Until I was sixteen, Thanksgiving was spent at my maternal grandparents’ house in Ashtabula, Ohio. Often prefaced by a blizzard, and by my father worrying about making the five hour drive with 5% visibility and black ice on the Interstate, these holidays really began when we arrived, cold and tired, to find a House Full O’ Jews at 5105 Chestnut Street. We put our bags in our assigned bedrooms (I preferred the front bedroom, with its partially removed, politically incorrect and leering 1940s Cleveland Indian stuck to the mirror), and found our way to the living room, where there was always chopped liver with crackers.
My grandmother’s chopped liver, a miracle never repeated in my lifetime, was smooth, addictive and so delicious that I could completely disregard the fact that it was made largely of chicken livers and rendered chicken fat, along with some egg and onion. If you have never had good chopped liver, I fully understand that you may find the idea repellant, and that you are possibly imagining liver and fried onions, raw liver, or some other equally unredeemable and noxious substance. This was not that; this was intoxicatingly rich, bore no resemblance to liver in its original state, and could have been classified by the DEA as Hungarian Crack. The fact that my brother and I loved it from the time we were small (notwithstanding the fact that we both hated liver) and would have eaten until we foundered, should give you an idea of its universal and supernatural appeal. Now, of course, no one has my grandmother’s recipe and we are all doomed to wander the kosher delis of the universe, trying in vain to get just one more bite of what we can only have in our dreams. (There’s probably a joke in there somewhere, about “wandering jews,” but it’s just too easy).
My
dad lived part-time in Sag Harbor and made the drive from the city
every weekend in every type of weather. I would visit him and my
stepmother every summer, and we’d stay put for the weekend, usually
poolside. My dad and I would swim back and forth and read books and
nap. He would do his Sunday puzzle and I would nudge him for clues; I
would read books he gave me and he would nudge me about which part I
was up to. Because to me, my dad was part Phillip Roth and part John
Updike, I read Phillip Roth and John Updike. Because we both loved to
punctuate the headier reading with murder mysteries, he would toss me
his copies of Lee Child or Lawrence Block, and I would gobble them up
like candy. I still have the water swollen copy of Annie Proulx’s Shipping
News that he accidentally tossed into the water in order to save
me from a hovering bee, and I remember how he had said he envied my
getting to read it for the first time.
My father was a dyed-in-the-shorts Bermudian who loved to feast on all
things from under the sea. Shrimp, crab, oysters, mussels, fish of all
kinds, and lobsters. Five years of serving in the Canadian Army
overseas in Holland and France during World War ll chewing on K rations
in a trench didn’t diminish his early island jones for a crustacean or
almost anything seaworthy and edible.
Wednesday was a special day in my house when I was a child. My father was a pharmacist, my mother stayed home to take care of us. To help make ends meet, he worked a second job on Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons at a local drug store in addition to his usual 9-5 gig at the local hospital. Thirty years ago being a pharmacist didn’t bring in the big bucks it does today and with four kids, he had his hands full. He was never home until long after dinner on Wednesdays and we were always excited for his return, partly because he brought with him our weekly chocolate treat – plain M&Ms.
I once went to the most spectacular Hollywood funeral ever. And the love that poured out was well deserved. We knew her by one name, kind of like Cher or Madonna. Kaye. Do you all know whom I’m talking about? You do if you were lucky enough to grow up in Beverly Hills at that time. It’s Kaye Coleman, beloved Nate ‘n Al’s waitress of 38 years and star of our collective childhoods.