Every Sunday morning she made blueberry pancakes using the sourdough starter she got about 60 years ago from Heloise (remember Hints From Heloise? THAT Heloise), who had gotten it from someone in Alaska, when both were young brides living on an Air Force base in Hawaii. That precious starter went everywhere they went in their long life as a career military family--on the plane, in a crock she held in her lap--to California, Libya, Germany, Belgium, Washington DC and California.
She made her pancakes by putting silver dollar sized dollops of a thinner-than-usual batter in a cheap, old aluminum pan lined with a thin layer of browned butter and dropping three, exactly three, fresh blueberries into each one. When they were done they'd still be white in the center but have a thin dark brown rim all the way around that provided an exquisite, delicate crunch when you placed it on your tongue. Each pancake was one bite and each panfull of seven was a single serving, and she'd make each person at the breakfast table start eating ("Don't wait!") the second she filled their plate. Then she'd fill everybody's plate twice before making a batch for herself. It would seem to take all morning, but no one ever left Stella's breakfast table feeling anything other than a reluctance to go, so this was a good thing.
I have never cared for conventional pancakes much, but Stella's were like no others and Bob and I loved them. And so did every member of her family, every lucky neighbor (they lived just down the street from us in California), and the many friends they made along the long road of life. Including, apparently, and not to name-drop but this is cute, former German Chancellor Hellmut Schmidt who they befriended in their NATO days and who, Dick claims proudly, begged to be invited for breakfast instead of dinner because of Stella's prowess with the great American breakfast and in particular these pancakes. They were truly her signature dish.
In addition to Stella's special sourdough and the care with which she sorted the blueberries and selected the perfect triplet to go into the next pancake, the pan itself was essential to Stella's success. It was purchased from the base PX in the first year of their marriage, and even though it got so bashed up and misshapen and black over all these years of use that she felt almost embarrassed about using it, no other pan ever browned just the edges the way that pan did and so, though she tried many other pans in an attempt to pull off two batches at once, she gave up.
She and Dick met almost 70 years ago when she was working at a USO club in Pomona, California, and Dick was a young pilot from Pennsylvania who arrived for training in the P38 fighter plane which would become the second love of his life. One night he asked her where the closest gas station might be, three weeks later they were married and the next day Dick shipped out for Europe where, among other feats, he would fly 133 missions in the Berlin Airlift and eventually become one of this country's youngest four star generals. And she would become a great cook. Not the Julia Child type, but the Joy of Cooking type who put up her own pickles and jams, who made not just gingerbread houses but gingerbread villages every Christmas, and whose spectacularly comforting homecooking was transformed by the inventions of Bisquick and Jello. With great fondness, I remember the 'fancy' salad course she made for us one night, which held a quivering slice of what she adorably pronounced "aspect"--tomato juice and lemon jello mixed together, chilled in a ring mold until solid, and served on a lettuce leaf.
Which leads me back to the pancakes. After breakfast, she would take the leftover pancake batter--there was always leftover batter--and add Bisquick until it thickened into a gooey dough that could be rolled into cinnamon rolls, and these she would feed to the neighborhood children who flocked to her house when the sweet smells wafted out of the garage which Dick would open up by way of saying, "We're home, come on in." Stella had no enemies, just friends and more friends, so many of them I have to think won on Sunday mornings. This ritual continued throughout their entire long marriage until about five weeks ago, when she woke up one morning too sick to get out of bed.
Yesterday Stella passed away quietly at the age of 87 with Dick holding her hand, and there will be no more pancakes. No more because even if someone like me were to try to do that for Dick in hopes of making some future Sunday seem a little less empty, even if we were to step into her kitchen and use her starter and her sacred pancake pan and brown the butter just so, our pancakes wouldn't end up tasting like Stella's. It took a certain touch to get them just right, and only Stella had that.
And that special touch went way beyond pancakes into the selfless way she gave of herself every day. Which is why I know that even though no one here but me was lucky enough to know and be loved by my Stella, just about everyone here has either known a Stella or longed all their lives for a Stella or even had a Stella for their very own mother, and if you did then you know why this morning I'm sitting here with all this love and grief and can't seem to get anything else started.
