Faith Works 1-1-22
Jeff Gill
Thinking about a cup of sugar
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If you read my four part story through December, you followed a young mother up and down the street she'd lived on for a few years, looking for a cup of sugar.
The story, a work of fiction built of scraps tugged out of my own reality, had a beginning in a staff training session I was asked to help with years ago, for a group working on housing issues in Licking County.
There were a number of elements to the visioning and planning day I was part of, but what's stuck with me was a group conversation I started with talking about the memory I had, growing up, of being sent across the street by my mom with a measuring cup in hand to get a cup of milk for making biscuits. Sometimes, it was Mrs. Stone coming over to our house for one egg because she needed three and found she only had two left, or Mrs. Glinski asking on the phone if Mom could send me over with two cups of flour.
I'm not saying it happened every day, or even every week, but it wasn't odd or unusual. And then at some point . . .
This is where the conversation really took off. Because the folks my age or older (I'm 60 now, but this was 10-15 years ago) all had variations on the same sort of memories from their childhood. Those who were younger, in their twenties and thirties, were kind of bemused by the whole idea. Go to a neighbor's house for supplies? Seriously?
What we both uncovered and bridged in the next few minutes was a bit of a generational gap in assumptions and expectations: a time when many families had one car, so if Dad wasn't home from work, "running to the store" wasn't even an option; a time when baking not only happened, but wasn't always from a pre-mixed box; a time when houses and fridges were smaller, when a few of us even recalled milk delivery in the morning, and the homes were closer together and even had sidewalks between them.
To be honest, I haven't asked a neighbor for baking ingredients in . . . decades. (I did have a bottle of wine show up on my front porch recently.) And both my wife and I have cars, we have a pantry and cupboards and if anything, I might find my supplies are dried or hardened or rancid, not used up. But there are still makers and bakers and grandmothers on many (most?) blocks in our communities, and while home-made snacks are out of bounds for most school events, there's still times and places where a plateful of homemade cookies are welcome sights, let alone tastes.
For all of the popularity of cooking shows and bake-offs and Martha Stewart with Snoop Dogg, it's not clear if actual food preparation is on the upswing in homes. The early pandemic period saw shortages of yeast packets and A-P flour and other home baking goods, but that demand seems to have settled back down to previous levels. Drive-up carryout pickup of food, home delivery services, and even resurgent inside dining all are showing our eating habits to be back to a fairly retail and individualized status.
So what's the path for what my story was really meant to be about, which is rebuilding community? What is the best recipe for mixing together our own memories of pies and cakes and cookies, punch and egg nog, potlucks and pitch-ins, to where the interest would rise for us to get together and share meals?
This is something that faith communities perhaps do best. For many of us, a shared meal, even with modest amounts of bread and wine, is the heart of our worship. And even traditions which make less of communion know the communing that can take place around covered dish dinners or after funeral luncheons. Sharing food is a taste of the holy, an eternal moment that can come during the lunch hour, and we need to find more ways to break bread together. Or to make cookies!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's enjoyed hearing from so many of you about your cookie recipes. Let him know how you'd get more people eating together at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
