Memories for mom

Young Chang

So many cooking stories, so many laughs.

Liver and onions once a month. Hot dogs slathered in apple sauce and

peanuts and cheese. Heavenly Hash -- potatoes, ground meat,

Worcestershire sauce, water and soy sauce -- all served over de-crusted

sourdough bread because that’s how Edna Padrick, an inventive cook and an

even more inventive mom, wanted it.

Everyone cackles remembering this. Peggy and Irene Engard of Costa

Mesa sit on either side of 87-year-old Padrick, fingers laced through

their mother’s. The three have the same smile, the same laugh.

Like giggly friends at a slumber party, as women who have together

weathered a rotation of husbands and tears and divorces and death, they

remember how Padrick would cut the crust off the sourdough bread with

scissors designated just for food.

There were others -- paper scissors, fabric scissors, kitchen scissors

-- and no-one would dare misuse a pair while growing up.

Today, there are still at least ten different pairs of scissorsat

Padrick’s Santa Ana home. Her grown-up daughters have come over to visit,

as they usually do to swim (Padrick loves to swim) and take care of their

mother. She suffers from severe dementia and is in the beginning stages

of Alzheimer’s.

“Sometimes she asks, ‘Of what value is my life?”’ said Peggy Engard.

“She was so devastated by losing her [driver’s] license, and she feels

like she’s so dependent, and everything she wants to do she has to ask

somebody . . . but she’s a good listener. That’s what I tell her. ‘Mom,

what would [people] do without you and your good listening ear?”’

This Mother’s Day, the dutiful daughters want to make sure their

mother knows she is someone they celebrate.

Engard, 59, wrote a letter to the Daily Pilot last month about Padrick

and how much she loves her. Padrick didn’t know of this. Engard started

reading the letter to her this week but stopped, passing it to sister

Irene because the lump in her throat wouldn’t go away.

Padrick cried. She laughed at mentions of how she’s “stubborn and has

very strong opinions” and gives “head butts” if she disagrees. She

laughed even louder at the mention of her “unbridled laughter” and how

Peggy Engard inherited it too.

Padrick remembers almost all of the references to the past -- both in

the letter she’s hearing and in the photo album on her lap -- despite the

onset of Alzheimer’s. There’s a bulletin board in her home with pictures

of all four of her daughters -- including Dorothy Sabino of Washington

and Lorraine Boyd of Kansas -- and other family members, to help Padrick

remember who’s who. But she needs little help when it comes to

remembering happy days.

Like summer meals consisting of just watermelons. Or just corn, just

banana splits, the lone artichoke.

“I thought that was great,” Peggy Engard said. “And she always fixed

our lunches. She’d figure out different kinds of sandwiches to have and

different ways to cut the sandwiches. It was never just diagonal.”

Credit this to Padrick’s artistic sense. She won many awards for her

paintings and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Cal

State Long Beach when she was 65.

The youthful mother even painted portraits of each of her daughters.

Irene Engard’s is clear -- the face is discernible, it’s your typical

portrait. The one of Peggy Engard is abstract. Titled “Adolescence,” the

scene shows layers of clouds and colors.

Padrick erupts into a laugh again at how she interpreted her

then-teenage daughter.

And then there were the teacher dinners, where every year Padrick

would invite each of her daughters’ teachers to dine with the family and

get acquainted. Peggy Engard, a teacher in the Newport-Mesa Unified

School District, says this is probably what inspired her to do what she

does.

“And she would say I don’t care if you just get C’s,” Irene Engard,

54, said. “I never got rewarded for good grades.”

Which, ironically, explains why both her local daughters graduated at

the top of their classes.

Padrick had some other quirky traditions. She would tape dimes to

windows and floors tempting her children to clean. She would stock the

house with brown sugar or honey but never with white sugar. She was

always honest, for better or for worse.

“And we got talked to,” Irene Engard laughed. “I woulda taken a

spanking any day, ‘cause the words stick with you.”

In the middle of all this memory-lane strolling, Padrick interrupts

the emotions and points to her green living room table. It’s a slab of

polyester resin hardened and resting on four hollow plastic cylinders for

legs.

She likes the legs. She says that’s where the art is -- here the

intrigue lies.

“I made this table, but notice: all of its beauty is underneath,”

Padrick said.