TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 118

[Tobie Shapiro]

January 12 200000000007


Dear Folks,

	Today is the great grandchild's birthday. 
He is one.  My mother waited and waited for one 
of her grandchildren to sprout offspring, and one 
finally did.  This makes me a grand aunt.  For 
all of you who yawn at talk like this:  I know 
how you feel.  You are just starting out.  The 
idea that the next generation, your children 
could have children is just not feasible.  When 
it happens, you will be infused with a new sense 
of youth.  My mother is going up to Seattle today 
to be there for Lumen's first birthday party.  I 
get to drive her to the airport.

	You may have wondered what sort of a name 
Lumen is.  A Lumen is a measurement of light. 
His parents know what they're doing.  I like the 
name.  Probably, people will call him Louie. 
It's just the way things go.



 
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You will know them by their marshmallows

	Harry taught me how to cook Chinese.  He 
also taught me how to eat Chinese.  There was a 
restaurant we frequented in Oakland Chinatown 
called the Lun Kee.  It was very plain to look at 
it, and the inside, like so many good Chinese 
restaurants, was low on decor, but the kitchen 
turned out the real stuff.  We would open the 
menu to the front and look at the page that was 
tacked into the cover, all in Chinese characters. 
That would be the daily offering for two, three, 
four, five, six people.  The dishes would be what 
you never get in the honky menu.  There would be 
bitter melon, dried shrimp, salted fish with 
steamed pork, a daily soup which would be a thin 
broth with some variety of leafy vegetable or 
winter melon in it.  There would be organ meat, 
and steamed fish steaks with sauce.  The first 
time I tried bitter melon, my throat wouldn't 
swallow it.  My body must have read it as 
non-edible.  I hated it.  But I was determined to 
learn to like it.  So I ate more.  The second 
time I tried it, it was passable and I tolerated 
it well.  By the fourth time, I couldn't get 
enough of it.

	I always had an adventurous spirit about 
food.  I was frightened of nothing.  I suppose I 
drew the line at recognizable insects.  There was 
a certain pride in being able to say, "I really 
liked that fish face with chicken fingernails!" 
When all others were grimacing and backing off 
from the food, I would be digging in with my fork 
or chopsticks.

	My grandmother used to love to tell a 
story about me when I was six or seven years old. 
My grandparents were visiting Silver Spring from 
San Francisco.  It was the afternoon, time for a 
snack.  Tobie was hungry.

	"What do you want to eat?" my grandma 
asked.  I opened the refrigerator and foraged, 
then brought out a little bowl of coleslaw.

	"I want coleslaw," I said.

	"Coleslaw!?"  Grama was surprised. 
Vegetables as a snack must have sounded unusual 
to her, especially for a child to request.

	"Yes.  Coleslaw.  It's delicious.  It's 
full of vitamins, and it's goooooood for me!"

	She would draw out the words and take 
delight in the story.  So so did I.

	When I first went away to school in 
Seattle, I couldn't cook a pot of water.  That 
semester of cooking in the eighth grade just 
didn't prepare me for a hot plate in a rooming 
house.  I'd call my mother and ask her how she 
cooked the string beans, the tripe, the breast of 
lamb, the noodles and cottage cheese.  Then I'd 
go out to the store and find the ingredients, 
come back and attempt to replicate the tastes and 
smells I grew up with.  The other roomers were 
not pleased with the aroma of simmering tripe, 
and had a legitimate complaint that it took a few 
hours to cook on the little one burner hot plate, 
which we all had to share.  I called up my mother 
nearly daily, trying to get the hang of cooking. 
How did she make the parsnips?  I went to the 
grocery store for parsnips, came back and cooked 
them to the letter of the instructions as issued 
by my mother, but it came out all wrong.  The 
texture was wrong.  The taste was bitter.  It 
took me a while to figure out that I'd bought 
daikon radishes, not parsnips.

	But I got good at hot plate cooking, and 
offered to cook dinner for a friend who had his 
own apartment.  Breast of lamb with barbecue 
sauce.  A very fatty dish, one that you wouldn't 
find promoted now.  But back then, fat was fine. 
Fat was what kept you warm in winter.  I was very 
good at cutting the meat into one bone strips, 
and I was good at the sauce, but I fell down in 
the hardware department.  I put the ribs under 
the broiler in a pan with a Bakelite handle.  And 
the heat broke the handle off.  There were always 
mistakes like that in any new endeavor, but with 
cooking, you had to eat the mistakes, and there 
were little shavings of Bakelite in the lamb. 
Not a good garnish.

	By the time I got married to Dweller, I 
had called my mother enough and was beginning to 
brave new endeavors myself, like inching out to 
the edge of a long branch, swaying in a strong 
wind.   I never went to recipe books.  Everything 
was done in estimations and grand sweeps of the 
arm.  I became a good cook, could throw together 
all kinds of spices and herbs to get a flavour 
particular to my own likes.  Dweller loved my 
cooking, and we invited people over for dinner. 
I would cook well more than enough food.  Enough 
to choke a horse, if truth be known.  And this 
inability to judge quantity has stayed with me 
throughout my life in the kitchen.  I am famous 
for it.  I am, in fact, ridiculed for it.

	The moment of my decision to leave 
Dweller came in a cooking context.  I had made a 
special dinner for him:  lamb chops with 
pomegranate sauce.  I set it before us, and we 
sat down to eat.  He carved into his lamb chop 
and put a fork full in his mouth.  He began to 
chew, but saw that the chop he had cut from was 
rare on the inside.  His eyes bugged out.  He 
said nothing.  He just bent his head over his 
plate, opened his mouth and let the meat fall 
out, splat, onto his dish.

	I looked at this, at the whole scene, at 
the lack of adventure, the lack of sensuality, in 
his make-up.  And there was the half chewed piece 
of lamb in pomegranate sauce, lying dead and 
masticated on his plate.  Something snapped 
inside my head and my heart.  "I want a divorce," 
I said, tears cresting over my eyelids and 
trickling down my cheeks.

	I should have known the first time we 
roasted marshmallows together.  You can tell a 
lot about someone by how they roast their 
marshmallows.  Watch out!  Dweller would hunt for 
the perfectly straight stick.  Then he'd whittle 
the end into a point.  Onto this little spear, 
he'd screw a single marshmallow until the point 
was half way into it.  Then he'd approach the 
fire, aiming the very top of the marshmallow 
toward the flame, but not too near.  Patiently, 
he would wait until there was a brownish skin 
formed on the top of the marshmallow.  Then he'd 
back away from the fire, deftly remove the hot 
surface skin, neatly place it in his mouth and 
eat it.  Then when he'd digested it, he would 
approach the fire again, and brown another skin 
on the top of the marshmallow.  He would repeat 
this series of steps until the whole confection 
had been consumed.

	Here is how I roasted my marshmallows. 
I'd find a stick that was long enough so I 
wouldn't burn myself.  I'd take two marshmallows 
and impale them on the stick.  Then I'd thrust 
the whole thing directly into the blaze until the 
marshmallows had burst into flames.  I'd let it 
burn in an incendiary celebration until both 
marshmallows were forged together and reduced to 
a blackened mass of bubbled carbon.  Then I'd eat 
it, even if it was too hot.

	How could these two people spend their lives together?


 
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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net