Poring over Mom's recipe for Roberto's Chicken

I have in my hands a tattered scrap of paper with a handwritten recipe for Roberto’s Chicken. I came upon it by happenstance. It reads like this:

3 lb cut up chicken ¼ cup olive oil juice of large lemon ¼ cup fresh mint leaves …

There are a few more ingredients after that, and then instructions:

Dry chicken on paper toweling. In a baking dish whisk together oil, lemon juice mint & garlic. …

Boring, right? But it’s my mother who wrote it, and now that she passed away a year and a half ago, it’s almost all I have of her. So now it’s a big deal, this little scrap; now it’s a forever keepsake.

I don’t know why it was scrawled on this ruled page from a 6-by-4-inch drug store pad and torn out so that it’s ratty and resembling hanging chads. When I married in 1980 and had no clue about soup stock, my mother had sat down at a typewriter and hunt-and-pecked me a folder full of recipes on mated sheets of white and carbon paper. (Young people reading this, do not imagine that an old Smith Corona is anything like your tablet keyboard in any respect except that the letters may be in the same place. This was surely brutal.) The chicken meal solution in my hand must have been an afterthought. Or maybe she jotted it idly while kibitzing with me at the kitchen table on one of her visits.

No matter. The point is that I am studying this scrap for anything I can know about my mother. The handwriting is as familiar and comforting as M&M’s and Bosco. There is a freewheelingness about it, in the way the crosses of her “t’s” defy gravity and tilt toward outer space, never coming into contact with the vertical line, and the way she breaks every Palmer Method rule the nuns at school mashed into our heads with rosary beads. And I’ll never get to ask her now how it came about that she would make her cursive lowercase “r’s” in the bold up-and-sharp-plunge-down style instead of having them gently plateau with two discrete points at the top, as we were taught.

Then, there are the sentences. What can I glean about my mother from the sentences in the Roberto’s Chicken document? Why did she use this one word and not another? I never heard her say “toweling” in all my life. Yet it’s here in sentence one, rather than “towel.”

When what you have about a person is a dog-eared, yellow page with words she wrote while thinking of you, and when you love that person, you will read it over and over like a general poring over maps for his African campaign. You won’t want to miss a clue as to her intention, or any key that may unlock the secrets of her mind.

How much more are we to revel in the very Word of God, left behind for us to probe His mind and His affections, more affection than a mother ever lavished on her child?