that one would think that he wouldn’t forget about it after he put it in the oven. But he did. He went out for awhile and when he returned there was smoke coming from the oven. The pie was burnt to a crisp. All that work for nothing. He was a bit heartbroken and embarrassed when he relayed the story over the phone. So to have another pie decimated was really a bummer.

He did stop at our friends the Dessayers in Moraga on the way home and Alice, whose daughter Janet was at UC Davis with Stephen, had been told about the pie, and had a homemade apple pie waiting for him when he arrived. The Dessayers were like a second family to us and Alice and Mom shared a lot of recipes, so a pie from Alice was almost like having a pie from Mom.