My mother could have planned an invasion of Mars with such precision that the quartermaster would have had the exact number of moist towelettes needed to wash the last red dirt off the last pair of human hands, with no waste and no shortage.
She approached Thanksgiving dinner with the same competency. Early in November, she planned the menu – not just a listing of “mashed potatoes” and “pumpkin pie,” but the number of pies and the amount of potato needed for the number of people she expected at her table. Our menu didn’t change much from year to year, but there might be a new vegetable side she wanted to try, and the number of family kept expanding, and there was a granddaughter who didn’t like pie so Mom needed to add a small cake to her menu.
Then she assembled the recipes and read them over carefully. This was to remind her that the cans of pumpkin for sale last year had been smaller than the ones sold previously, so she would need an extra can of pumpkin (she could use the leftovers in pumpkin cookies), or remember to adjust the amount of milk so the custard wasn’t too runny. Or maybe she needed to experiment a time or two with that new sauce for the carrots so that she could make it just right for the big day.
Next came the shopping list. Not just “eggs,” but a careful tabulation of the number of eggs needed in each recipe. Had the walnut extract evaporated since its last use? Buy enough onions not just for the stuffing, but to mince for those mashed potatoes, too. Waxed paper, foil, plastic wrap, baggies – all needs were evaluated.
Then it was the scheduling. This could be baked ahead of time and kept in the freezer. That could be chopped on Tuesday, even if the whole dish couldn’t be assembled until Thursday morning. Fill the salt and pepper shakers on Monday. Get down the turkey platter and any other seldom-used dishes and wash them on Monday, too. Start the rolls on Thursday at this o’clock, so they are ready to slide into the oven the moment the turkey comes out. Make the meringue for the lemon pies so they can go in when the rolls come out.
There were lists, too, so that any helpers knew exactly what was needed, and where, and when. Setting the table Thursday morning? That included this many squares of butter, don’t forget the salad forks, and discreetly stack extra napkins here and here.
Come the big day, and nearly everything nearly always worked like clockwork, with everything landing where it needed to be when it needed to be there. It was easy – nobody had to think or worry or wonder, because Mom had already done all that planning so we only needed to follow the schedule. Relax. Enjoy. Have some more pie. No, really, have some more pie!
-ooOoo-
My mother married late, so had quite a few years of work experience behind her before she began to raise her family. She worked off and on during her married life, too (I was born nine months to the day after she accepted a fancy job with Convair, working in the Atlas missile program at Cape Canaveral — so my impending arrival put an end to that particular career), but mostly all those skills she was born with and developed through use were, after marriage, devoted to family and Church.
The skills that might once have launched a rocket became the best planned Thanksgivings and Christmases.
Or they went into the PTA, where Mom’s district had the highest return of permission slips for mass inoculations in the ’60s, and where she made hundreds of candy airplanes (stick-of-gum wings, Tootsie Roll bodies, Lifesaver wheels, held together with rubber bands) that distracted the kids in line so that they were more focused on that basket of goodies than on the shot.
Or they went into staging ward dinners, in a manner similar to Thanksgiving but scaled up for hundreds.
Or they went into Primary fundraisers, and fundraisers to build a chapel, or Relief Society bazaars, or inservice presentations for stake Primary training, or into a monthly multi-page mimeographed, stapled, and hand-delivered ward newspaper that was a work of art – when the stake president, a stranger to my mother but a recipient of the ward paper, visited the hospital ward where she was a patient and saw her name on the door, his voice boomed across the ward: “Which one of you is Sister Parshall? I read with delight every word that you write!” When my mother got to planning, things got done, and they got done efficiently and enjoyably. Every detail.
-ooOoo–
I thought about my mother’s planning skills the other day when I read a 1916 note having to do with the construction of the Hawaiian Temple at Laie:
The Primary gave a concert and dance last month, at which they sold ice cream and cake and such like things that the people donated, and they cleared in cash $304.65. The R.S. of Honolulu did about the same thing the first of this month and have cleared about $400.00 this all goes to the Temple Fund.
Those successful fundraisers didn’t just happen – they, and the thousands of similar events that have sustained the functioning of the Church through a dozen generations – called on the intensive, hands-on efforts of legions of Latter-day Saints. While men planned and carried out conferences and missions and building projects, this kind of local effort was largely the purview of women: The Relief Society, responsible for caring for the poor of the Church, raised its own funds to buy supplies, as well as to build and furnish its own meeting and work halls and staff its own maternity centers. The YWMIA, with its annual dance festivals and music festivals and drama festivals and speech contests provided opportunities for many kinds of specialized and creative contributions. The Primary raised its own funds to build playgrounds and operate hospitals. In most cases, the women first made the food or other articles they sold, then used part of the funds raised to buy more supplies which they then sewed or quilted or canned into more goods to be sold to raise more funds.
For women like my mother, with executive abilities that often found too little outlet in the home, planning a ward dinner or coordinating the individual decoration of many hundreds of gingerbread boys for a Primary celebration was a lot of work, yes, but was also a source of satisfaction.
I’m not sure there’s anything comparable in women’s church service today – certainly I have never been asked to participate in anything like it: It still takes some calculation of quantities and the placing of a few phone calls to provide a funeral luncheon, but when everything from the six-foot sub sandwiches to the bakery sheetcakes to the vegetable platters come ready-made from some commercial establishment, there is relatively little hands-on work. When imitation “road shows” are scripted, rehearsed, costumed, and performed in the same Saturday in place of weeks that used to be given to writing and choreography and serious rehearsal, the project becomes a slap-dash bit of amusement instead of the exercise and development of individual talents.
It may sound like I’m the curmudgeon complaining about “kids these days,” but I’m really not. Women have so many outlets for the exercise of skills today, with opportunities in so many work fields. Mothers play tetris with their time, to fit in all the shuttling of children to and from activities and lessons, along with picking up the dry cleaner and taking the dog for his shots and dropping off the car for its routine service. Single mothers who juggle paid work with too little time for supervising homework and still getting something on the table for supper are exercising high order time management skills – and they don’t even get the thanks over the pulpit for their never-ending performance that a ward dinner committee once got for a single successful evening. The time-intensive, labor-intensive work of women’s past church service is probably something that few would even want to shoulder today, on top of other responsibilities.
Rather than faulting the present, I’m remembering my mother’s work, and imagining that work multiplied by many thousands. When I read a note that “they sold ice cream and cake and such like things,” I want to see the personal service and hard collective and individual work that hide unseen beyond such a simple statement. Those concerts and dances and bazaars and dinners and festivals raised their funds and built their social networks because individual Latter-day Saints worked so very hard to pull them off.
Here’s to our parents and grandparents, and the legacy they left us.
“Here’s to our parents and grandparents, and the legacy they left us.”
A grateful amen.
Amen.
At my son’s Eagle Scout project on Saturday, I was reminded how wonderful Latter-day Saint women are. Yes, the men were there too, working hard. But the women are exceptionally impressive.
Yes. Hear, hear!
Are you sure your mother wasn’t a staff officer during her time in the WAC? Sounds as if she would have been terrific!
I vaguely remember Relief Society bazaars from my early childhood that were weeks, if not months, in the making. Those quilts didn’t just magically appear overnight. Thanks for this reminder. Also, too bad your mother didn’t get to spend more time on the Atlas rocket program, or she could have won a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I love that first paragraph! I started reading this like it was one of the advent christmas stories. It has a decidedly more modern voice to it and I noticed the several comments. It was only then that I paid attention to the author and that it was non-fiction. I love it!
Growing up, I was off-and-on in a ward with Janie Thompson– THE Janie Thompson, who ran the Program Bureau at BYU for years and was (by her own story, but a good one) responsible for getting “Called to Serve” into the hymnbook.
She had one heck of a strong personality, and was from a family of strong personalities. She could occasionally be sharp-tongued, and if someone else who knew her didn’t appreciate her as much, I tried to not give them grief about it. For myself, however, the older I get, the more I appreciate and love her.
When I was a tall, awkward, shy, ugly-feeling teenager, her constant refrain to me was “you’re so talented!” as she had me sing in the chorus of the yearly Christmas Program– the music all written, as I remember it, by her. For one number, she roped in her good-natured brother-in-law, our bishop, to be Rudolph.
I was thinking about her the other day– about the time she was asked to give a Relief Society lesson on Visiting Teaching, so naturally she wrote a song about Visiting Teaching. It was classic Janie: a duet sang the first part, and then for the chorus everyone joined in. No worries about copied music if you write it yourself! That memory still makes me laugh with delight.
My dad’s favorite story about her was from the Christmas program the first year we were in the ward (we were too new, or I was too young, to participate in it)– she was playing the piano accompaniment to the current number, while almost walking away, apparently not paying any attention to what she was doing, as she asked anyone who would listen, “Where’s so-and-so? Has anyone seen him?” So-and-so was sick, and she had only just found out he wasn’t there. The accompaniment never faltered as she eventually found out where the missing performer was.
Janie was a working professional her whole life. I give it as evidence of her humility that only once, in passing, did she mention that she had been singing with Tony Bennett’s band in Las Vegas when she was asked to come to BYU. The “Called to Serve” story I heard more than once, but again, out of affection to her, I find this as evidence of what was most important to her.
In her older years, she would walk up to campus using an umbrella with constellations on it as a parasol. That same brother-in-law had been an astrophysicist. Her sister– I haven’t even started on her sister, and shouldn’t, for reasons of space. What extraordinary people they all were.
Anyway. She was a good old maid. I try to take her for an example, since there has been so little preserved in my own family history about how to pull that off (partly just because in my parents’ generation, both sides had only sons who lived, other than my mother). As I attempt to bring this back to the original topic: I don’t think anyone knew half of what she did, even though she did have a paid job, and was in some ways pretty visible.
Also getting back to the original topic: it sounds very much like your mother was the sort of woman who knew that plans are for people, not people for plans. As I slowly become more thoroughly organized in my own life, I try to remember this, because many has been the time when I’ve been run over by someone else’s plans– they organized everything so that they could feel organized about a particular event, but not so much with a view to how it would affect the experience of the event.
Sorry. One last note about Janie. I always thought she was lying about the talent thing. But (again) the older I get– the more I get to know myself– the more I discover that I really do enjoy performing. The thought of walking into a large crowd of people who might expect me to talk to them is enough to keep me in the side-room at the ward party for 90% of the time, making Christmas Cards for denizens of detention centers. But if I’m singing in front of everyone I’m fine. Oddly enough, I also enjoy running practices now– for the Primary Nativity and for our yearly sacrament meeting program, so far. I’m not the primary president, just the secretary, thank goodness, but since MY day-job has a lot of child-wrangling some of the most recalcitrant children my school has to offer, I have Tricks Up My Sleeve. Also, a loud (enough) voice and a sense of humor.
Weird how life works out like that. God bless Janie Thompson. (And Ardis Parshall, for letting me totally threadjack her blog like this.)
I remember RS bazaars well. Our ward always had a “fish pond” for the kids. In place of a hook on the fishing line was a bucket. The kid would “cast” the line over a sheet curtain (always blue with construction paper fishes pinned to it) and the sisters on the other side would place a small toy in the bucket for the kid to discover when the line was reeled in. The Lone Star and the appliqued rose quilts that were in my wedding trousseau were purchased by my mother at the ward bazaar, along with sets of embroidered pillowcases edged in tatted or crocheted lace. And the suppers! Sloppy Joes, with your choice of jellos and home baked desserts. Looking back, I can see that those bazaars were Big Deals, and I marvel at the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the sisters who put them on.
Oh! And if your mother had organized that mission to Mars, I would have signed on in an instant!
I’m with Tiffany B—this is one of the best short-story opening sentences i’ve read in a long time.
I don’t have much opportunity to be quite so fanciful when writing history most of the time, so I’m glad to know that kicking up my literary heels this time was appreciated. 😀
I really miss being involved with the RS bazaars and other projects. I learned so much from women in various wards I lived in, when they shared their talents in “homemaking meeting” held in the evening. I still use many of the ideas or recipes from that time. I loved being in charge of the ward music festival and seeing our quartets go to the all church festival.
Back in 1966 I was living with my husband’s family for a few months. Back then the Road Shows were a work of love. I worked with my two sisters-in-law to write and produce our ward’s show. This was such a huge thing in that stake that the leaders had to put a restriction on how early the wards could start rehearsals. The stake put together several training sessions on Saturdays so they could teach about costuming, how to create music and dancing. It was seriously a big thing as each ward tried to win the prize for the best show, which usually ended up vieing for the best Road Show in the church.
Those days are all gone now. We can’t even cook in our church kitchens so our young mothers don’t have the chance to learn from our older sisters (including myself) as I did. At times I look back and am glad I had the opportunities that I had. Some things are terribly missing today.
This is fantastic, Ardis. I understand some of why we’ve moved to where the slap-dash is the norm. And some of the pressures of all that production took it’s toll on the women of the Church just like somewhat similar but also new pressures take their toll now.
But it’s good for us to remember the things we’ve lost and think about what might be worth preserving and regaining.