Monday, November 29, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
In Their Own Words:
"If only there could be an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like having the moment all over again. "
— Daphne du Maurier, (Rebecca)
— Daphne du Maurier, (Rebecca)
Monday, November 15, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
On the Way Home from School
I should have been home for lunch no later than five minutes past twelve, but I yielded to temptation and made a stop at the Grand Book Center. It was nearly twenty to one when I finally climbed the stairs up to our small apartment. My mother was furious.
"Where were you? What were you doing all this time?" she demanded.
Strictly speaking these were rhetorical questions. I was late home for lunch nearly every day, even when I didn't stop at the Grand Book Center. The walk home from St. Mary’s was no more than five minutes, but I had a tendency to 'dawdle and daydream' as my mother liked to put it.
Actually, what I did do most days was stop in front of the washing machine repair shop in the next block and tap on the glass until Max, the jowly and wrinkly old Bulldog who slept his canine days away behind the greasy display window, finally roused himself onto uncertain legs and wobbled over to slobber the glass on the other side of where my hand was pressed. "Good boy," I'd whisper. Then he'd turn around and make his painful way back to his sleeping spot, shaking and trailing yards of drool behind him, collapsing once more into unconsciousness. Everyone said Max was the ugliest creature they had ever set eyes on, but that was probably because they'd never looked into his eyes. Those were large and brown and sad and beautiful. I loved that old dog. But even on those days I was usually home by twelve-thirty.
“Do you know what time it is?” I looked up meekly at the big clock hanging over the stove.
"And what's in there---" her attention was suddenly arrested by the paper bag pressed tight between my arm and rib cage. This question wasn’t rhetorical.
“Let me have it,” she said.
I handed her the bag and she slid the contents out on the table. Two Green Lantern comic books and one Justice League of America. Two issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. One receipt for .71 cents.
"This is what you waste your money on? Junk that will rot your brain? They're going right in the garbage," she said, but she only slid them back in the bag and tossed them on top of the breadbox. I knew she wouldn't really throw them out. She might yell when she was worked up but she was never mean.
"Wash your hands and sit down."
Lunch today was my favorite: tomato soup and American cheese on toast and Devil Dogs for desert. Which meant she had been looking forward to surprising me. It made me feel rotten---but not for long. I broke off a piece of my cheese sandwich and dipped it in the tomato soup and felt happiness seeping through all the pores of my body. After a while I worked up the nerve to ask, "Do you think you can write me a note for Sister Anne?"
It was one of the rules of St. Mary's: If you were late or had been absent, you needed a note from your mother when you finally showed up. I knew there was no way I would make it back to school by one o'clock today.
"I will not. You can tell Sister exactly why you were late."
"I'll be punished," I told her. "I'll have to stay after class."
"Then maybe you'll learn not to waste time anymore."
"Just this once?"
"Eat your lunch," was all she would say.
But by the time I'd taken my first delicious bite of cream-filled Devil's Food she had scribbled a note and slid it into my shirt pocket. "Give that so Sister," she told me. I was saved.
A few minutes later as I was going out the door at 1:05 she said: "Please see if you can at least get home on time this afternoon. I want to take you to Izzy's. You need some shirts."
"Izzy's" was where we bought the white shirts and blue pants that, along with a blue-knit tie sold only in the Principal's office, made up the St. Mary's School uniform. There was a back room at Izzy's where they stored boxes and boxes of clothes, and it doubled as a dressing room. It had a nice smell of cardboard and camphor, and that's where I always tried on the new pants. For some reason though I always seemed to 'dawdle' and my mother would have to come in back to see what was taking me so long.
"OK," I said.
"No later than three-fifteen. Please."
"I'll be home on time," I assured her.
I meant it, too, when I said it. But I had skipped Max at lunchtime and I was always afraid if I let a whole day go without seeing him he might not be there next time. He was old and nearly crippled and it was probably cruel of me to make him get up and walk across the floor to the window. But I figured if he sat there all day he'd just die. I loved that old dog.
We never made it to Izzy's that afternoon.
Not long ago I read of a study that found that our personalities and our individual tics and traits are set in stone by the age of six or thereabouts:
“We remain recognizably the same person,” Christopher Nave, study author and a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Riverside, writes. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.”
This morning, as I was preparing to leave for work, I picked up a copy of Brambley Hedge and allowed myself to become lost for some minutes in the wonderful world of small mice who live inside of tree trunks.
I was late to the office.
Somehow, I don't think my mother would have been surprised.
"Where were you? What were you doing all this time?" she demanded.
Strictly speaking these were rhetorical questions. I was late home for lunch nearly every day, even when I didn't stop at the Grand Book Center. The walk home from St. Mary’s was no more than five minutes, but I had a tendency to 'dawdle and daydream' as my mother liked to put it.
Actually, what I did do most days was stop in front of the washing machine repair shop in the next block and tap on the glass until Max, the jowly and wrinkly old Bulldog who slept his canine days away behind the greasy display window, finally roused himself onto uncertain legs and wobbled over to slobber the glass on the other side of where my hand was pressed. "Good boy," I'd whisper. Then he'd turn around and make his painful way back to his sleeping spot, shaking and trailing yards of drool behind him, collapsing once more into unconsciousness. Everyone said Max was the ugliest creature they had ever set eyes on, but that was probably because they'd never looked into his eyes. Those were large and brown and sad and beautiful. I loved that old dog. But even on those days I was usually home by twelve-thirty.
“Do you know what time it is?” I looked up meekly at the big clock hanging over the stove.
"And what's in there---" her attention was suddenly arrested by the paper bag pressed tight between my arm and rib cage. This question wasn’t rhetorical.
“Let me have it,” she said.
I handed her the bag and she slid the contents out on the table. Two Green Lantern comic books and one Justice League of America. Two issues of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. One receipt for .71 cents.
"This is what you waste your money on? Junk that will rot your brain? They're going right in the garbage," she said, but she only slid them back in the bag and tossed them on top of the breadbox. I knew she wouldn't really throw them out. She might yell when she was worked up but she was never mean.
"Wash your hands and sit down."
Lunch today was my favorite: tomato soup and American cheese on toast and Devil Dogs for desert. Which meant she had been looking forward to surprising me. It made me feel rotten---but not for long. I broke off a piece of my cheese sandwich and dipped it in the tomato soup and felt happiness seeping through all the pores of my body. After a while I worked up the nerve to ask, "Do you think you can write me a note for Sister Anne?"
It was one of the rules of St. Mary's: If you were late or had been absent, you needed a note from your mother when you finally showed up. I knew there was no way I would make it back to school by one o'clock today.
"I will not. You can tell Sister exactly why you were late."
"I'll be punished," I told her. "I'll have to stay after class."
"Then maybe you'll learn not to waste time anymore."
"Just this once?"
"Eat your lunch," was all she would say.
But by the time I'd taken my first delicious bite of cream-filled Devil's Food she had scribbled a note and slid it into my shirt pocket. "Give that so Sister," she told me. I was saved.
A few minutes later as I was going out the door at 1:05 she said: "Please see if you can at least get home on time this afternoon. I want to take you to Izzy's. You need some shirts."
"Izzy's" was where we bought the white shirts and blue pants that, along with a blue-knit tie sold only in the Principal's office, made up the St. Mary's School uniform. There was a back room at Izzy's where they stored boxes and boxes of clothes, and it doubled as a dressing room. It had a nice smell of cardboard and camphor, and that's where I always tried on the new pants. For some reason though I always seemed to 'dawdle' and my mother would have to come in back to see what was taking me so long.
"OK," I said.
"No later than three-fifteen. Please."
"I'll be home on time," I assured her.
I meant it, too, when I said it. But I had skipped Max at lunchtime and I was always afraid if I let a whole day go without seeing him he might not be there next time. He was old and nearly crippled and it was probably cruel of me to make him get up and walk across the floor to the window. But I figured if he sat there all day he'd just die. I loved that old dog.
We never made it to Izzy's that afternoon.
Not long ago I read of a study that found that our personalities and our individual tics and traits are set in stone by the age of six or thereabouts:
“We remain recognizably the same person,” Christopher Nave, study author and a doctoral candidate at the University of California at Riverside, writes. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.”
This morning, as I was preparing to leave for work, I picked up a copy of Brambley Hedge and allowed myself to become lost for some minutes in the wonderful world of small mice who live inside of tree trunks.
I was late to the office.
Somehow, I don't think my mother would have been surprised.
A Story (sort of) About Soup
My father loved pea soup; he could eat two-three-four bowls in rapid succession on a Saturday night --- provided it had first been boiled to the approximate thermal reading of molten lead.
“Hotter,” was his continual refrain. “It's supposed to burn when it goes down.”
My mother tried to oblige, but somehow the soup was never scalding enough. He would spoon down several mouthfuls then hand the bowl back to her.
“I want it to burn,” he’d tell her, “I want it to feel fire inside my guts.”
So my mother would pour the soup back into to the pot and boil it up again. On and on it went. I was no great fan of pea soup in those days, but I had begun to wonder if maybe the extreme heating process didn't bring about the release of some hitherto unsuspected flavor element that was impossible to resist. One night when my mother placed the soup bowl on the table I grabbed a small tea spoon from the kitchen drawer and skimmed a taste off the top. My howls of agony still echo down the Brooklyn streets to this day.
“Hold this against your tongue,” my mother said, handing me an ice cube from the freezer. My father merely glanced at me and shrugged. Someday when you're a man you will understand, his look seemed to say. Then he went back to his soup. It had been boiled and re-boiled to the point where it could have melted chrome steel, but it still didn't satisfy my father.
“Hotter," he decreed. I don’t know how he did it, except that he chased the soup down with a cold beer, so maybe that helped.
My father wasn’t ordinarily a fussy or demanding man when it came to his food. Normally he ate whatever my mother placed in front of him. Nor was he given to eccentricities of any kind. Weeknights he didn't get home until after seven, long after the rest of us had already had our supper, and he ate fast and alone (and without re-heating instructions) at the kitchen table so he’d have time to relax and watch television. But on a Saturday night with a couple of beers under his belt he grew expansive, and he’d occasionally call for a special dish, super-hot pea soup or maybe a plate of sauerbraten, a German specialty he remembered from his childhood. My mother, being a full-blooded Italian, was naturally aghast at the very idea and concept of sauerbraten. She made it for him all the same, of course, but was determined to shield her children from such gastronomical horrors. So there was laid down a strict law that I could not have so much as a taste of this strange dish until I was over twenty-one and living on my own. Having gotten a look and a whiff of my father’s plate, I was certainly in no hurry for that day to arrive. In fact it wasn’t until a great many years later that I tasted sauerbraten for the first time. On the afternoon following my father’s funeral we took the family to a well-known German restaurant called Niederstein’s, which stood for over one-hundred-and-fifty years on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens, and there I had sauerbraten for the first time in my father’s honor. My mother had some too. It wasn't half bad at that. But on those long ago Saturday nights sauerbraten was strictly off-limits.
As for pea soup, I can take it or leave it, but once when I had it in a restaurant it came out lukewarm and I asked the waiter if he could take it back and heat it up.
"We can't do that," the waiter told me. "If it's too hot, and someone gets burned, they're looking to sue us."
I'm not sure what my father would have made of that, though as far as I know he only ever ate my mother's pea soup. And it was only in later years that I gained any insight into his odd culinary preference.
I had come into the house after midnight. My mother was already in bed but my father was sitting at the kitchen table having a bowl of soup he'd obviously reheated from that night's supper. I could see the steam rising out of the pot on the stove.
"Pop," I asked him. "Why do you eat your soup so hot? Aren't you afraid of burning your throat?"
The question seemed to startle him. "I like it this way," he said.
"It's not good for you too hot," I lectured him. "You can damage your insides that way."
He only shrugged. "But I like it hot."
It went back and forth that way for a while, but eventually he told me a little bit more:
"My mother used to make a big pot of pea soup on a Saturday night," he said. "In the wintertime. It's how we kept warm. There was no oil furnace in those days, just the wood stove. The soup would warm us up at night."
I thought about that for a while. I wasn't sure how much it explained.
Finally I said, "But we have heat now, Pop."
Again he shrugged. "I just like it hot."
That was all a long time ago, and now my mom and dad are both gone, and the rooms we lived in belong to someone else. Even Neiderstein's is no longer there, having closed its doors permanently a few years back, after an unbelievable run of a century and a half.
So we grow older and older, and my father's soup preference is no great matter, just another small mystery in the great warehouse of mysteries we will never solve in our lifetimes.
“Hotter,” was his continual refrain. “It's supposed to burn when it goes down.”
My mother tried to oblige, but somehow the soup was never scalding enough. He would spoon down several mouthfuls then hand the bowl back to her.
“I want it to burn,” he’d tell her, “I want it to feel fire inside my guts.”
So my mother would pour the soup back into to the pot and boil it up again. On and on it went. I was no great fan of pea soup in those days, but I had begun to wonder if maybe the extreme heating process didn't bring about the release of some hitherto unsuspected flavor element that was impossible to resist. One night when my mother placed the soup bowl on the table I grabbed a small tea spoon from the kitchen drawer and skimmed a taste off the top. My howls of agony still echo down the Brooklyn streets to this day.
“Hold this against your tongue,” my mother said, handing me an ice cube from the freezer. My father merely glanced at me and shrugged. Someday when you're a man you will understand, his look seemed to say. Then he went back to his soup. It had been boiled and re-boiled to the point where it could have melted chrome steel, but it still didn't satisfy my father.
“Hotter," he decreed. I don’t know how he did it, except that he chased the soup down with a cold beer, so maybe that helped.
My father wasn’t ordinarily a fussy or demanding man when it came to his food. Normally he ate whatever my mother placed in front of him. Nor was he given to eccentricities of any kind. Weeknights he didn't get home until after seven, long after the rest of us had already had our supper, and he ate fast and alone (and without re-heating instructions) at the kitchen table so he’d have time to relax and watch television. But on a Saturday night with a couple of beers under his belt he grew expansive, and he’d occasionally call for a special dish, super-hot pea soup or maybe a plate of sauerbraten, a German specialty he remembered from his childhood. My mother, being a full-blooded Italian, was naturally aghast at the very idea and concept of sauerbraten. She made it for him all the same, of course, but was determined to shield her children from such gastronomical horrors. So there was laid down a strict law that I could not have so much as a taste of this strange dish until I was over twenty-one and living on my own. Having gotten a look and a whiff of my father’s plate, I was certainly in no hurry for that day to arrive. In fact it wasn’t until a great many years later that I tasted sauerbraten for the first time. On the afternoon following my father’s funeral we took the family to a well-known German restaurant called Niederstein’s, which stood for over one-hundred-and-fifty years on Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village, Queens, and there I had sauerbraten for the first time in my father’s honor. My mother had some too. It wasn't half bad at that. But on those long ago Saturday nights sauerbraten was strictly off-limits.
As for pea soup, I can take it or leave it, but once when I had it in a restaurant it came out lukewarm and I asked the waiter if he could take it back and heat it up.
"We can't do that," the waiter told me. "If it's too hot, and someone gets burned, they're looking to sue us."
I'm not sure what my father would have made of that, though as far as I know he only ever ate my mother's pea soup. And it was only in later years that I gained any insight into his odd culinary preference.
I had come into the house after midnight. My mother was already in bed but my father was sitting at the kitchen table having a bowl of soup he'd obviously reheated from that night's supper. I could see the steam rising out of the pot on the stove.
"Pop," I asked him. "Why do you eat your soup so hot? Aren't you afraid of burning your throat?"
The question seemed to startle him. "I like it this way," he said.
"It's not good for you too hot," I lectured him. "You can damage your insides that way."
He only shrugged. "But I like it hot."
It went back and forth that way for a while, but eventually he told me a little bit more:
"My mother used to make a big pot of pea soup on a Saturday night," he said. "In the wintertime. It's how we kept warm. There was no oil furnace in those days, just the wood stove. The soup would warm us up at night."
I thought about that for a while. I wasn't sure how much it explained.
Finally I said, "But we have heat now, Pop."
Again he shrugged. "I just like it hot."
That was all a long time ago, and now my mom and dad are both gone, and the rooms we lived in belong to someone else. Even Neiderstein's is no longer there, having closed its doors permanently a few years back, after an unbelievable run of a century and a half.
So we grow older and older, and my father's soup preference is no great matter, just another small mystery in the great warehouse of mysteries we will never solve in our lifetimes.
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