Food, Family and Memory

From the time I was in nursery school until I graduated from high school, I never spent a summer in my home state of Michigan. Most summers we went to Maine, but for three summers, we headed not to the rocky, Atlantic coast, but across that ocean to Europe. The middle summer when I was fifteen, we explored England, Italy and France deeply and passionately. My mother, possibly the best trip planner ever to draw breath, spent nearly a year before the trip selecting the perfect bed & breakfasts,  auberges and pensiones for us.

The things we wanted to see were an odd mixture of The Things One Sees in Europe (The Coliseum, The Louvre) and things my father wanted to see (the famous “Black Madonna” of Urbino). A consummate networker long before the days of the internet, my mother communicated her charm and enthusiasm via weightless, pale blue aerogrammes that appeared in the mailbox all year, one memorably addressed to “La Famiglia Graham;” by the time we boarded the plane for Frankfort in June, deposits were made, and an assortment of feather beds, duvets and hand-embroidered pillow cases awaited our travel weary bodies.

We fell hard for Florence, so hard that my mother cancelled our reservations in Venice and booked an extra week. Our “insider” guide was a colleague of my father’s, an Italian professor named Bob (and a “real” Italian), the leader of a group of Michigan State University students studying  in Florence for the summer session. Bob had rented a villa at the top of an impossibly steep hill lined with Cypress trees to which we ascended one afternoon for bread, cheese, olives, and a plate of salami, soppressata, and prosciutto.

My grandfather Mervin was an inventor. He invented hairclips. To make money as a lad, he got a job sweeping up hair in a beauty parlor. Soon he noticed a need for clips. Clips that held the hair in place while the barber cut, clips that put waves in the hair, and doohickeys that crimped and flattened. He had patents on all these. Some were profitable, like the Jiffy, the Teeny, and others weren’t. But I guess the successful ones more than made up for the duds because he did pretty well for himself.

In the 1940s, his factory was at 173-177 Lafayette Street in Manhattan. Later he moved it to Orlando, Florida, though, when the workers tried to organize. In my family, we never liked unions much.

Many years ago, more than 30, there was a little boy who loved apples. On sunny autumn days, he and his mom would each put on a warm, cozy sweatshirt. They would get in the car and take a short drive to their favorite apple orchard.

The sweet fragrance of fresh apples would meet their noses as soon as they walked into the barn. The big red apple barn at the orchard always felt cool inside. On each visit, the little boy and his mom would taste each of the varieties of apples. They already knew which was their favorite apple. But the little boy would watch as his mom carefully cut a slice from each of the apples so they could have a taste. Some were sweet, some were tart, some were soft and some were firm.

The blonde little blue-eyed boy and his mom always chose the same kind of apple. Red and juicy. Crunchy and tart. Firm, not soft. As they wound their way to the place in the barn where they would pay for their small basket of apples, the little boy would stop at the freezer case. He loved the frozen apple cider sticks and he knew his mom did, too. He would stand on the tips of his toes, stretch his arm and try to reach down to pick up two of the frozen sticks of cider. But, he couldn't reach them. So, his mom would scoop him up in her arms and hold him just close enough so that his little hands could grasp the chilly bars of frozen cider.

Christopher Low

When I was younger my brother and I were constantly fighting. One day, my mother decided to ban swearing. We were at a loss. We stared at each other across the dining room table with enough venom to take out a tiger, but we had no words. I have no idea how it started, but we began to call each other the names of the foods around the kitchen.

"You're such a Quaker, Oatmeal." "You're a can of tuna fish that isn't even dolphin safe." "You're a carton of milk." "You're a half empty bottle of soy sauce. We threw these terms at each other every morning over breakfast and every night over dinner, somehow making the terms more and more apropos to our specific fight.

"You're Tropicana orange juice, some pulp." "You're sour cream." "You're such an apple." "You're a nectarine." "Yea, well, you're a banana." It went on for days.