ArcaMax

I was lucky enough to be born at the intersection of three great pancake traditions. My mother made the American pancake from a box mix called Bisquick, which can also be used to make biscuits and dumplings. My mother made dumplings when she made beef stew. She did not make biscuits. She was not an airy, fluffy cook. She was a stodgy, starchy cook, with the darkness of the Great Depression always lingering in the cupboards of her well-stocked mid-century kitchen.

My French-Canadian grandmother made skinny Frech crepes (very thin pancakes). She served them hot out of a cast-iron skillet that was one of maybe six pots and pans she owned. She put them on my plate already buttered, and then stood over me with a hard block of maple sugar and a metal grater, shaving maple sugar onto the crepes. The sugar melted on contact, the way sweetness always does when it touches warmth.

My other grandmother, my mother's mother, cooked the food of old Yankee New England, where she'd been raised, wife to a man whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. She made johnnycakes (thin, gritty pancakes made of white corn meal) served with butter and maple syrup. Books written by smart people say johnnycakes go back to the 1600s, longer if you count the Native American version, which my grandmother did not.

The American pancake still lives in diners and terrible chain breakfast places where the food looks delicious in the commercials but has no flavor when eaten. Some diners still do a pretty good job, though, and Bisquick is still around.

Coming up on America's 250th birthday, the jonnycake is vanishing fast, joining the three-cornered hat and the musket in a big pile of historical junk. I live in Rhode Island, and there's one place to buy johnnycakes in a 30-mile radius. It's a breakfast/lunch place, and if you go in the morning, the dining room is full of people with white hair eating johnnycakes.

When the older French-Canadian people died off in my part of New England, the crepe went away. You sometimes see crepes in fancy French restaurants that have nothing to do with being French-Canadian, and if the crepes aren't stuffed with squid and served as an entree, they're stuffed with kiwi fruit and mango and served as a punishment for wasting your money.

Unless you die very young, your world dies before you do, and you're left living in a strange country with different food, different customs and a new, terrifying version of the language you grew up speaking.

And you and your wife drive past an empty storefront in your hometown and your wife says, "Remember Michael's Shoe Store? I loved that store."

And this is your life.

And yeah, I drank from the garden hose. And yeah, I rode in the back of a pickup truck. I won some trophies when I was young, and none of them were "participation trophies." And my pop whacked me sometimes. I can write in cursive. I can do basic math with a piece of paper and a pen. I can tell time by looking at a clock with hands on it, and I know what "quarter of" means.

None of that made me a better person.

My grandmother who made the crepes had 14 pregnancies to raise six children. She lost two sets of twins. They were born premature and died at home because people were tough back then and they drank from the garden hose.

Some people vote for the candidate who says they will bring the garden hose back, and an all-white suburb of Kansas City in 1973 when the police were damned careful about who they let drive through town at night.

And others will vote for the candidate who says they'll make sure that illiterate breeding machines like my crepes-making grandmother don't have doctors when they're pregnant. Let 'em keep their knees together.

The only two things anyone knows about the past is that it's not coming back and it wasn't as good or bad as you remember.

Don't vote for the past. It's gone.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.