JELL-O Decisions

My grandmother used to make a lime JELL-O salad that I loved. Pecan pieces hid in a cream cheese blend of crushed pineapples, and marshmallows dotted the fluffy mixture like cotton clouds on a clear blue sky. I thought about her and my childhood today as I looked at the recipe card scrawled with familiar childish writing. I wondered why no one seems to make JELL-O salads anymore. When did we outgrow congealed salads filled with cans of fruit cocktail?

Life seemed simple back then. As children, we learned in terms of good or bad, right or wrong, and neither/nor. We were either well enough to go to school or we weren’t. Maybe being sick is when we learned about decision making and how to live life in the middle of two big field goals colored black on one end and white on the other end. We learned when to advance from eating nothing to nibbling dry toast or crackers and sipping Sprite. We learned when to graduate to cold cubes of JELL-O that would slide down red swollen throats. We looked forward to the big day when we feasted on Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup accompanied by JELL-O filled with crushed pineapple or fresh bananas. Before we knew what happened, we grew up, and it seems that collectively we threw out the old JELL-O molds and moved into more complex lives.

We fell in and out of love; lived in valleys and on summits; experienced tragic loss and great joy. We savored expensive wines; took pills in good times and bad, and lost touch with both our childhood and ourselves. And yet, the lessons learned while lying in a pile of crisp white sheets next to a nightstand of icy cold washcloths, thermometers and JELL-O bowls stayed within us even though life is not as simple as right or wrong; sick or well. Life is lived in the moments of decision making when we don’t quite know if we’re able to eat the JELL-O with fruit cocktail, take it plain or if we’ve graduated to full blown concoctions shaped in rings or layers or stripes. Life is lived when we don’t know what to do, and no one can tell us if we want plain or parfait. We yearn for someone else to make the decision for us, just like when we were sick, and bring us exactly what we need.

Picking up my mother’s cookbook entitled Joys of Jell-O, I flip through the pages with black and white pictures of JELL-O shaped in cake rolls, pies, and tall towers. I skim tips on how to whip it, flake it or cube it. Putting it back in the pantry, I pick back up the yellowed, stained index card with my Grandmother’s congealed lime salad recipe and set out the cream cheese to soften. I’m not alone, and I don’t make decisions alone. I carry within me a lifetime of lessons taught around the kitchen table, at picnics by a creek, and lying in a bed waiting to be well. On JELL-O's foundation, I’ve been taught I can achieve any dream. It’s up to me to create my future and some days, I can only move forward when I first recreate the past.

Sweet Tea

In the midst of a summer heat wave, a few friends and I went to a Saturday night baseball game. It was hot. It was stinkin’ hot. Hair frizzed, program books soaked up sweat and even the flag couldn’t find the energy to fly. I don’t know who we played, how we played or if we won but I remember the heat leeching onto my skin. I recall my mind wandering to the upcoming season of ice hockey and crisp autumn days of football.

I heard the food vendor before I saw him. “Sweet tea,” he cried. “Sweet tea. Who wants some sweet tea?” In plastic cups filled with melting ice, he carried the entire southern culture in his hands. He sold to men wearing sleeveless t-shirts and to women wearing loose cotton frocks and cowboy boots. He sold to men and women carrying gun permits and holding the fear of God. He sold to a multi-generational crowd who grew up on sweet tea and church suppers; sweet tea and family reunions; sweet tea and green beans slow cooked, with just a touch of bacon grease, all day long.

The strains of the national anthem played over the noise of cicadas and the crowd rose in unison. Baseball caps and cowboy hats were removed and without athletic skill, we formed a team bigger than pageant hair and longer than a southern drawl. On that sweltering summer night, in a diverse crowd eating corn dogs and fried pies, we united around country, baseball and our prized sweet tea.