One thing I had to do this evening was bake a batch of jam bars for Bill's memorial service tomorrow. I had gotten a text from Charlene earlier in the week - "Could you make a dessert, either another batch of the lemon bars or the jam bars you do?"
Well, the lemon bars, while very good, are INVOLVED in a way that the jam bars are not, and I'm tired and it's been a long week and I am slightly endogenously ailing* and so I decided to go with the simpler thing, which was the jam bars -
(*I think it's - finally - The Change, as they used to call it. At any rate, the symptoms seem to fit, and I had night sweats two nights in a row this week)
- And I got to thinking, how many times have I made these in the past 20 or so years? Dozens, probably. Most of the time for things like this - funeral lunches for the family, or receptions after memorial services, but sometimes for happier things - I've done them for 50th-wedding-anniversary celebrations, and graduation celebrations, and for installations of new ministers, and I think once at the reception we gave after a concert was held at the church.
But I mainly thought of the people whose funeral lunches I made them for - Mecy's (she was the one who always pressed for me to do them, because she said they were so good), and I think for Steve's, and for both the Wrights' (they went within months of each other). And oh, all the people I've lost.
I found them a bit harder to do this time. Maybe it was because I was tired and not feeling my best. Or maybe the ingredients resisted me a bit this time - the butter was not quite soft enough, the jam didn't want to spread.
Typically, I do a double batch. The cookbook I have ("Cookies for Christmas," I think it's a Better Homes and Gardens book but I don't feel like getting up and checking) gives the recipe for an 8" square pan; I double it and put it in a 9 x 13. Usually there are crumbs left over; sometimes I make something with them but tonight I just pitched them, not in the mood.
When I do this, I use a whole 18 ounce jar of jam. That's a bit more generous than what the doubled recipe would suggest but like I said, it can be challenging to spread it (you CAN heat it, I suppose, but that's another step and another pan or bowl).
It is a very simple recipe: butter, powdered sugar, lemon zest (you can use the dried peel from the spice aisle; today I just bought a lemon because fresh is better and I might make a lemon shake up tomorrow afternoon) and ground pecans or walnuts and flour. It makes like a shortbread; you press it into a pan saving some back for the topping. Then you dump and spread the jam (I most commonly use seedless raspberry or blackberry, or if I can't get those, apricot, but you could probably use anything). At the end you add more flour to the remaining unused crumbs, and then sprinkle them on top as a streusel.
They are pretty easy. Cutting them can be a bit of a pain but usually it's not so bad once they're cooled.
Mainly though, I now associate them with "things" at church - as I said, mostly memorials. (There's also a cookie recipe for almond bars I don't ever really make any more, as it was my dad's favorite and the last time I tried making them it made me sad. Maybe someday I will be able to, just not quite yet).
And I admit I think of all the memorials I've taken part in, and the ones probably coming up in the future. And standing there, waiting for the oven to pre-heat, I wondered: who will be left when it comes my time to be memorialized? Most of the people I know are older than I am. Will we still have a church; will we still memorialize those who have died? (will there be anyone to come to mine?). And then I thought - though maybe this seems a bit less likely than it did a few days in this, that maybe, as Tom Lehrer once sang, we'll all go together when we go, and there won't be any memorials because there won't be anyone left to do the memorializing. And then my mind blipped to an Uzbek animated short I saw of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" (I am not linking it; you may not want it in your head; it's VERY sad).
Oh, maybe things will change. Maybe I will make a lot of new friends in the future who are enough younger than I am that when it's my time there will be someone to fix a meal and to sit around and reminisce (and sometimes laugh, as we do now when we remember Mecy at CWF, about the departed's personality traits). Maybe I will learn to realize that it doesn't really matter if no one remembers you after you're gone. I don't know. The only way to keep going towards the future is to hope there are better days ahead when things are difficult.
(But still: I admit I needed something nice and fluffy, or at least heartwarming, after that. I wound up watching a program about short cartoons that were Oscar winners - one called Burrow, a very nice story of neighborly cooperation between forest animals. And "Bao," which was a short made by the woman who made "Turning Red" - and I admit I am laughing now at the one white-male movie reviewer who claimed that "most of the audience can't relate to "Turning Red"" because with "Bao" - well, I am a Anglo/European American, and not a mother at all - but I cried at the story (fundamentally: a Chinese mother learns to accept that her "little dumpling" is growing up). It's a very sweet story. The third short "Lou," about a bully being redeemed was good, too)
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