Brain Drippings

Multi-Generational

Game Of Telephone.

Of course, I am now the fourth generation who bakes this cake. (I never met my great-grandmother. She died shortly before my dad met my mother, but he tells me stories about her. She spoke three languages and was trying to learn Portuguese when she died. She wore a fur coat over a muumuu and owned a wolfdog. When she was widowed in the Great Depression, she supported her family by playing piano in a honkey-tonk before lying her way into a radiology position. Her second husband was a British naval officer who was trained on a ship with sails and who gave her jewels by pouring them into a bowl and handing it to her at breakfast.)

My mother used it to make a wedding cake for my sister’s wedding. (My dad insists his grandma would have loved my mom, both plain-speaking women from the midwest.) My brother-in-law fell in love with this cake, to his own surprise, as he loves chocolate and the wedding cake has none. Now it is his birthday cake of choice. I have baked it for him multiple times.

One day my sister will teach her son how to make the cake from his great-great grandmother’s recipe. I will tell him stories about her, this woman I never met but who is so real to me.

This picture of Karoline Leavitt (left) was scrubbed from AFP and Getty's systems after WH complained

A few months before he passed away in 2003, a 74 year old children’s television host sat down in the same studio where he had filmed 895 episodes over 33 years and recorded one last message. It wasn’t for children. It was for the adults who had grown up watching him.

Fred Rogers hosted Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on American public television from 1968 to 2001. For over three decades he walked into the same set, changed into a cardigan and sneakers, looked directly into the camera, and spoke to children as if each one of them was the only person in the room. He never raised his voice, never talked down to his audience, and never rushed a single moment.

In that final recording, he looked into the camera one last time and said “I’m just so proud of all of you who have grown up with us. And I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead. But I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger. I like you just the way you are.”

So.