“Can we have dessert?” my four-year-old grandson asks, a conspiratorial half-smile pulling down the right side of his mouth. He knows full well that this is not dessert time, but also knows that spending special time with Mama Dora means tossing all parental restrictions to the wind. Ice cream? Yes! Cookies? Why not! Chocolate? Of course! As far as I’m concerned, a grandparent’s holy responsibility is to spoil the grandchild. The parents’ holy responsibility is to deal with the aftermath—a sugar-filled, hyper child, who’ll climb up walls and spin like a possessed dreidel. So! We will have chocolate, I silently decide, my own mouth watering.
“Two,” he negotiates. “Two what?” I ask, as if I don’t know. “These tiny square, brown things,” he says, without naming chocolate, as if voicing the magic word might summon his parents, heaven forbid. “Ok,” I reply “two.” So we march to the kitchen, arrange the table with china plates and napkins. It’s important to set a good example even, or especially, when chocolate is at stake. I put two chocolates on each of our plates. Help him up the stool and sit next to him.
On December 24th, 1963, Philadelphia was hit with a rip-roaring
blizzard. I’ll never forget it. By evening, the drifts were well past
knee-high. Snowflakes swirled in the halos of streetlights. Driving
anywhere was out of the question. Wrapped up in coats, boots, gloves,
hats and scarves, and loaded down with bags of presents, my girlfriend
Bonnie, my mother and I set out on foot for Aunt Tilda’s house. What would have been a 7-minute drive turned into an hour trek. I
remember laughing so hard we could hardly walk. We knew we were crazy
to be slogging through such a storm, but we were determined to reach
our destination. It was Christmas Eve, and Aunt Tilda had prepared the
traditional Italian Feast of Seven Fishes.
Daddy was everything to us. He was a lot to many and my mother's
whole world. He moved from Los Angeles to a small southern town in
Georgia when he was 16 years old and met my mother shortly after. Mom
was 15 and the rest is history. He left us, very unexpectedly on an
early Spring night. Nothing could have prepared me for it. He was the
pied piper, the epitome of a fine man, the definition of love, all the
reason I turned out to be me. He was kind and gentle, inspired me every
day to see the good in people. He inspired the adventure in me. It's
why I grew up in a small southern town on a cotton and pecan farm and
have seen so much of the world that most folks will never see.
My sister and I have a pretty terrific food store called The Green Spot we have owned or more accurately been the worker bees at for many years., It has an energy all it's own. It’s a gathering place for people to come to when they are happy and it is a place people run to when they need good solid honest advice of the non-food type, if you know what I mean.
It started with cheese and frackers. Between ages three and four I switched out a rented violin for a full junior pro drum kit, and graduated to brie’n’bread in the snack game.