You'll Know
My Grandma Murray made the best donuts.
I didn’t get to see her very much when I was a young girl, but occasionally she and my grandpa would take a few Greyhound buses south from their home in northern Wisconsin to our home in Indianapolis.
During those visits, she would head into our kitchen, grab a few ingredients and prepare the most wonderful donuts.
I was about 20 and home from college when I asked her to share her donut recipe with me. She had had a stroke and was physically unable to show me, so I asked her to just tell me. I still remember sitting in front of her, eagerly holding pen and paper, waiting for her to give me her list of ingredients.
Here’s how it went.
Grandma: Just take some flour.
Me: How much?
Grandma: You’ll know.
Me: Hmmm. Then what?
Grandma: Get some sugar.
Me: How much?
Grandma: You’ll know.
She gave me her list of ingredients with no measurements, and then she told me that her recipe called for blending them together until the batter had the consistency of “you’ll know.”
It didn’t take me long to realize that my opportunity to get that recipe had disappeared – and that it wasn’t coming back.
Recently, my friend Jan told me about an experience that she had with her grandmother and cooking.
Way back in the early 1940s, her grandmother had purchased “The Joy of Cooking.” When Jan was in her early 20s, her grandmother gifted her with the cookbook.
“It looked awful,” Jan said, laughing at the memory. The book was stuffed with recipes clipped from newspapers, and its spine was taped together. Her grandmother had scribbled notes throughout the book, words like “really good” and “too sweet.” She had also changed some of the measurements noting “pinch” or “two pinches.”
Jan’s family had moved around a lot when she was a kid. “We didn’t keep things,” she said, explaining why that made her acquisition of the cookbook especially tender.
Her granddaughter is getting married at the end of this month, and Jan decided to give her something very special at a recent bridal shower. Of course she gave her the 70-year-old cookbook. “She was thrilled to death,” Jan said of her granddaughter’s reaction.
There seems to be a special bond between grandmothers and granddaughters. And it seems that in granddaughters’ eyes, their grandmothers can do no wrong.
Titus 2:3 reminds us that “older women” are to “teach what is good.”
Although my grandma didn’t teach me how to make donuts, she did teach me the importance of attending Mass and saying the rosary. She taught me about faithfulness during her 65-year marriage to my grandfather.
Now, I’m a grandma. Someone once told me that having grandchildren is like standing on a shore and watching the distant horizon.
I think that’s true.
You sure don’t know where the future will take them, but you hope with all your heart that you have taught them something that will help them along their way.
