Writing Through Cancer

It’s at dinnertime the stories come, abruptly,

as they sit down to food predictable as ritual.

Pink lady peas, tomatoes red as fat hearts

sliced thin on a plate, cornbread hot, yellow

clay made edible. The aunts hand the dishes

and tell of people who’ve shadowed them, pesky

terrors, ageing reflections that peer back

in the glass when they stand to wash up at the sink.

(“At Deep Midnight,” by Minnie Bruce Pratt. In Walking Back Up Depot Street, 1999) –

“We all have food stories,” said Marcus Samuelson, chef and owner of New York’s Aquavit, in an 2009 NPR Thanksgiving day broadcast.  “So much of cooking is where you want to go in memory,” he remarked, adding that he was baking his mother’s apple cake for his Thanksgiving dinner.

It’s true, isn’t it?  Whether you’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving or Hanukkah next week, families and friends will gather together to share in meals; traditional foods will be prepared; stories will be told.  This year, although we’ll be celebrating with four other friends, I’ll prepare two traditional dishes to contribute to the meal, both from recipes I’ve used since I was young and newly married. One, a candied yams recipe from my mother (although I now reduce the brown sugar substantially), and the other, a broccoli soufflé, following instructions on a worn and stained 3 x 5 notecard, copied from my mother-in-law’s recipe, her little tips on preparation noted in parentheses.

Take some flour. Oh, I don’t know, 

like two-three cups, and you cut

in the butter… 

You cut up some apples. Not those

stupid sweet ones. Apples for the cake, 

they have to have some bite, you know? 

A little sour in the sweet, like love. 

You slice them into little moons.

No, no! Like half or crescent

moons. You aren’t listening. 

 (“My Mother Gives Me Her Recipe” by Marge Piercy.  In:  Colors Passing Through Us, 2003)

Missing from our Thanksgiving will be my daughters and their children—they each live in different countries—my parents, who died several years ago, and the forty or fifty relatives who once gathered together for Thanksgiving dinners all the years of my youth.  I still remember the crispness and color of those Northern Californian autumns, games of softball and touch football outdoors before the meal, the smell of roasting turkey in the kitchen and finally, the tables laden with food.  There were cousins’ tables, defined by age, and the adult table.  I remember how thrilled I was to “graduate” to the adult table when I began high school, for there I heard the family stories, told and re-told each year by my father and his brothers.  Even though I still feel a sense of longing for those Thanksgivings of the past, the stories linger, carried in memory and ignited by the comfort of the food and tradition that marked those family celebrations.

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on…

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women…

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks…

(“Perhaps the World Ends Here,” by Joy Harjo, In:  The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, 1994)

Holiday celebrations, the food and traditions that accompany them, are rich in memories and in story.  What are some of yours?  Whether you are celebrating Thanksgiving or Hanukkah, it is also a time for all of us to give thanks.  I wish you a very happy, storied holiday.