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First Posted: 11/20/2014

By Joanne Duzen Dahms

Dupont, Pennsylvania

During my freshman year of high school, I had to deal with many changes. The Scranton General Electric plant where my father worked had closed, and he had to go to work in King of Prussia. My sister was away at school. My mother had to return to the workforce. Suddenly, I was alone most of the time.

In order to remedy the situation, my faithful grandma, my Baba, moved in and stayed with me during the week to nurture and care for me. She made me feel special because she baked for me. The sights, smells and tastes of those treats will be indelibly etched in my memory along with the great love and remembrance I have for my Baba.

Every morning she would entice me to get up by standing at the bottom of the steps holding a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice. After I got dressed in my school uniform, she seated me at the head of the kitchen table. First I found either an orange cut into eights or a half of grapefruit sliced and sugared. The next course was always oatmeal with brown sugar and cinnamon and toast. Cafe au lait washed it all down. “You can’t leave this house until you eat breakfast every day,” she remarked. I certainly wasn’t complaining.

I’d walk up the street to collect my friend, Dorothy for our walk to the bus stop. She was usually still in the tub relaxing away and would bolt at the last minute to race with me up to the bus. Dorothy never ate breakfast even though her mother kept vigil at her coal stove awaiting breakfast requests from her family members.

When school was over, we’d get off the city bus. I would stop dead as soon as my feet hit the pavement. I just knew there was something waiting for me at my house besides my grandmother. I remember following the smell of homemade doughnuts to my back door. And there they were on the kitchen table. They were just like the doughnuts that are eaten on Shrove Tuesday before the start of Lent, fried in oil and coated with powdered sugar. Baba would take them from her huge black cast iron frying pan , drain them, place them in brown paper bags filled with sugar and shake them so they would be uniformly sugar coated. We called them kreplis.

She also made homemade pizza on Fridays. Baba didn’t know much about Italian pizza except that kids liked it. So she made bread dough, sauce, put cheese on it and there was her homemade pizza. In those days families didn’t eat out much. I’d be hard pressed to tell you when we did eat out because we just never had the money for that. And pizza wasn’t delivered like it is today. Families ate home every night – usually early between 4 and 6 p.m. Occasionally, a member of the family would go up the road and get a few slices of pizza from a town tavern for the family later in the evening as a Friday treat.

Baba made homemade cookies, pies and cakes as well. She perfected a Sunshine Cake that she made for birthdays for relatives and friends. You really knew you had status with her if you received one of these cakes on your birthday. There were twelve eggs in it and it was three layers high and topped with white homemade boiled icing laced with sprinkles. She sent me one every birthday when I was in college. I was the envy of the dorm getting a homemade cake packed and sent by mail from Baba. And it always arrived perfectly intact.

Every morning as I ate my breakfast and drank my coffee I’d look at my Baba and see a special gleam in her eyes. “What are you going to do today, Baba?” I’d ask. But she would just smile and I’d know that she had a special project in mind because the gleam always meant some scheme she was dreaming up and getting ready to tackle. Baking bread was always a big one. When Mom and I would come home there would be flour everywhere and lots of dishes to do. My mother would be upset by the mess, but not me. I’d take Baba’s glasses off, look at the flour dusted on the lenses, clean them and replace them on her eyes. She was always so involved in her projects that she never noticed that she couldn’t see too well.

And to this day, every time I get that gleam in my eyes and wonder what kind of project I can get involved in, I think of my Baba and the wonderful trouble she got into at home baking the best pastries and cooking the best food anyone could ever hope to have in a lifetime. And it was all for me. It was all to show me how special I was to her and how I was affirmed every day coming home from high school.