Side by Side

 

It was pancake day at our house—the easiest breakfast to fix. I put the sausage in the skillet and mixed up the batter while I waited for the sausage to brown. I fixed our pancakes, and since I don’t really measure, I was a pancake short.

I had already slid the pancake mix canister back into its slot, so I quickly opened the canister, mixed in a little water, and without missing a beat poured it into the skillet.

 

“This pancake isn’t browning right,” I said.

 

“Well, as old as the stove is, the burner has probably quit,” my husband said.

 

“It’s cooking, but it’s not getting brown.” I put the pancake on a plate and scraped out enough batter for another small pancake. “Something just isn’t right,” I said.

 

I turned around and looked at the canisters sitting side-by-side on the counter… “No wonder it looks weird,” I said. “I grabbed the flour instead of the pancake mix.”

 

“Flour and water make paste,” my husband commented. “That’s what we used to use to put wallpaper on the walls.”

 

I shouldn’t have made the mistake, but they were sitting side by side and neither one was labeled. We had a good laugh, and I stirred up some real pancake batter.

 

After the flour and water disaster, I couldn’t help but think of a day Jim walked into the kitchen while I made the first pancake. I didn’t have the batter quite right or the pan hot enough, so I had made a funky first pancake, which was not uncommon for me.

 

From Indelible (Memoir in Progress):

 

One day I was cooking pancakes and the pancake stuck and crumbled into a real mess. Jim walked into the kitchen and said, “What is that?”

“It’s a pancake. But you don’t have to eat it,” I assured him. “I’m going to make another one. I’m not much of a cook, but then you never married me for my cooking, did you?”

“I don’t think so!” he replied emphatically. Jim answered with one of the stock phrases he used after aphasia diminished his communication skills.

I laughed and said, “Well, you do remember why you married me, don’t you?”

He looked at me with a puzzled look on his face and said, “I have no idea.”

 

It always helped to see the humor in Jim’s reactions. Knowing how dementia affected Jim’s ability to speak, it’s quite possible that he may have known deep down why he married me, but he answered with one of his familiar phrases.

 It’s pretty safe to say that Harold found humor in my flat cake, no-flavor mistake. It hadn’t interfered with his breakfast at all since he had already polished off his pancakes before I messed up.

 Just for fun, I tasted the mock pancake. It was as tasteless and yucky as I imagined. I threw it in the trash and had another cup of coffee. Who knows, maybe if I’d had the second cup of coffee before making pancakes, I might have noticed that although the contents looked the same, the canisters did not.

 

Copyright © August 2021 by L.S. Fisher

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