By Abe Villarreal
A few readers responded to my last column with suggestions. One was to watch Brenda Gantt on Facebook. Ms. Gantt is a classic Southerner. A 74-year-old grandmother who puts on her own cooking shows.
They aren't professionally produced shows with perfect lighting and an enthusiastic audience. It’s just Ms. Gantt with a smartphone. A smartphone that she sometimes has trouble using. She posts something almost daily. Gravy, fried green tomatoes, sweet tea, and more than any item – biscuits. She loves to make biscuits.
About five years ago, Ms. Gantt lost her husband. They had been married for over 50 years. He had Alzheimer’s, and she had become his personal caregiver. Going through something like that does something to you.
Between her constant sprinklings of “y’alls” and other southern sayings, Ms. Gantt is filled with eternal optimism. Even when she had shingles recently, she took time to share scripture and to thank the Lord for her current situation. All that and she still cooked up eggs and bacon on an early and dark morning in Andalusia, Alabama.
Watching Ms. Gantt took me down a rabbit hole of videos of other grandmas cooking from home. Hillbilly grandmas making goulash with canned tomatoes and elbow macaroni. Soul food grandmas making all kinds of pies and casseroles while sharing how they learned that from their mothers who learned it from the mothers before them.
I even saw a few grandpas with their own channels. They made dishes too, but it didn’t feel as special as watching the grandmas with their way of sharing family stories and anecdotes.
It’s nice to know that in your seventies, when you think you’ve done all you can to make a life worth living, something new can come your way. Ms. Gantt gets tens of thousands of likes and shares on her videos. There are plenty of people watching and interacting with her. Giving her a new fulfillment for her life after living a fulfilling life with a partner she no longer has.
I like watching these cooking shows, not just because I’m learning new ways to make fried pies (what we call empanadas in our neck of the woods). I’m learning what’s important to people who have lived their lives. They raised children and lost children. They’ve been married and are now alone.
When you are my age, sometimes you fool yourself into thinking you’ve been through a lot. I don’t think I have. I haven’t been hospitalized with something life-threatening. I haven’t had to retire because I was too tired to keep going. I haven’t had the need to change direction, to do something new, because someone, maybe society, said I had to.
Sometimes, things are out of our control. At least we think they are until we realize they could be in our control. That we could grab the wheel and guide our own path as long as we remember that we need some direction. That there has to be a guiding light of some kind.
That’s what Ms. Gantt, and Mammaw, and the other grandmas are showing me with their homemade cooking shows. They know something that us who are half their age don’t know. Life is what you make of it, not what other people or societal norms make you believe. You can sit out to pasture, or you can start a cooking show.
Just you and a phone, mixing and folding, pouring and scooping. Talking about the good old days and reflecting on a life well lived. One that can still keep going if you want it to, and if He wants it to. A biscuit recipe and a Bible are what Ms. Gantt has, and it keeps her going.
Abe Villarreal writes about the traditions, people, and culture of America. He can be reached at abevillarreal@hotmail.com.