On my father’s 100th birthday, snow was coming. It was a good day to make soup. My father had passed from this place into the way better, most wonderful place 25 years earlier, so the date was one of remembrance.
I was out of town enjoying a rented condo along the coast for my own birthday of significance, and thought Maryland Crab Soup would be fitting. The recipe called for lima beans. I looked for another recipe. Also needed lima beans. And another. Same. I am flexible with my soup making, but it was clear the lima bean is a staple of this dish. My father did not allow lima beans in our house – a very strong stance for someone who didn’t say much and wasn’t into complaining. But the lima bean ban was not new to our home, it had travelled with him since he was maybe ten years old and a child of The Depression. His large family of two parents and seven kids relied on the same option during those years of many other families – food rationing stamps. One month, the rations ran low and all that was available was chocolate milk and lima beans. This was his meal for two weeks until rations re-stocked. He would never taste either again. I only know this fact because my mother told me. In true Davis fashion, my father was a locked vault where his past was concerned, choosing instead to live in the current chapter of his life. The evidence crept up when he winced if we were at a picnic and someone passed a bowl of simple succotash – the dreamy 1970s dish of corn and lima beans. He did not drink milk, either plain or chocolate, and I never saw a bowl of cereal in front of him. By default, I also never ate lima beans and was inherently revolted by them for the first half century of my life. Then, on my father’s 100th birthday, in anticipation of authentic Maryland Crab Soup, I went to the store when the first snowflakes were falling. It was time. I bought lima beans. What goes on in our brains? How do they record a belief that might mean nothing to us at all and let it become our belief anyway? Why do we carry not only our own life experiences, but also the experiences that those closest to us demonstrated in word or action? Vegetables don’t matter at all. Fears, anxieties, worldviews, and deeply felt beliefs that turn into weighted chains – these do matter. If you are carrying an idea or an ideal that was planted when you were too young to see the seeds hit the soil, can your brain hear the message that you are moving on and allow you to willingly let go? Or does your brain keep returning to the ideas it knows best, most frequently, deeply stored? Today, my father would be 103! I made the soup again, lima beans and all.
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