Just tonight, as I embarked on filling my gaping god hole
with a marvelous concoction I’ve created and lately often indulged in that
combines mashed potatoes, peas and chicken in a sort of shepherd’s pie filling,
I thought of her and her selfless love giving in the guise of food.
This woman loved to make me food, in that old-world
immigrant way that somehow seems a lost ghost our kids could never know or
imagine. She lived in Manhattan on the Lower East Side and used to come up to
Connecticut quite a lot for weekends. And she’d cook and cook. Saturday
mornings I remember especially well, when she’d make an enormous pot of these
simple potatoes that cooked for hours and tasted like nothing better than you
could imagine. And she’d make mashed
potatoes and stuffed cabbage and meatballs and potatoes. (God, everything had
potatoes in it.) And chicken soup and pancakes and pot roast and chicken with
little potatoes all around it …
But it wasn’t just the awesome quality of this simple fare.
It was the way in which she offered
it. I lived with her in my late teens in the city, and I would come back to the
apartment at one in the morning in a state of wasted gracelessness, trying to
sneak in softly so she wouldn’t hear. But she always heard and would come out tut-tutting, would share her
scolding comments, and then ask if I’d eaten. Then she’d literally prepare a
salad, a fresh fried steak, French fries, and a bowl of frozen peas with those
fabulous little pearl onions, and I’d sit like a dope in the living room and
with squinting eyes watch Channel 9 Up All Night—this is back when there were
less than 10 channels—and stuff my gob with this grand wealth of culinary love
(or culinary enabling, depending on how cynical you’re feeling as you read
this) …
When she died a couple years later, she left me with a
quantum of guilt, for I recognized the extent of her selfless caretaking and
love, and I knew I had never repaid it, or even perhaps never could have repaid
it. That sucks when you’re like me and sometimes juggle the precarious
self-esteem of Charlie Brown.
And so it goes, as my friend Linda Ellerbee always said. (At
least I think she was my friend,
though I never got a thank you for all that toffee I sent her.) Anyway, it goes
… so …
But again today, as I scrambled to get the chicken parmegian
made for my daughter’s dinner, and yesterday, when I made my son’s refried bean
after-school snack, or this evening, when I was cooking the chicken for their
lunches, or this morning, when I made their breakfasts, it got me to thinking
about my grandmother …
And yes, one of the thoughts centered on how great it would
be having her here so I could sleep in. But that was a passing thought,
because—even though it qualifies as work, and I sometimes don’t have all the
motivation I can muster—I really love doing it. It’s an honor, really, and a privilege to have
them want me to make Glop (the recipe for which I provided in a recent Blah-ugh! posting), or to make a spaghetti sauce, or to bake something, or
“that sandwich” I make … or the potatoes!
You get the idea …
And so we pay it forward, year after year, a collection of clueless clowns bumping our heads again the well wall of humanity's clouded stupidity, trying to find something that makes sense ... and it's the food. It was always the food ...
