With my son nearing the end of his senior year in high school, I wanted to write him a letter and put it in his brown paper bag lunch this morning, but I didn’t. He will read this though, and hopefully understand what I am trying to say.
“Dear Son,
I’m sure you noticed something a little different about your peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch today. At least I hope you did. I understand that you are used to having it the ‘usual’ way, but last night I needed to make it a different way.
I needed to ‘hear it.’
I needed to hear the sound of a woman who loved me. Yes, that is a strange thing to say when making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I’ll explain it to you.
When I was a little boy, I got to stay with my ‘Mama Baker,’ a woman who lived a few houses down the street. She loved me and the other children like her own, she has long since passed away. She didn’t have much and the only job I ever knew her to have was keeping kids. I think my parents paid her ten or twenty dollars a week, I’m really not sure.
She shared with me some of life’s most important secrets. Things like professional wrestling and soap operas, which I didn’t like then, nor do I care for now (if they still have soap operas). I knew the theme songs to ‘Dark Shadows’ and ‘As the World Turns.’ She would simply say, 'Mama Baker needs to watch her stories.’
She would let me watch cartoons if there were any on the 3 or 4 channels available and she had a box of mostly broken toys. I’m not complaining at all, the broken toys gave me the motivation to want to fix things. In the fall, she would let me watch the World Series; she thought boys ought to watch baseball (they played a lot of games during the day back then).
She didn’t have much, but it didn’t seem to affect her outlook on life. When I was sick, she took care of me. She had this ‘medicine’ she kept in this little hole of a bedroom. She would mix it with honey and say, ‘This will help your cough.’ It did help my cough and it also put me to sleep. It was cheap whiskey I am sure, but if Mama Baker gave it to me, it was alright.
When I got hungry, she gave me sweet tea and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That’s where that ‘sound’ comes in. She would get the peanut butter and the jelly, and then put it together in a bowl and start mixing it with a butter knife. She would hit the side of the bowl with the knife while she mixed it. It made this beautiful sound as she whipped the peanut butter and jelly together into this wonderful concoction.
There wasn’t anything else in it other than peanut butter and jelly and she spread it on plain store bought white bread. But the sound made my mouth water and made me realize that she loved me so much that she was not just making a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich, she was making a meal for one her boys, her ‘reason for living’ and being happy. She would smile, sit there and watch me eat it, like she had accomplished this world changing task that people should be so impressed with.
I’m here to tell you, they should.
I’m also here to tell you that you should take every seemingly mundane task you face along life’s way, the same way. Go at it like it is important and the people you are doing it for are important. Because they are important.
I just wish you could ‘taste’ what it felt like to have her sit there and smile at you.
I love you, Daddy"
Honestly, I probably should have told my son about the time Mama Baker pulled the pistol out of her purse. She was about to go to the “rasslin matches’ down at the city auditorium. She told me, “Don’t worry about me going to the wrestling matches, I’m taking this pistol with me.” She was pretty good with a butter knife, but I was very concerned about her toting a loaded pistol in her purse.
Don’t take the little things for granted – in particular, the sounds of life.
________________________________
Cranks My Tractor
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I'm BN Heard and I like semicolons, dogs and the sound a butter knife makes hitting the side of the bowl when peanut butter and jelly are being 'whooped' together.
Come see me in Vienna, Virginia at Jammin Java on Saturday, May 28th when I take on 9 of the other best storytellers around in Better Said Than Done's 5th Year Anniversary Show and Contest.
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