Tea Cakes

The other day I was searching for something on the web and came across a recipe for tea cakes. I had not thought of them in years but that recipe immediately brought back memories from my youth.

When we were growing up my sister and I spent a good bit of time down at my maternal grandparents house. Mama worked and every afternoon after school, we would ride the bus down to my grandparents house and stay there until mama got off work and came to pick us up. My grandmother who was a diabetic and nearly blind had fallen several years earlier and had broken her hip and was confined to a wheel chair. That did not stop her from getting around in the large kitchen in their house and she still did some cooking. She always tried to have something for us to eat in the afternoons. I remember eating tomato sandwiches made with whole wheat bread and canned tomatoes, but one of the staples down there was tea cakes. Seemed like they always had some tea cakes on hand. Sometimes they would put chocolate icing on them but most times they were just plain tea cakes.

When I came across that recipe I printed it out. I had most of the ingredients on hand but was running low on butter and lacked the right kind of flour so I could not fix them right then. Since then I have been to the store and got what I was lacking. This afternoon, I mixed up a batch of tea cake batter and cooked a small pan full of them. They were just as good as I remembered them. In the next few days I may try my hand at putting some chocolate icing on a batch.

On Being Lucky

A mechanic that worked at my fathers garage used to say "I'd rather be lucky than have a license to steal." If you think about it a bit, it makes a lot of sense. If you could steal legally, you would still have your conscience to deal with but when things just pop into your lap, well, you can just kind of bask in the glow. Of course there are different kinds of luck. There is the finding a 5 dollar bill laying in the middle of a parking lot kind and the narrowly missing being hit by a train kind. I know folks that have experienced both.

My grandpa Kelley by his own account was lucky at least one time in his life but no one seems to know the exact details. Pawpaw, as we called him was a fine decent god fearing man. He was a fantastic farmer who always raised more vegetables than he and his family could eat. He freely shared this abundance with his neighbors and best I could tell was well thought of in his community. He went to church regularly and did not smoke. But none of that has any bearing on this particular incidence of luck. Being a Kelley, he had one stereotypical Irish trait. He was fond of a little drink. Unfortunately, in his younger days, there seems to have been no such thing as a little drink. It was an off or on, all or none proposition. When he drank, he would go on what my folks referred to as "a tear." I got the impression from what I was told that it did not happen that often, but when it did, look out. The incident I recall hearing of involved him having been gone off for about a week with God knows who doing God knows what. He came in stark, disheveled ,still pretty tipsy and visibly shaken. His wife and kids got him to the back porch and set him in a rocking chair and my grandmother started asking him what had happened to him. All he could or would ever say was "we was just lucky."

This morning, as I reflect on Auburn's game yesterday with Utah State, I realize that they were lucky. There are those that will tell you that you make your own luck and there is a lot of truth in that but I still think that what happened to Pawpaw and what happened yesterday at Jordan-Hare probably fall a lot closer to the being narrowly missed by a train kind of luck instead of the finding a $5 bill kind.