Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (23 page)

Reluctantly, Andy left in the car they had used to haul camping gear. “When we came back the next day she was lying in a giant puddle of water,” Andy said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, she's dead.'

“I kept thinking, ‘Omigod, I never should have left her,' but she was so doggoned determined to tough it out,” Andy said. “I was used to her being stubborn, so I just said ‘Okay.' Still, I was scared of what I'd find, but there she was. Her eyes fluttered open and she said something really goofy like, ‘Good morning.' When I asked her why the hell she didn't get up, she said, ‘My body warmed the water just right when the rain stopped. If I move I'll be freezing.' That was Molly.”

On other outings there would be food and plenty of it.

“Of course we could never have just plain steak or hamburgers; there was always some fancy cheese or some special ingredients. Once she even did shrimp on the fire. But her favorite was beer-in-the-butt chicken that she did with roasted potatoes. We'd share cooking duties, then sit around the fire with Molly telling stories while the kids sat mesmerized. Sometimes they'd be up until sunrise, asking her questions and listening to her stories.

“I know she broadened their world with those stories,” Andy continued. “She taught them to be more open, to be informed, to think for themselves, to travel and listen to other points of view—and that was a wonderful thing.”

Andy recalled those days as we sat in the barn on the ranch he owns in London, Texas. He and Molly bought it together. This was the property they had planned to put a few cows on, plant those grapevines, and eventually bottle their insouciant Chardonnay with the provenance of Château Bubba.

As we sifted through boxes of photographs, he periodically choked up as he uncovered snapshots of Molly with her mom, with him, with nieces and nephews, with her father. He lingered over the 2006 Thanksgiving photograph of him, Carla, and Molly, taken at the Four Seasons in Austin. It had turned out to be their last Thanksgiving together.

The family is scattered now. Darby is closest, in San Antonio, working for a public relations firm there. In Chile, Drew works for a nonprofit educational venture between the US State Department and the Chilean government. Like an uncle and his father before him, Andy's other son, Dax, committed suicide in 2005. It was a devastating period in Molly's life. Dax's death was almost too
much to bear. Molly had not only set money aside to finance college for each niece and nephew, she had also invested much of herself in nurturing them all—first as children, then as young adults. It was the only time I ever saw her truly inconsolable.

What had been a spacious dream home in the quiet town of Boerne became a house of sadness. Andy and Carla sold it and moved to the London property where Molly and Andy had once dreamed of raising a small herd and planting their vineyard.

We continued to rummage through photographs. The mention of Dax's death cast a pall over our sweaty undertaking in the barn, so I redirected it to food as Andy smiled over a photograph of his mother and his sister Sara in Sara's New Mexico kitchen. He smiled, and shaking his head, quietly said, “Turnip fluff.”

21

WE USED TO LAUGH WHEN WE
'
D HEAR PEOPLE
discuss the importance of eating naturally, organically, locally, as though those practices were a quasi-revolutionary concept; as if people hadn't done that for generations, until factory farms assumed center stage in the food theater. My parents organized seasonal family outings where we drove to the Eckert farm across the river in Illinois to pick peaches. Mother chose them one by one. We'd bring basketsful home, peel, pit, and slice them, then make hand-cranked peach ice cream to go with homemade peach cobbler. We all took turns at the old-fashioned ice cream maker.

I remembered those years as I struggled to raise my daughter. Although I was a single mother, I was determined that she and I would pick fruit together, but I rarely had the time. In the spring of 1980 I became an unemployed single mother. The mayor who had appointed me to a job failed to get reelected that April. His replacement replaced me. He had to. I refused to tender my resignation, forcing the new mayor to fire me. As a fired former executive, I was entitled to unemployment benefits. My tax dollars at work for me for a change.

If there is such a thing as a good time to be unemployed, it's spring. I reported immediately to the unemployment office and signed on for food stamps. Didn't even think about looking for a job until early August. My four months on unemployment were the best 120 days ever. Eight-year-old Hannah and I found all sorts of free things to do. Instead of buying bread, we bought flour and oil and milk and baked our own—onion, cheese, whole wheat, and, yes, white bread. We couldn't afford meat. We went to the Soulard Farmers Market late on Saturdays, when they practically gave away produce. We had already
received gift memberships to the botanical garden, art museum, and zoo, so we went to each in rotation throughout the summer. We made egg salad and tuna salad sandwiches on our homemade bread and, to save gasoline, rode bicycles to Forest Park—St. Louis's answer to Central Park—for picnics. Sometimes we went downtown to the levee and watched tugboats guide barges up and down the Mississippi.

One night in 1977, when my mother and father were out of town and I was under the influence of a controlled substance (so maybe it was 1976), I decided to create a garden in a portion of my parents' backyard. For years the yard had belonged to Mr. Chips, a boxer of some size, so the soil was well fertilized, black and rich with big fat worms. Once the rows were prepared (and sanity more or less returned), Hannah accompanied me to a nursery and we chose what we would plant. Throughout the spring and summer we pulled weeds and watered rows. When eggplants, bell peppers, yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes, and onions were ready, she picked them and we made ratatouille. She couldn't wait to eat the spinach she picked. When there was enough okra, we pickled it or cooked it with tomatoes and onions or made shrimp Creole. Before the sun killed off the spinach and lettuce, we picked cucumbers and made simple salads with canned tuna and baby green beans. When tomato plants threatened to consume the block, we canned the fruit and used it to make our own spaghetti sauce the following winter. It is now and ever shall be my belief that kids who plant, nurture, and tend food can't wait to eat it.

Early-morning visits to Shaw's Garden (now Missouri Botanical Garden) earned us fresh-picked bananas for breakfast when the banana trees bore fruit. We also went to Eckert's, where we picked strawberries in the spring, peaches in the summer, and apples in autumn, just like I had done at her age. We ate as much as we picked. We made strawberry jam and gave it away for birthday, get-well, and Christmas gifts. As autumn set in, we picked apples and made chutney. In winter we made chowchow from cabbage, onions, peppers, garlic, salt, and vinegar. When food stamps didn't stretch far enough, I posted a note in the lobby of our apartment building and offered to cook for neighbors, cash on the barrelhead.

A couple from Louisiana who lived in our building hired me to make gumbo for a dinner party. Hannah set the table, arranged flowers, and peeled shrimp. When we were done, we couldn't wait to get back to our apartment. We opened the envelope with our pay in it.

We had apparently not charged enough, because instead of the $100 we had agreed on, the envelope contained $150. Now we could sock some away, then go to the movies and eat popcorn and buy ice cream cones. Now we could buy groceries we wouldn't otherwise have splurged on—capers, Gouda, fresh mushrooms, a mixture of veal and pork and fresh ground round for meat loaf instead of cheap ground beef of ambiguous origin. The closest grocery store was Straub's, a boutique market not generally frequented by people on food stamps. It was also my mother's preferred destination for buying meat and seafood.

On one particular Saturday afternoon she was in one line while I was preparing to check out in another. She was so worried that I would whip out those little multicolored coupons that she actually began shaking her head, as if to say, “Please don't do that while I'm here.” She was so unhinged that she summoned my daughter over, gave her cash, and sent her back to the line we were in. Saved an easy $50 in 1970s-era food stamps.

That story cracked Molly up.

April, May, June, and July came and went. The botanical garden's banana season ended. Signs appeared announcing that the zoo train would soon run on an abbreviated schedule. Children's classes at the art museum scaled back to weekends in August. Time to find a job. One evening, while we were riding our bicycles from Baskin-Robbins, I bumped into Art Hoffman, a friend and neighbor who told me about a job possibility. A new vice president for public relations at Bell Laboratories wanted ex-reporters to translate tech talk into English.

Emboldened by Art's information and fortified by hops and barley, I wrote, detailing my intimate familiarity with telecommunications technology (i.e., I'd used a telephone all my life) and my enthusiastic willingness to apply wit, intelligence, charm, and the aforementioned technological expertise on behalf of that august institution.

They actually hired me.

Marilyn Laurie, who was elevated to vice president in spite of having the bad judgment to add me to the Bell Labs payroll, was cruel enough to read part of the letter at my farewell party about a decade later, confessing that she had summoned me for an interview just to find out who this person was who had written such well-crafted bullshit.

So I went back to work. But at least Hannah, then nine, had learned that food came from the earth, not from plastic bags or shrink-wrapped Styrofoam.

HANNAH ROUNDED OUT THE TEXAS PHASE
of her culinary career as executive chef at a restaurant called August E's in the historic town of Fredericksburg, about eighty-five miles west of Austin.

Molly and her family promptly came for Thanksgiving dinner. The restaurant, situated at the time in a turn-of-the-century log cabin just outside town, featured what the owners called “nouveau Texas cuisine.” Hannah even had the temerity to introduce once-a-week sushi to locals. My favorite recollection of Thursday-night sushi revolves around a family arrival just before sunset. As they were being shown to a table, the son, about ten, said “Dad, what's sushi?” The father, attired in neatly pressed Levi's and wearing a smart ten-gallon hat, didn't miss a beat. “It's raw fish, son, and yure gonna lak it.”

As much as anything else, I suspect the Ivinses' Thanksgiving dinner in Fredericksburg was Molly's way of showing support for Hannah in her first crack at executive chefdom. I also suspect that Molly wanted to see for herself if Hannah was telling the truth when she said she had hired a one-armed waitress. She had, and the young lady waited on us. The Fredericksburg employment pool was not very deep, Hannah explained, and she liked this woman's spirit. And I liked any meal where I didn't have to spend two days preparing something that was demolished in less than two hours.