Mom's Chocolate Pie

As I grow older I find myself indulging more and more in nostalgia about the days of yore.  I ponder my childhood exploits and recall my treks along the babbling brook near my childhood home. Sometimes I get a great urge to walk that trek again. Just a week or so ago, I developed a deep craving for my mother’s chocolate pie.  That craving just would not go away.  Finally I baked a chocolate pie of my own.  The pie turned out well, but it didn’t quite measure up to my mother’s.  I used a prepared pie crust.  My mother made her own pie crust from scratch.  I used the only pudding I could find at the grocery store—an “instant” chocolate pie filling.  My mother labored over the stove top to make her pudding.  She didn’t have access to the “instant” stuff. No wonder my chocolate pie didn’t quite measure up!

As much as I would like to have a piece of my mother’s chocolate pie, or my grandmother’s blueberry pancakes or her homemade bread (made on her wood-burning stove and its oven), I cannot.  The ingredients are just no longer available.  And, even if they were, I still would not have access to a wood-burning stove and oven.  Besides the “lard” used back then is deemed unhealthy for us these days.

This nostalgia for what once was affects us all.  We’d like to taste again Mom’s chocolate pie or grandmother’s blueberry pancakes. We’d like to have things the way they once were and as we remember them.  “Make America Great Again” implies that such is possible.  But the ingredients and the wood-burning stove aren’t there for us anymore.  We can’t replicate the pies, the pancakes, or the bread.  We live in a new and different world now.

When I indulge in nostalgia about my early days I find myself creating a “fictional past.”  I ignore the uncomfortable things or fail to remember them at all.  I remember the chocolate pie, the blueberry pancakes and the oven-baked bread, but ignore the fact that back then our society was a segregated one, that LBGT people were ostracized, and life wasn’t all that easy.  The ingredients and the wood-burning stoves of yesterday are no longer available.  It is a new day of prepared pie crusts and instant pudding!  

Martin Luther King said, “…social systems have a great last-minute breathing power, and the guardians of a status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive.”  But that old order is already gone—a new order, a new age has come and we must face it rather than an indulgence in nostalgia of a fictional past.