In the 1970s, my family and I lived on Park Place in Venice Beach, California, in an old two-story house that had been converted into four apartments.
When we first moved in, I was pregnant with my second child, and we rented one of the small downstairs apartments. But it was a little bigger than the three-room apartment that was a garage we had been living in, so I was happy.
For over a year, we lived in just that one old tiny apartment where I had to open the refrigerator with a spoon because it had no handle. Our son slept in the tiny entrance, and my daughter slept in an alcove on the way to the bathroom.
A big red stand-up piano that I painted swirls on to make it… I don’t know, different—as if it wasn’t different enough already—took up what was supposed to be a dining room but acted as our bedroom with a mattress on the floor.
Within a year, I was pregnant with another child, and the upstairs apartment became available.
I was so anxious to get it I climbed up on the roof and into the window to see what it would look like. It looked just like the one downstairs. So again, no bedrooms. This time our son slept in the kitchen without the appliances, and everyone else squished into the open spaces.
But it meant I could turn the downstairs “living room” into a dance studio and I could start teaching.
In the middle of all that trying to get by, I decided to become a better cook. So I subscribed to Gourmet magazine, and started trying out recipes, starting with my family and then the block parties we often had in our courtyard. I loved them.
Everyone brought food. The kids played and entertained us. One dish I brought became something I always had to bring. It was a decadent dessert called Lime Delight.
I still have the recipe with the date April 1972 on it. And it is still requested at current gatherings over fifty years later. And when I make it, I get out the 197Os mixer (the one I scrimped and saved to buy) that I used to make it back then instead of using my fancy new one.
Using the old one helps me honor the pregnant twenty-six-year-old struggling to make ends meet, who loved the people in her neighborhood who were like family, who wanted to become good at something in the middle of a messy relationship. It reminds me to say thank you to her for what she did.
Because she transformed the house and garden into something beautiful, raised three kids in the midst of marriage chaos, went back to college, survived three thousand miles away from family, taught dance in a tiny studio with mirrors she stuck up on the wall with tape, and made rugs and pictures in her spare time to sell, and most of all believed that it was possible for things to get better if she just kept going.
So, using the old recipe and the old mixer is my way of saying thanks to her. And I hope that the person I am today is preparing for my future self as well as she did for me.
We both still believe that anything is possible, that we are allowed to choose the life we want to live, and that although we will make mistakes, at least we tried and moved forward.
Looking back on that life, and the one before, and the one that came after, and the one I live now, I see that a few things remain. Not just those few recipes. More importantly, what remains the same is the essence of who I was, am, and will be.
And I know that is true for each of us as we move through what appears as time on earth. Our essence remains. Who we are despite everything—remains.
So my message to myself, and to each of us, is to keep moving forward, learn as we go, prepare the way for those that come after, and for our future selves so they will look back and say thank you to the person we are today.
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
