Food, Family and Memory

I read “Look Homeward, Angel” by Thomas Wolfe the summer I worked as a busboy in a Catskill Hotel. His hero Eugene Gant was a lover of the morning meal but I had to help serve it.

Getting up at six in the morning for the breakfast shift was hell made worse by sharing a room with medical student waiters who were all too willing to roll you out of your bunk and drag you into a cold shower. If you were lucky enough to escape you took a ‘waiter’s bath’: generous helpings of Old Spice; like French nobility at Versailles we stunk under a layer of perfume.

Breakfast in the Catskills was bountiful. If the hotel was kosher it combined the menu of a Second Avenue dairy restaurant with the display case of a King’s Highway Brooklyn bakery. Juices, fruits, sour cream, cottage pot and farmer cheese, blintzes, all manner of eggs, cereals hot and cold, lox, herring in cream or wine sauce, smoked whitefish, cod and kippers. Fresh baked onion rolls, poppy seed rolls, caraway crescents, fruit Danishes, coffee cakes, and last night’s left over strudel.  If the hotel wasn’t Kosher – and the one I worked in wasn’t – then there was the gift of the forbidden animal; bacon and ham.

So what's the first thing to order in the Florida Keys, after the mojito and conch fritters? Key lime pie, of course. So we did.  We ordered a slice just about everywhere we ate, and the hands-down best came not from a fancy waterfront restaurant or anywhere on Duval Street, but from the Key West Key Lime Pie Co.

We went to the store on Big Pine Key at mile marker 30, next to Pizza Works in the scenic Winn-Dixie plaza. The company sells pies out of about twenty other locations.

I had one hell of a shower for my first born.  Numerous gifts were given.  I had been to my fair share of showers, both for weddings and babies, and now I wanted a big, fancy one of my own.  Kimme had the best house, so she threw it for me with my other BFF, Kimberly.  Robin made the unforgettable-to-this-day desserts.

Two of the gifts were what seemed at the time like simple, not-too-much-thought-put-into-it gestures.  A white stuffed bear.  And a brown stuffed bear.

By the time Oliver was only a few months old, he clung to those two bears — they had become his best friends, his security bears.   Before the age of one, he would never leave the house without white and brown bear.

I was hired for a small part in a small movie, on location in Texas.  I would be gone a week.  Oliver, white bear, brown bear and I boarded a plane.  I hired some random local girl to watch my baby while I worked on set.  Things went well and I hired her for the following day too.  But when I came back to the hotel, brown bear was missing.  We went into panic mode, though the teenaged girl seemed way relaxed.  I grilled her.  “Where were you when you last saw brown bear?”  She did seem to recall something about the pool area.  It was now evening, dark already and we all went down to comb the pool area.  No brown bear.  As we were about to give up, I looked into the trash and there he was looking very forlorn, ready to take a trip to the local dump.  He would never have been seen again had I not peeked into the trash can.  What a relief.  Separation anxiety averted.

The first time my sister cooked for me, we were both in our 20s and living together in my 500 square foot studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was the day I had quit my job working in book publicity and had decided to go back to freelance film production work. My sister, Alexandra, having just finished up her first transfer semester at the Fashion Institute of Technology, wanted to make us a home-cooked meal to celebrate our big life changes. She was already cooking by the time I arrived at our apartment that evening. I smelled pasta boiling and lots of lemon and basil. I started over towards the blender to take a sniff, but she shooed me away. “It’s almost done. Go and sit down.”