Sunday Pancakes

Sundays meant two things when I was growing up: church and pancakes. Sometimes there were scrambled eggs, but most of the time, pancakes and the Lord. 

My father took us, my two brothers, and me. First, just me, sitting with my dad on the hard pews with my feet dangling when I was in the first grade, trying not to choke on the incense that could have easily been strawberry. I’m sure it had something to do with keeping Satan away. I can still see dad smiling down at me, his hand on my leg as I buffed his nails in a sleepy manicure. Each of my brothers was added as they came of age, piling into the car for the 9 o’clock morning mass every week with such regularity that I didn’t know there were other options until I was in high school. 

When we got home, Mom was ready for us. We sat down to a sumptuous breakfast that, looking back, feels more like an old-timey movie than something I actually experienced. It was that family togetherness that is hard to achieve, that kind of ritual that holds people together. It was fun, warm, effortless, and family sometimes has trouble being fun, warm, and effortless. And the entire time, I assumed my mother stayed home to facilitate it. You know, to make the pancakes. It did not occur to me that there could be another reason. More specifically, it did not occur to me that there could be another reason not about me. 

So right here, let’s take a wonder: am I going to reflect on why? Is there a conflict in this piece, that my mother grew up with brutal, cold nuns smacking her hands with rulers in school, ignoring her family when they went through devastating crisis, even while shoving hypocritical parables down her throat, and that her choice to shun the church had nothing to do with pancakes and everything to do with conscious choice? 

Or am I using creative license, merging a few events and making this the story of vomiting out of the moving car on the way home from church when I was fourteen after a night of drinking? The backstory, the drama, the disappointed dad of it all?

Or, is this a snapshot, a memory in marination?  A family around a table, fighting over the last piece of bacon like The Fonz is going to come down from his apartment over the garage and pour coffee in his thermos? 

This is where you pick which muscles you feel like working, which structure you feel like pulling, and which writer you feel like being for the moment. And, like pancakes, all versions are perfect.                       

And you can use this to find many directions for future writing, prompts to leapfrog ideas, motivation for tomorrow, and the next day. So even if this is not the writing you set out to do, it can help generate the writing you’re trying to do, or keep you writing the writing you want to do.