Happy Valentine's Day

Recipes are the currency by which generations of women define and distinguish themselves from other families.  These sometimes secret formulas, handed down from mother to daughter, are inscriptions of endearment, the personal stamp encrypted in each dish like DNA.  For my husband’s family, it’s the rutabaga recipe at Thanksgiving and the corn and oysters stuffing.  On my side, it’s the secret ingredient of buttermilk in which to cook lima beans, Snickerdoodle cookies and a simple homemade teriyaki marinade for flank steak that tenderizes meat as if it were a five-star chop house.

 

And if cooking is a physical manifestation of love, then it was a heart-felt gift this past summer to receive my grandmother’s well-worn 1943 original  Joy of Cooking.  Like a butterfly working it’s way out of the cocoon, my mother has begun wriggling free of her possessions.  It’s an almost compulsive need to shed herself of her earthly weight before she is incapable of doing so, although thankfully there are no signs that she is flagging.  She is a methodical person, a plotter and list maker like me, and she is determined to hand her three girls the physical pieces of our legacy in person.

When I eyeballed the cracked spine and no-nonsense pale blue and white cloth cover, I hesitated.  True confession: I’m a sloppy cook book chef.  I like to improvise too much and I’m lazy when it comes to precise directions.  Blanching, poaching, measuring, sifting, these are all too fussy.  I like to experiment a little, break the rules.  Besides, I thought, I had already lovingly transcribed my favorite family dishes onto index cards in a recipe holder I‘d made as a kid in 4-H.   The book was delicate, the pages yellowed.

Inside the front cover was a notation in pencil from my grandfather.  And then in my grandmother’s alternatively loopy and cramped handwriting was a poem she had clearly copied as a younger wife, presumably to remind herself that the way to her young husband’s heart was ultimately through his stomach.

“Crestfallen bride, you labored long

To bake that lovely cake
And heard your husband’s
“Not so good as my mother used to make”

Before you shed your angry tears
Or hang your head in shame, 
Remember – not too long ago
His father said the same”

I smiled when I read this anachronistically docile and sentimental ditty.  Nana Stokes was anything but a blushing bride.  She was a grand, strong, southern woman, a concert pianist who moved north when she married a Yankee.  She had her funny eccentricities, her fur coat, her French words, her guided tours to foreign countries.   But almost above all of that, she was a consummate cook whose love for us all manifested itself in her giant Sunday suppers.  Long before people anguished over clogged arteries, gluten-free diets and veganism, she was a cooker of lard, that southern staple that made for feather-light fried chicken and pie crusts that flaked like croissants.   She boiled okras and used bacon grease liberally.  She salted watermelon and made berry sherbets and pound cakes with dairy cases of butter. She would have laughed in the face of canola oil or scoffed at Mrs. Dash.

My grandfather, a much quieter soul, was probably stunned into submission by her cooking.  I imagine that it was her ability in the kitchen that held him at times, that endeared her to him, that smoothed out her rough, bossy edges and her strident voice.  I wonder now, how he viewed her when she was hard at work, her tongue  clucking, arms flailing around the timing of her roast, a shock of curly hair wilted onto her forehead by the blast of oven heat. 

Even in the later years of their marriage, where habit and familiarity had frayed their patience, made them snappish and outwardly less considerate, her cooking brought all parties to the table on a Sunday after church.  Food was the great equalizer.  Being called to the table meant children washed their hands and grown-ups laid down their discussions before pulling up a chair and smoothing a napkin on their laps. Heads bowed, lips murmured, silverware clattered.   Family time. 

Flipping through the middle pages of The Joy of Cooking, a yellowed newspaper clipping fell out, and I reached to pick it up.  Now this was more like the feisty grandmother I knew. 

“Remember Christopher Morley’s little stanza – 

 “The man who never in his life
 Has washed the dishes with his wife
 Or polished up the silver plate –
 He is still largely celibate.”

And there it was, I smiled to myself.  The bookends of a bride’s life captured in this best-selling bible of domesticity.  She had left her father’s house to marry with the unbridled hopefulness of a young woman. And she had evolved, like all of us, into a more realistic and gimlet-eyed wife.  Her chosen stanza reflected the shrewder woman who had come to terms with a rich, mellowing love amidst the servitude and routine of real life.  It was this wife who had wisely learned to barter a little nookie in the bedroom for some help in the kitchen.

Because lets face it, when all else fails, a cook can always withhold the dessert.

Holiday Greetings From the Woodruff's

Card by www.cathrinewhitephotography.com

WHEN REHAB MEDICINE IS CUT – YOU HURT TOO

Gabby Gifford’s amazing story and the release of her book and home video have put rehabilitation medicine and its heroic professionals—the doctors, nurses and therapists—temporarily in the public eye. But I have no doubt it will soon fall back in the shadows of public consciousness.

Medical rehabilitation isn’t sexy.  There’s no rush of the emergency room—no gurneys or defibrillators or physicians yelling orders in an environment of barely-controlled chaos.  There’s no discovering cures or fashioning a human heart out of stem cells.  And, while George Clooney would make a handsome rehabilitation physician on TV, the networks aren’t lining up to film a pilot involving a rehab hospital.

Rehabilitation does not provide instant results; rather, it is a long, hard road.  It is a near-relentless struggle over the course of weeks, months, and even years to help an individual who has been severely injured get back as close as possible to where they were before their injury.  It can involve countless hours of hard work and determination just to remember the word for an apple, to gain the motor skills to hold a fork, and the ability to dress oneself again.  

It’s a journey that most often involves families and friends.  It is a road that my children and I walked with my husband Bob when he was severely injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq.  But consider this:  at some point every one of us will need expert rehabilitation care for a loved one or ourselves.  How many of us know someone who has been in a car accident, or had a stroke, or broken a hip?  As I move through my 50s, I’m more keenly aware of my own pressing mortality, the fact that anything can happen to myself, my loved ones and my family members.  It’s simply a fact of life. 

It was impossible not to think of our own journey when I watched the home video of Rep. Gabby Giffords working hard and making such great strides.  Many things are possible on the journey of recovery.  I see them at work every day with Bob.  But none of my husband’s achievements and his “getting back to himself” would have been possible without rehab.  

Sadly, the type of quality medical rehabilitation care that Bob and Rep. Gabby Giffords needed—and the type of care that you or your loved ones may need in the future—is at significant risk due to current proposals in Washington proposed as part of deficit reduction.  These cuts will reduce patient access to care and threaten the viability of rehabilitation providers.  Thousands of people in need of medical rehabilitation will no longer receive these services.  Training as well as therapists and medical jobs will be cut – hospitals will have no choice.  

Patients in rehabilitation hospitals are often at their most vulnerable.  It’s an emotional and scary time, usually following an injury, sudden event or illness.  Most Americans already face very real limitations on their access to inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation care – their insurance runs out or benefits stop before their treatment needs end.  The average insurance plan for traumatic brain injury covers six weeks of rehab.  That barely begins to scratch the surface of an injury that can take years to heal.  

Patients and their families should not unfairly bear the burden of balancing the federal budget.  Cheaper is not better.  Who would ever choose to see their catastrophically hurt loved one in a nursing home instead of a rehab hospital?  But that will be the result if these cuts are approved.  

Talk with these people, as well as our returning wounded veterans, about how overwhelming the access and financial challenges can be.  At a time when our population is aging and returning veterans are in need of services in their local communities, services will be slashed or eliminated. Rehab is darn hard work—placing challenging policy and additional access obstacles in front of these patients are not in anyone’s interest.  

It’s easy to put medical rehabilitation at the back-of-the-bus in medicine.  But we need to fight cuts that will eliminate access to high quality care for your spouse, your grandmother, and your child.  Otherwise, society and each of us will pay in many unanticipated ways, including higher costs, reduced quality of life for the disabled, and higher levels of intense stress for families and caregivers.  

Rehab saves lives and families.  It saved mine.  In my lowest moments, it was the energy, motivation, expertise, and commitment of the professionals and caregivers in rehab hospitals that got me through.   I have a very clear memory of walking onto the floor of Bob’s inpatient rehab hospital, my spirits at their lowest ebb.  I had run out of gas, and my shoulders were hunched in a C-curve.  A voice piped up from behind the desk.  “Come with me Mrs. Woodruff,” the young physical therapist commanded.  She shut the door behind her tiny office, “ has anyone asked you how you are today?”  she inquired, as I burst into tears of gratitude and release.  She then proceeded to give me a ten-minute shoulder massage that I will never forget.  Her kindness and compassion humbled me that day.  And it lifted me up.  She had extended her care beyond simply focusing on the patient and offered it to an exhausted caregiver. That’s just a tiny slice of the magic that takes place in rehab hospitals.  We can’t allow these much needed resources to be vastly diminished. 

With the skills and support of the therapists, nurses, doctors and caregivers in medical rehabilitation hanging in the balance, I want to lend my voice to wake Washington up.  It may not be a sexy, but it’s a critical one.