I Remember Mania ...

October 23, 2013:  It somehow makes perfect sense that I’d have had a grandmother named “Mania,” which was pronounced “Mahn-ya,” but certainly doesn’t look like it. Mania Andrusevich was my mother’s Polish mother, and she’s been on my mind lately in relation to food, parenting and the coming winter …

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 ...