My grandmother was the true north for our family during the holidays. It didn’t matter where we had scattered to across the nation, at Christmas, we all wanted to be with her. It was a family tradition that started when we were children growing up, and after she moved to Florida, it was like we had been set adrift in a boat without steering during the holidays.

Some of my fondest childhood memories were the times I spent with her. Not all of them entirely pleasant. She was a tough taskmaster. But when you got that rare praise for doing to her liking, such as ironing sheets, or we’d share a laugh and I’d hear her cackle, well, it was just a special time.

We’d try to make it to Fort Myers for the occasional family get-together, but somehow, there was always something -  our own family/job demands – that kept it from happening very often and never having the whole family get together like we did in West Virginia. We did for Christmas 1991, though, because we knew our time with her was getting shorter. She died 18 months later. I still miss her.

I mention this only because I have some innate need to cook a huge family dinner to celebrate the occasion of us getting together, whether it is Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter or a random moment of circumstance that brings all four of us together with our parents. I blame this on my time spent with Grandmother.

So when Mom and Dad were at the beach house, it occurred to me that Saturday evening we would have all of the grandchildren together. And whenever there are more than four of us gathered together, I develop a brain spasm that makes me say: I’LL COOK.  That statement spews forth out of my mouth like someone suffering from Tourettes Syndrome.

It’s not like I can’t cook. I cook just fine. I’m not terribly imaginative because frankly, I don’t have the time nor energy.

But with Cameron coming in to visit, and knowing my mashed potatoes will perhaps make him forgive the times he had to sit in my office while I was covering a city council meeting (hey, he had a TV, laptop and a dog, plus Red Baron and all the sprinkles he could eat from the mayor….), I offered to make dinner: chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, green beans with biscuits/bread. Not too terribly difficult. Well, not perhaps if it had been done at my house. But this was being done in a strange kitchen.

Everything is going OK until about an hour before I thought the chicken would be ready. Corn had been shucked, green beans plucked and potatoes peeled, boiled and now in the mixer. Gravy was a bit iffy, but waiting on drippings. I opened the oven to check on what appeared to be a beautifully browning bird, only to find out the oven had automatically cut itself off after two hours. Guess it was a safety feature.

So now everything I had timed down to the last minute so it would hit the table hot and at the same time was going awry. Potatoes were getting cold, green beans were taking longer than I expected to steam and was that chicken ever going to pop it’s “ALL DONE” cork?

The table was all ready to go and finally all of the kids were rounded up. Rather than waiting on the chicken, we decided to eat the first batch of mashed potatoes and gravy as an appetizer. Then came the green beans. Corn never got done, and by now, it was after 8 p.m., so I said forget it. Chicken finally popped the cork and it was delicious, but of course better with the mashed potatoes. Bread came out as dessert. Second batch of boiled potatoes were ruined sitting in the pot — too mushy to even use unless patching holes in the road outside.

It was hardly the well-timed out and well-prepared meal I had envisioned, i.e. those of my Grandmother’s. And my sister had called in sick. I had just spent five hours buying/cooking/cleaning a meal that required two dishwasher loads and it was consumed in about 15 minutes.

But as we sat there, all of us at the table, talking, laughing, joking, a little poking and teasing amongst the cousins,  I hope someday one of them will tell their children that sharing this meal with their grandparents was a cherished memory, not so much for what a perfect meal it was, but for its imperfectness, which probably made it even more perfect for our family.