Food, Family and Memory

First off, I need to explain going bowling in France was never on my wish list, top or bottom.

My sister and I were invited to a friend’s home in a tiny mountainous town in the Southwest of France. We planned to land in Barcelona to have a little road trip and go exploring before our visit. We planned on two days meandering from Barcelona to St Jean, France. We also wanted to stop in Arenys de Mar, a little town in Spain on the ocean. It’s famous for Paella and we had spent an entire summer there eating it many years ago.

Our flight arrived early. We rent a car and a GPS and we were off! The GPS assured us we would arrive in time for lunch in Arenys de Mar. The weather was sunny and beautiful as our little car clicked off the kilometers. The signs for Arenys de Mar appeared and we both smiled. 30 kilometers…15…and finally 2. Then the unthinkable happened. We hit a bump-a big bump just as my sister was changing the setting on the GPS. It went into Romanian, I think, and there was no getting it back into English. A melt down ensued - how would we ever find our friend’s house in the mountains, hours from here? Suddenly, we were no longer mellow and carefree or hungry for our paella lunch in a town we had so many precious memories of.

I assured my sister somebody will help us - be patient. As we descended into Arenys de Mar the GPS was chattering in a language all it’s own. I noticed a Renault car dealership so I pulled in on two wheels stopping feet from the mechanic’s knees. Let’s just say, he was surprised to see us.

The Help surprised some people that Southern whites could treat their servants with so much inhumanity in the 1960's. I was shocked by a few specific incidents, but not surprised. I saw it close up as a child. Not in Jackson, Miss., where the story is set, but in my hometown of Beverly Hills where the help was almost exclusively 'negro,' before the Black Power Movement and the influx of Hispanic housekeepers and nannies in the late 70's and early 80's.

My overly emotional reaction to the film puzzled me. Good story, great performances, but floods of tears? On the drive home, memory hit and re-opened an old wound that I had hidden away. Of course... ESMUS HEMPHILL, our black maid in the 50's & 60's who was let go when I left for college and who I never thanked enough for all she did or properly protected her against my mother's unconscious cruelty towards her.

My mother, born into working class Memphis in 1925, became politically liberal, but personally she still carried a few racist seeds in her DNA. She would sit at the head of our dining table in Beverly Hills and ring a sterling silver bell to signal to Esmus that it was time to serve.

Before there was IHOP, there was Gwynn’s. 

When I was a kid in suburban Teaneck, New Jersey, it was always a treat to go for Sunday brunch with my family at Gwynn’s on Teaneck Road.  Gwynn’s seemed swanky and grown-up to me.  Outside, it was painted white brick, and inside it was cool and darkish, with comfy booths.  My mother would order her coffee, and the cream came in tiny, glass pitchers with little round cardboard pull-tabs on top.  She only used a drop and then gave me the supreme pleasure of letting me drink the rest of the cream from its miniature jar.  Sometimes, if she had a second cup, I got another taste of the thick, heavenly liquid that would contribute to the need for Lipitor years later.  Compared to my very picky little sister, who ate only cream cheese and jelly, I was “a good eater” with a passion for pancakes, waffles and French toast.

Growing up in an Italian family in Canada, meant doing everything food-related at home. Long before words like “casareccia” (home-made) gave it respectability, we were merely those kids with giant vegetable patches for back yards, whose hundreds of relatives were always coming over to can tomatoes, roast peppers, peel beans, boil fruit, bake biscuits, make cheese, cure salami, press grapes and yes, strangle chickens. Some of those activities have diminished over the past 30 years. Indeed, if any of my generation continue the practice of strangling chickens, they’ll only be doing so as a catharsis. That said, my family continues to produce homemade Italian specialities to this day. I hope that never stops.

One thing we never got into was curing olives. I mean, we love olives. There are stories about every member of my family almost choking on an olive repeatedly in infancy. It didn’t matter which: the waterlogged run-of-the-mill canned ones, the meaty, slightly bitter, crunchy ones a relative smuggled back from Italy in his luggage, the prune-sized black ones that were so oily I’d call the dog over to wipe my hands on....

So given that my family loved olives and was so adept at curing and preserving food, why did we never do olives? A quick poll of the family one night over dinner gave me a unanimous answer to the question: I dunno.