Remember Me

“You have to have the streusel topping or it isn’t banana bread,” my dad always said when talking about his favorite recipe.

He stood tall when he entered the kitchen, usually dressed in orange and black, his penchant for representing his alma mater apparent from the holes in his t-shirts. He even convinced my mom to remodel the kitchen in Oregon State University colors too, the orange cabinetry a permanent hark back to his glory days. In my dining room, there is a watercolor portrait of me and my dad from the day I graduated college. I’m in a scarlet sundress seated next to dad in his favorite Beaver Orange sweatshirt with a ball cap atop his ponytailed gray hair, both wearing matching smiles.

Retired engineer turned avid at-home chef, my dad turned every meal into an appetizing adventure. His decadent, velvety cheesecake was Michelin star worthy. But the hallmark of his culinary expertise was his streusel-topped banana bread. Moist in the middle but not too wet, perfectly ripe bananas created a rich creamy taste that lingered long after the final bite.

“Always keep browning bananas in the freezer,” he would tell me each time we made the bread. My ten-year-old self would grab a fork from the drawer as dad slid a bowl of thawing bananas towards me to mash. “They just need a chance to become banana bread.”

His hardworking, calloused hands became soft and tender as he let the crumbled sugar, butter, and cinnamon mixture fall through his fingers over the batter.

***

When my dad sent me off to college, he gave me his banana bread recipe on a 5x7 index card. In return, I promised to attend every class (since he made sure to let me know how many of his hard-earned dollars it took for each one). It's a recipe of simple ingredients—bananas, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, cinnamon. I made his banana bread for every brunch I shared with my roommates and while procrastinating studying for midterms. When we graduated, they all asked for the recipe, and a decade later, it's still known as “Karen’s Dad’s Banana Bread.”

At twenty-two, on my first post-grad adventure, I took that tattered index card when I moved to North Africa. I could only muster a few simple phrases in Arabic, but a week after moving I was already homesick. I folded the card carefully in my wallet and trekked down the hill to the neighborhood bazaar. I knew I could find everything I needed at the local souk in Morocco.

“Arbae baydat afak,” I mustered up my best broken Arabic for the grandmotherly shopkeeper. She waved to a child behind the counter who gently opened a cardboard crate and loosely placed four eggs in a plastic bag. I’d never seen eggs stored outside of a refrigerator before. I hoped they would work the same.

“Shokran bizef,” I said, thankful she did not roll her eyes at this nervous American. I scanned the crowded aisles for sugar, flour, the indispensable bananas and with help from a kind teenager who spoke a little English, found them.

I zig-zagged back through the bustling aisles of the market, scurrying between chicken carcasses dripping from butcher cases and around three-foot-tall bags of deep orange spices I couldn’t name. I flagged down a taxi, scooted into the backseat and cradled my grocery bag on my lap for the bumpy ride back to my apartment.

I set the ingredients on the counter, hoping there was a bread pan in my new kitchen. I crouched down to open the cabinet next to the washing machine, a glaring sign I wasn’t in America anymore. I found a bread pan, a mixing bowl, and a wooden spoon and started mashing the bananas. They were a firm bright yellow, but they would suffice. When it came out of the oven ninety minutes later, I marveled at the trademark crack across the middle, perfectly crisp streusel topping, and—somehow—knew my dad was smiling.

For the next four months, my coworkers came to love this bread just as much as my college roommates had. I couldn’t wait to make banana bread for my first Christmas overseas. When I ate banana bread, home didn’t feel so far away.

***

On New Year’s Day, I received an iMessage from my dad: “I went to the doctor. I think you should consider coming home. I need you to help your mom take care of a few things.” I froze at the rest of the message, specifically the words lung cancer and instinctively knew it was serious. My stoic father would never ask me to come home if it wasn’t. Forty-eight hours later, I was on a transatlantic flight from North Africa to California. I left behind my job, my new boyfriend, and the recipe card. For the next two months, I lived out of my suitcase while forced to learn the meaning of Power of Attorney, Do Not Resuscitate, and hospice.

Three months after diagnosis my dad died on a rented hospital bed in the living room of my childhood home. I sobbed as I watched the hospice nurse wheel his lifeless body through the kitchen—past the pantry where we kept the sugar, the refrigerator that housed the butter, and the orange cupboards full of mixing bowls. That kitchen held eighteen years of my best memories with my dad. That cold day in March was the worst one.

***

I got married the following December and in February, my husband Brad and I crammed our wedding gifts into a tiny U-Haul and moved from California to Colorado. We took our newlywed budget to a small Goodwill hoping to finish furnishing our first apartment. During one of those shopping trips, I gravitated towards a familiar sight on display at the back of the store: a red and white checkered Better Homes cookbook. I remembered it from my childhood, permanently perched between the coffee maker and butcher block in my dad’s orange and black kitchen. I made a beeline to the display, forgetting the new couch I was supposed to be shopping for. I grabbed it and fanned briefly through the index, thinking I might find a fun recipe to impress my new husband.

One title immediately stood out, and I flipped to page sixty-eight: Streusel-Topped Banana Bread. I read the streusel ingredients first: flour, sugar, ½ teaspoon of cinnamon, butter cut into pieces. Could it be?

I kept reading: 1 ¼ cups sugar, softened butter, 2 large eggs, 1 ½ cups mashed very ripe bananas. Dad’s recipe.

I closed the cookbook, took my $2.99 up to the counter and walked away with a little piece of my dad and a sudden craving for banana bread. I went home and though I had the new-to-me cookbook, I mixed everything from memory with ingredients already stocked in my pantry. I cried as the streusel topping fell through my fingers around the diamond on my newly-jeweled left hand.

***

I’ve made a handful of my dad’s recipes over the years. Some, like his pumpkin cheesecake with the handwritten note at the top, I have yet to try. Those are the hardest for me to recreate, his handwriting a stark reminder of the man who once stood tall in the kitchen. I’d rather remember him like the man in the portrait wearing OSU apparel and a soft smile. But these recipes, Dad’s food, they are the part of him that endures. It's what my kids get from him when they don’t get a grandpa to do a puzzle with on Christmas or get a milkshake from after an unexpected surgery. We didn’t have my dad’s sage advice on how to stay safe when the world went into quarantine. But we had his recipes.

While everyone was learning to bake sourdough during the pandemic, it was my dad’s banana bread that brought stability to our chaos. When every news story brought an additional safety precaution, a new death toll, a new uncertainty, I opened the freezer to see my stash of frozen bananas. We ate banana bread the day after I was laid off, on the day my kids didn’t return to their classrooms, and on the morning they did six months later.

Most days I lived paralyzed by fear, scared that some invisible particles would rob me of a future with my children, the same way I feel robbed of my adult life without my father. He would have worn his mask while constantly grumbling about its inconvenience. He would have bemoaned having to social distance from his grandkids. He wouldn’t have gotten on the sourdough bandwagon. It would have been banana bread or bust for him.

***

Last year, on one of summer’s final days, I pulled three browned bananas from the freezer and containers of flour and sugar from the pantry. I grabbed the eggs from the fridge, grateful for this ritual that was once again grounding me. The newly post-pandemic world still felt like it held more unknowns than certainties, but I knew my dad’s banana bread would hold me steady here. I was confident the cathartic mashing of the bananas would continue to be my safe place. I mixed the ingredients from memory and smiled for a moment, thankful for my dad, for something predictable, for this recipe that has carried me my whole life.

I let the streusel topping fall through my fingers, still stained with paint from an early morning craft time, over the thick, golden batter.

“Is it ready yet?” I hear my four-year-old ask.

“Not quite, buddy. You gotta wait for the timer.”

Suddenly I am my dad, standing in the kitchen waiting for bread to bake with a child underfoot salivating with anticipation.

An hour later, with steam rising from freshly cut slices, my four-year-old was the first to the table. I watched while he and his brothers shoved fistfuls of hot, chewy banana bread in their mouths, Dad’s portrait above them, while I nibbled mine over the kitchen sink.

I hope I get to send my boys off to college, and I hope I get to play with their children at Christmas. But when I’m gone and all that’s left of me are portraits, recipes, and memories, I hope they remember me the same way I’m learning to remember my dad.

And I hope they remember to always keep overripe bananas in the freezer, too.

Guest essay written by Karen Miller. Karen is a California native and former overseas missionary. She now calls Colorado home where she lives with her superhero husband and three boys in a house filled with LEGOS and strong coffee. She is a friend of Jesus, and loves her boys, sunflowers, and dirty chai tea lattes. She's rarely without a notebook, multiple pens, or a story about finding the goodness of God in her everyday life. You can find more of her writing on Instagram and her Substack, Home Among the Stories.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.