He Moves Me

All my life I've had a passionate love affair with sports cars. People say being in love is temporary insanity; I wear a size six straitjacket.

My first affair was with Rex, a red English Ford. Rex was a Singer Sewing Machine with wheels, but I was smitten by Britain. Anglophenia pulled at my heartstrings both then and now. It's why I spend my Sunday nights at Downton Abbey.

Rex had a hot temper and when he blew his last gasket, my dad said, "The roads are crowded with the likes of him." It's how he found Ollie, a pea-green Oldsmobile Coupe. Years of transporting hooch gave Ollie a permanent scent: Eau de White Lightning.

I wanted to believe that Ollie was a sports car, not a coupe. He had two-doors and no back seat, but he wasn't the real deal; he was an Oldsmobile and he reeked.

One morning I discovered him gone and I couldn't understand why he'd left. Had he missed those days of hauling hooch till the revenuers put a cork in his job description? For whatever reason, Ollie fell off my personal wagon and never got back up to speed.

I went through several American "caffairs" after Ollie, each one mind-numbing and humdrum. No turn on at all.

There was Carl Chevy and then Frank Ford. Yawn. When Maximilian, a white Mercury convertible decked out in red leather showed up, he peaked my interest in domesticity.

Max was a handsome hunk of engineering but I had to share him with my husband. Even while I was pregnant, Max tootled me around town with his top down. He did this until my expanding tummy could no longer fit under the steering wheel.

Max left me, and after that I went through cars like Sherman through Atlanta on the Perimeter hoping to find the perfect CarFax.

Stanley Station Wagon was the quintessential dog and kid schlepper, but he was so boring that he couldn't get off cruise control. Thank goodness I dumped him before we coasted into Comatose City.

Conrad Comet entered my life the year compacts came of age. Connie gave good gas mileage but was no more a sports car than Freddie Falcon who was monotonous as an unpainted picket fence.

When they all had taken off for that universal junkyard in the sky, my first real sports car, Francisco Fiat, aka Fix It Again Toni, came into my life. Francisco spent more time with Toni than with me, however, so it was no surprise when Frankie and Toni became sweethearts. He was my mancar but he done me wrong.

Nick Nissan Z, was a sporty dude with a tiger in his tank, but way too masculine for this Southern Belle. I tried to make it last but eventually Nick and his mileage roared like a dragon into Blue Book history.

Miso Miata was a good sport. He showed up with the ability to make me laugh, but with one too many glitches. Even a blonde knows that glitches, like jokes, ain't funny after the third one. When Miso began to bomb more often than a drunk drone on high test, I shuffled him off to Buffalo.

At long last my dream, the fantasy car for which I had always longed, came home to Mama. Jacques Jaguar, a carnival red convertible stole my heart. We were happy for a very long time and unlike the others, he gave me no grief. I mourned him when we had to part, but he was old and cranky and could no longer mask his rattling bones. It was time. Fifteen in car years is ninety in dog years.

My true love was gone forever, but when fate plopped the cherry of all cherries on the front seat of my life, Jacques Jaguar was forced to take a back seat.

Wolfgang, a silver Porsche convertible, has never clashed with my golden years. He hugs me with his heavy body each time I turn his motor on. Woofie glides down my road of life indifferent to detours, potholes and roadblocks. His dashboard demeanor is more German than English but do I care?

Ach, Woofie & Ich liebe Dich.

Advice My Mother Never Gave Me

*You have muscles “down there” and you need to train them. They’re called Kegels and believe me, you want to learn how to squeeze those puppies dry. You won’t be aware of the Kegels until after you have born children and even then, muscles will bottom out on the childrearing spectrum. But one day your children will cease asking for your advice and you’ll find yourself  staring into the face of the dreaded menopause. Hopefully, that’s when you’ll say hello to Ms. Kegel and thank your mother for teaching you how to pinch and squeeze before it was too late.

*Keep your maiden name for as long as you can. It’s your identity. There is no MRS law that requires you to replace it.

*Don’t go to bed mad is a bullshit platitude. Sometimes being pissed off feels really good so hang onto it.

*Labor pains hurt like hell. Some say you’ll forget all about the pain once you hold that precious bundle in your arms. Don’t believe that either.

*You don’t have to give the best piece of fried chicken to your husband just because he’s got a bigger stomach. Grab hold of that fat, juicy breast and pass the wishbone to him. Next time maybe he’ll get lucky.

*Never iron the following (no matter what your mother-in-law does).
Your husband’s shirts. Take them to a laundry. You’ve got better things to do.
Tablecloths and napkins (see above). Don’t be an idiot: buy paper napkins. 
Pajamas. Like I said, don’t be an idiot. Sleep naked.

*Keep some mad money stashed away to splurge on yourself. This advice is even better than going to bed mad.

*You won’t always agree with your husband. Smile like you do and nod your head a lot, then go on and think whatever the hell you want. He won’t figure it out because duh! He’s a dude.

*If you sleep with a snorer, buy earplugs. It will save your marriage or keep you out of jail for murdering him in the middle of the night.

*You don’t have to be a perfect cook and/or homemaker. One Martha Stewart is one too many. Deli food is good.

*A regular Mani-pedi is an absolute necessity only if you don’t want to go insane. If you decide otherwise, then use those sharp toenails to stab the snorer next to you in bed.

*Feed your kids ice cream sundaes for breakfast. They will remember it for the rest of their lives. 

*You don’t need to be a volunteer. Some things are good, but others drain your energy, time and patience. If you must volunteer, choose an organization headed by an anal retentive because they won’t allow you to do diddlysquat. If baking cookies for ungrateful rugrats is your thing, go for it. If you’d rather be pummeled to the ground with a twenty-pound sack of flour until you pass out, then learn how to say NO and stick to it.

*Don’t try to please everybody. You’ll wear yourself to a frazzle and it never works anyway. It will only keep you up at night wondering why nobody ever gets you.

*Exercise if you want to. Opt out if you don’t. It’s the 21^st Century; it’s your body. Choose.

*Plastic surgery? Why the hell not? If you are criticized for fixing your nose, remind the critiquer that his or her forty-year-old buck-toothed kid still wears a retainer to bed. Do what makes you feel good about yourself.

*Be kind to your mother-in-law. She is the first woman your husband ever loved and she is not your enemy. He will love you more for loving her and so will she.

*Some men hate cats. It's probably because they never owned one. Get a cat even if he doesn’t like the idea because he’ll learn to love it. Are you not making a super human effort to love his mother?

*If you cook, he cleans up. That’s a no-brainer payback for those labor pains you endured.

*When you’re sick, DON’T get out of bed to cook for your family. If they can’t pour cereal into a bowl, trade them in for people who were born with a lick of sense.

*Don’t feel guilty for taking Me Time. Consider it more labor pain payback.

Advice can be good, bad or so-so. Some of it you’ll remember, some you won’t and some you’ll wish you’d never heard. Advice can make you laugh and a lot of it just flat out came too late to do a piece of good but trust me on the Kegel counsel. You’ll thank me when you’re a grandmother.

Big Mama Pulls the Plug

Big Mama Pulls the Plug

By Cappy Hall Rearick

Hello! Thank you for calling UAM, Universal Answering Machine, the official replacement for a human. Press 1 to leave a message. Press 2 to leave a callback number. With a little luck, a machine will get back to you before you die.

Beep!

(Sigh) "Okay, listen up, people. This here is Big Mama Nature calling and I’m sick and tired of leaving messages for you. This will be the last time you will ever hear my voice but I've got plenty to say and times a'wasting.

"I'm not going to be Big Mama Nature any more 'cause y'all have done wore me plum out. I am so outta here.

"Just so you’ll know, I plan to gather up a few of my things to take with me when I leave. They were always mine, never, ever yours. You took it for granted that my things belonged to you, but you were dead wrong! They were on loan. Consider today as your personal Chapter Eleven Day.

"I'm talking about all of the birds, every last one of them. Sparrows, ducks, egrets, gulls, especially the egrets and gulls. OMG! What you’ve done to my seabirds is unacceptable. And to make matters worse, you went and gave my little chickies and piglets the Flu. Well, you won't get any more chances to hurt my babies 'cause Big Mama Nature takes care of her own.

"I'm reclaiming the rain forests and all of its inhabitants. You never "got" their simple logic no matter how many times it was explained, so just forget about the rain forests. They'll be well protected under my personal supervision and I won't need to worry about them anymore.

"The Mississippi River is high on my list of retrievables. How can I not take back the Mighty Mississip after the way you've treated her? She's been crying out for my healing touch for years. The Great Lakes, the Colorado River and the Pacific Ocean will be coming with me as well. You can have all of New Yawk City and every drop of water surrounding it; it's way too far gone for me to fix.

"Originally, I’d planned to leave the Gulf of Mexico because I figured you learned your lesson after my Katrina wake-up call. Something so devastating should have gotten a big blip on your unconscious radar, but that didn’t happen. Instead of helping with the clean up, you whined and carried-on like a bunch of wussies and then let BP come in and turn the entire Gulf into a deep fat fryer. I'm taking the Gulf. You don't deserve one drop of it.

"The beaches along the east coast of the United States are mine, mine, mine. It'll be another millennium before even I can get them clean again, but they don't call me Big Mama for nothing.

"There are a few mountain ranges I'll collect on my way out, at least the ones you haven't gotten around to leveling. You won't miss them since you stripped away their natural resources long ago. I intend to rescue what’s left of them before your bulldozers turn them into corn meal mush.

"I am also taking back the air you've been polluting for the last century. I need what little is left so that my birds can keep flying and my rain forests can flourish again. Chances are, even I won't be able to undo much of the damage you've done, but I'll give it a shot.

"I should remind you that the minute I take back the air, clouds will vanish before you can say Boo Hoo! That's a fact, Jack. There will be no more clouds in the sky, but you won't miss them because you never bothered to look up anyway.

"I'm willing to leave the moon for now, but the sun goes with me. Don't even think about giving me any lip on this. I created sunrises to wake you up and get you going every morning. Those out-of-this-world gorgeous sunsets? They were there for you to reflect on the beauty surrounding you. But you blew it, Bubba, when you took me and my gifts for granted. I am so not happy.

"You figured the sun would come up and the sun would go down forever, didn't you? Well, you figured wrong. Now you'll have to remember what that lucky old sun looked like and how your skin tingled from its warmth. It won't replace the real deal but you can text the memory of it to your grandkids.

"I'll be back for some other things later, but you won't realize they're gone until you need them. That's when you'll be shocked to discover that they are no longer available for you to abuse. If history is any indication, you'll be more inconvenienced than sad. (sigh)

"I loved you from the beginning of time, loved you with all my heart. For eons, I forgave you your negligence and overlooked your ignorance. I even chalked up your indifference to human evolutionary learning deficiencies. I'm ashamed to say I forgave you over and over for your folly.

"But I will not forgive you for the shambles you've made of my beautiful earth. I trusted you to love, nurture and protect it and I didn't think for a nano-second that you would destroy it. You have broken my heart. (Sigh)

"No doubt, the human blueprint needs tweaking and I wish I had it in me to take you back to the drawing board, but you have drained me bone dry.

"Don't bother trying to get in touch with me. (Sigh) You couldn't be bothered to acknowledge my many calls, so we are so done.

Like the Big Guy says, "It's not nice to fool Big Mama Nature."

Bleep!

Cliché —Touché

I learned the backbone of American language from my mother, aka the Queen of Cliché. While other parents charged their kids with, “Be home by eleven o’clock sharp,” my mother said, “If you’re not early you’re late.”

Language was always a painting to Mama. Words and phrases, the catchier the better, were the brush strokes of finished sentences. While other families played Tiddly Winks and Monopoly, we played word games like Scrabble and Perquacky. Mama invented the Cliché Game, however, and it was our favorite. She always started it off with a well-worn phrase. 

On Mondays, it might be something like, “Well, if the sun is shining and the creek don’t rise, we might go shopping today.”

Then she would look at one of us, eyebrows raised in expectation.

My brother, who would eventually grow up to be an engineer, would quit trying to figure out why Rice Krispies went Snap! Crackle! Pop! Long enough to say, “With any kind of luck, Mama, you just might find those new curtains you’ve been looking for.”

Two pairs of eyes would then look in my direction. My turn to come up with something equally clever like, “Don’t y’all take any wooden nickels.”

Daddy’s mind was never too far away from the family budget. As soon as he heard the word nickels, he would invariably pipe up with, “My pocket is not a bottomless pit, you know.” More often, he would quip, “Don’t y’all forget that money does not grow on trees.”

“Hurry up kids and clean your plates!” Mama would say as she scraped her chair back from the table. “We have to make hay while the sun shines.”

Nothing I have ever learned in an English class allows me to write a blank check by using clichés when I write. Just the opposite, in fact. Yet, just the other day, I read that those same tried and true expressions, the ones that rolled off my family’s tongues back in the day, are being seriously considered with regard to their significance in the preservation of our culture. Some researchers think the cliché may be the backbone of our communication system.

Seriously?

Mama would be thrilled.

As a creator, a very small architect of prose, I have the privilege of typing a distinctive breath of life into one-dimensional men, women, children and animals. It is always my hope that the characters I create leave a lasting impression on a reader. I’m pretty sure my characters (and their creator) will be forever grateful.

In any event, by writing in what is known as Southern Voice, means (at least to me) that I write about things and people I can see, hear and touch. I don’t necessarily need to dig deep into my unconscious to find characters with delightful dialogue. I can easily discover them right here at home, the place where dog-eared expressions are as natural as eating grits for breakfast.

My made-up characters are not always credible, nor are they always believable. Most often I take a little from one character and something else from another. What (or who) I end up with then becomes an amalgam of people with all sorts of characteristics. After that, I sit back and let them go wild, insisting that they do whatever they want to do.

Mama taught me that creativity can be a bottomless pit and that clichés are diamonds in the rough, always blessings in disguise. With that in mind, I will try to keep up the good work and not let it drive me stark raving crazy. I will turn off my computer before I become blind as a bat or worn to a frazzle. I will grab that bright idea before it vanishes into thin air and leaves me sadder, but wiser.

Singing the Delta Blues

"True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked." ~Erich Segal

It was the Depression Era and thanks to the Prohibition Act of 1919 America was sobering up whether they wanted to or not. When Snooks's boyfriend heard that a Mississippi riverboat was cruising three miles from shore down the Big Mississip he was all over it. The man was no fan of probhibition.

"Not only can we drink and gamble, but there's a fellow on the boat plays the Delta Blues on a harmonica and people say when he sings he sounds like a screen door that needs oil."

In time, Snooks would discover that Harold was not musically inclined, and in addition, he was totally tone deaf.

"Do they have a piano player too," she asked.

He nodded. "They say he's another Jellyroll Morton." Snooks loved the blues; Harold loved the booze.

Snooks felt she had earned the right to love the blues because she knew what it was like to pick cotton until the tips of her fingers bled. Even at the tender age of twenty, she went to bed each night with a backache from stooping over in the field.

Since the Prohibition Act put a damper on the consumption of alcohol, folks quickly learned to BYOB. Those who could afford it boarded riverboats, bringing along their own spirits. A riverboat during that era was the place to dance, gamble and listen to live music. Young people in search of good times crowded the decks.

At first glance, the riverboat looked like other paddle wheelers Snooks often saw clanging their bells down the Yazoo River and the Mighty Mississip. Once on board, however, she discovered a far different view and she liked it. A lot.

"How about a swig of my hooch," Harold asked. Snooks sipped on the bottle concealed inside his jacket, and then headed for the dance floor. He followed.

Her smile just wouldn't go away. Her dancing feet wouldn't stop moving to the heartfelt songs sung by a man who called himself "Blind Man Sonny." The piano player banged out an occasional Scott Joplin tune trying as though to rouse those passengers feeling the effects of bootleg whiskey.

Throughout the evening and with each sip of hooch, the comfort level in Snooks's new surroundings grew as did her laughter. Never in her young life could she remember having so much fun.

While they danced close together a woman who sounded like Bessie Smith sang Backwater Blues. Harold whispered in her ear, "Will you marry me tomorrow?"

Snooks didn't hesitate. "Nope. I'm gonna have a hangover tomorrow." And she did.

Snooks was living with her older sister in a small town in the Mississippi Delta at the time, taking a break from the farm out in the country where she lived with the rest of her family. Big sister was a teetotaler whose membership in a hard shell Baptist Church preached zero tolerance for alcohol and dancing. She was not one bit happy when the morning after the riverboat excursion, Snooks was too hung over to eat breakfast. She was even more put out when the doorbell rang before nine o'clock and a gentleman asked to speak to her sister.

"Wake up, Snooks. Wake up," big sister hissed, pulling covers from her groggy and much hung over sibling. "There's somebody here to talk to you and he won't say what it's about. What did you do last night?"

The last thing big sister needed to hear was that little sister got pie-eyed drunk. "Get up out of that bed right now and go in there and find out what that man wants with you. You hear me?"

Snooks dragged herself into the living room to find Harold all decked out in a suit, tie and polished shoes, looking better than he had a right to.

Nervous, he held a hat in his hands and twirled it around and around. Next to him stood a stout man with a fringe of grey hair that circled his pate. He held a Bible.

"What are you doing here," Snooks asked Harold.

"I came to marry you."

She blanched. "I told you I was gonna be hung over today and couldn't marry you."

The heavy-set man cleared his throat. "Miss, you might as well go on in there and get yourself dressed. This man is determined to marry you today. I'm a Justice of the Peace and he won't let me go back home until y'all tie the knot."

A year after she agreed to marry him in her sister's living room, Snooks gave birth to a son they named Charles Harold, Jr., and three years later on Valentine's Day Snooks delivered a baby daughter and named her Cappy.

A Christmas Story

MAYERLING AT MIDNIGHT

“Give me any two pages of the Bible and I’ll give you a picture.”

~ Cecil B. DeMille

I love sappy, sentimental Christmas movies. I cry as soon as a bell rings and Clarence gets his wings in It’s a Wonderful Life. When Jimmy Stewart goes all Alfred Hitchcock and frightens Donna Reed into the middle of Valentine’s Day, I get chills. That film is one of my favorites.

 And how about those big galoots in Miracle on 34^th Street that were too obtuse to see that Edmund Gwynne was not playing a role? He really was Kris Kringle. Anybody with half a brain could see that.

There is another film I love, although it may not be a true Christmas film. Mayerling, the romantic portrayal of a royal love affair gone tragically awry, is a movie I always watch during the holidays.

I was reminded of it the year I went to Austria for Christmas hoping for a snowfall, something we Southerners know little about. Upon arriving in Vienna five days before Christmas, there was plenty of seriously cold weather, but not one snowflake could be found. I bundled up like an Eskimo and walked around the city shivering like a jellyfish.

I saw performances of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker and then sashayed across Philharmoniker Strasse to the Hotel Sacher for a reviving cup of hot Viennese coffee and a decadent Sacher torte. Yum.

In short, my days and nights leading up to “C” Day were pleasantly full with only one snag. Austrian merchants and hoteliers go home at mid-day to be with their families leaving skeleton crews to take care of tourists like me. Consequently, I had nothing to do on the Eve of Christmas or for “C” Day itself.

That is the reason why on Christmas Eve I wandered alone in the near-empty hotel lobby leafing through travel brochures. What to my wandering eyes should appear, but a red and green pamphlet promoting a traditional Christmas Eve dinner deep in the Vienna Woods, culminating with Midnight Mass at Mayerling.

“Mayerling,” I sighed breathlessly as I shoved the brochure toward the only employee left in the hotel. “Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve starred in that movie. So romantic, so tragic and so...”

The hotel person raised his eyebrows and sniffed. “Bitte?”

I nodded vigorously.  “Mayerling,” I said as plainly as I could. “Ya?”

In perfect English, he told me there was one seat left on the bus for Mayerling. Could I be ready by four o’clock?

Grinning wildly, I shouted, “Ya! Ya! Mayerling. Hot diggidy dawg!”

The bus was warm and noisy and loaded with as many nationalities as a NATO Summit. We chugged along until finally arriving at a quaint restaurant steeped in old world charm that might have been decorated by Heidi herself, (played by Shirley Temple).

After a traditional Austrian Christmas Eve dinner of fried carp, roast goose, baked celery root and marzipan, we re-boarded the old bus and rode to the bottom of a hill in the thick of the Vienna Woods.

It was close to midnight when our tour guide doled out lighted “torches” to us with instructions to walk quietly, single-file up the hill to the chapel for Mass. The penitential convent, she said, had once been the site of a hunting lodge where Crown Prince Rudolf (played by Omar Sharif) and his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera (played by Catherine Deneuve) sealed their fate in a murder/suicide pact.

“The altar,” she said to her captive audience, “stands over the very spot in the Prince’s bedroom where the bodies were discovered.” A chorus of expected “oohs” and “aahs” followed.

I had hiked almost to the top of the hill when the first soft snowflake danced on my nose. When I looked behind me, what I saw snatched away what was left of my breath. Dozens of flickering hand-held torches twisted, turned and meandered up the hill illuminating an otherwise black night. The only sounds to be heard came from icy footstep crunches that accompanied the gentle purr of falling snow. C. B. DeMille, uber Hollywood king of dazzling productions in the Fifties could not have staged it more beautifully.

In that moment, all romantic illusions of Rudolf and Mary and their tragic love affair vacated the premises of my conscious mind. Omar and Catherine playing a role were no longer available to cloud my vision of the sacred moment. The quiet midnight torches below etched themselves on my soul as indestructible strips of celluloid.

Eat your heart out, C.B.

I had seen unforgettable images before but none as indelible as the one stamped on my soul that Christmas Eve. I will always cherish the vision of that quiet group of people ambling up a hill at midnight to honor the Christ Child, born to bring us love, peace and hope for a better world.

I expect one day I’ll take that journey again. No, the inner etchings of that night have not faded, nor will they. That said, a remake is not out of the question. Stay tuned!

A Feeling of Christmas

 

“It’s fruitcake weather Buddy!”

                                                    ~A Christmas Memory, Truman Capote

  

Our house is unusually quiet today while Babe recovers from serious but successful surgery that saved his life. He sleeps a lot. After a certain age recovery is no walk in the park. Emotionally, I am overwhelmed with relief each morning when I wake up to find him still snoring next to me. I am overjoyed that the two of us have been granted additional time together. 

The antique clock we bought at a flea market in Pennsylvania is ticking away the minutes, a stoic sentinel on the mantle over the fireplace. It is flanked on both sides by the traditional manger scene that I gently boxed up last January and with even more care unboxed early this morning. Hoping to festive things up around here, I went outside and pruned the magnolia tree down to a nub to make Christmas wreaths for the front door, side door and back door. Okay, so I got a little carried away. After hanging the wreaths, I rested before I attempted to decorate a six-foot tree with ornaments collected for the past twenty something years.

Although the house is too quiet, the old mantle clock seems to be ticking louder than it usually does. An annoyed part of me wants to get up, grab the pendulum and stop it in mid-tick but I don’t because the ticking sound is constant. When I analyze the prevailing stillness I realize that this house of ours has every reason to be hushed. It is what houses do when there is a sick person about.

The tree is up. It looks awful. I nearly lost my religion stringing lights on the darn thing, so now I am folded into Babe’s recliner trying to recuperate. The top of the already lopsided tree did not get the proportioned amount of lights because my five-foot-four body was too lazy to look for a step stool high enough for me to be able to get up there. The angel looks more deranged than heavenly. If she topples over, she’ll just have to deal with it. Light stringing is normally Babe’s job. This year? Not so much.

The reason I have written a lot of Christmas stories is due to the fact that I was inspired to capture my seasonal thoughts on paper after reading Truman Capote’s 1963 short story, A Christmas Memory. That haunting tale about baking fruitcakes with his cousin Sook is why today I continue writing my own holiday memories about growing up in a small Southern town. 

Looking out my window at the leafless, birdless winter morning, two words thread through my mind unbidden: Fruitcake weather. Could it be the ghost of Capote trying to tell me something? Babe is napping, and when I go in to check on him, I feel an overpowering desire to do something to make him smile. The leafless, birdless trees gently sway in the cold winter breeze as if singing a familiar phrase directly to me: “Oh my! It’s fruitcake weather.”

It hits me that the song of the trees is telling me to go to the store and buy candied cherries and pineapple, pecans and walnuts. The whispered directive instructs me to chop, mix and bake until the fragrance of freshly baked fruitcake is wafting out of every crack, cranny and mouse hole in this unusually quiet house. According to the leafless, birdless trees, baking a fruitcake will help me drown out the sound of time ticking away.

Mama’s White Fruitcake

1             Cup Sugar

2             Cups Flour

5             Eggs

2             Sticks Butter

1             Teaspoon Baking Powder

½            Teaspoon Salt

1             1-ounce Bottle Vanilla

1             Teaspoon  to ½ ounce Almond Flavoring (depending on your love of Almond)

1             Pound Candied Cherries

1             Pound Candied Pineapple

4             Cups Chopped Nuts (mix walnuts and pecans if both are available)

Chop fruit and nuts and dredge with 3 Tablespoons of flour.

In a separate bowl:

Cream sugar and butter until fluffy and add well-beaten eggs, one at a time

Slowly add remaining flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla and almond flavorings.

Combine batter and fruit/nut mixture and mix it all up with your hands, squeezing to get the batter evenly distributed.

Pour into a greased tube pan and bake for three hours at 250 degrees.

If you have a pressure cooker, steam the cake for one hour, then cook in the oven for an additional hour at 325 degrees.

If not, place a pan of water under the tube pan for the entire cooking time.

Cool on cake rack.