Dear Editor,

At 79, I have a lot of indelible personal memories, many of which involve my parents and how they worked together to survive and make sure their kids had the bare necessities. I believe pancakes was one of their ways to face hard times, smile, and give us a a little sample of having two cooks at home.

My mother was a wonderful cook, and she kept a file of her recipes and contributed many of them to family and church cookbooks to raise money for church and genealogy causes with some overlapping between the two because at one point in my young life many in our church were actually our relatives.

My father was a trained machine gunner during World War II, but he also was a cook for his unit, and when he came home from Europe, he used his cooking skills occasionally, especially on early Sunday mornings. I remember waking up and smelling his Army pancakes cooking on the iron skillet and bacon and eggs already fried waiting for pancakes and corn or cane syrup.

You don’t forget that cuisine because it didn’t appear every Sunday, but made a deep imprint on my senses of taste and smell, and melded with my parents’ love for us.

Later in his life Daddy rented a small restaurant from my uncle and he and Mama worked hard to make it go, but the labor, long hours, and almost no profit pressured him to give it up. My sister, Judy, and I helped as much as we could but she was in public school and I was in college, so our contribution didn’t change the end result. I learned that restaurant work was backbreaking and financially risky, not what I wanted at 24. But after that disappointment, Daddy still made pancakes when he could.

The lessons we learn come from choices we make and how we can use them to make our lives better. There’s always a fork in the road, it seems, just waiting for us to take the best one. If we use that fork to eat pancakes on Sunday, life seems to improve a little.

Grant Plymel

Thomasville