Food, Family and Memory

My dad clumsily peeled the skins off a few garlic cloves and then looked up at me with an expression I didn’t recognize.  He looked like a little boy.

“I’m nervous cooking for you,” he said.

I smiled at the slight power shift from the man whose passion in the kitchen inspired my career– and intimidated the hell out of me.

“Naw, Pop, you’re just using cloves closest to the center of the bulb.  The skins are thinner, especially if they’ve been around a week or two.  I had the same problem the other day in my kitchen.”

He steadied his hands, deftly chopped the garlic and tossed it into the pan of onions and chili flakes sauteing on the stove.  He pulled the can opener from a drawer and opened some DOP San Marzano tomatoes.  He was preparing a simple arrabiatta sauce.

I fished the garlic that I was blanching out of a small pot of boiling water and washed some basil for the pesto.

A sizeable t-bone steak rested in butcher paper on the marble counter, seasoned and coming to temperature before getting tossed on the grill outside.

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.

Relocating to the Toronto suburbs in Canada in the late Forties where seafood restaurants were almost as scarce as mermaid sightings still didn’t discourage his quest for a taste of the ocean. He did his best to pass his glorious seafood cravings on to his children, but as a toddler, I balked at the thought of sliding one of those grey slimy, pulsating mollusks down my tender young throat no matter how much tangy cocktail sauce was dumped on it.  I cringed at the thought of cracking open a giant scarlet claw to scoop the steaming white meat dripping with warm clarified butter and lemon.

I went to bat for my friend Tracy. She wanted the starring role in a movie my dad was producing, but it was really his friend Bob who was the money guy and director. If it were just my dad, it would have been a slam-dunk. So, I went to work on Bob. I pitched him for months, relentlessly. That’s me when I want or need to be – a dog with a bone. “Have you seen Tracy in Christopher Guest’s new movie?” I asked. “She’s brilliant.” Or: “Check out her credits, you’d be lucky to get her.” And: “Bob, let her audition, you won’t be sorry.” Finally, when I had exhausted all other angles, I went for the Boys Club Secret Society as a last try: “Your lead actor has always wanted to fuck her.” Yep, that did it. The part was hers.

We went to Texas and my best friend Tracy had the lead as the girlfriend. And I had one scene, one great scene, as the angry-crazy-ex-wife. (It would be another year before I’d play the role in real life.) And except for the hurricane threatening to shake things up and me freezing my ass off the day I was shooting, it was great fun to be on location with my dad and my close friend. I spent most of my downtime hunting for Galveston’s best fried chicken.

That was the late 80’s. Sometime in the mid-90’s, Tracy called to say she was hired to do some reenactments for the Leeza Gibbons Show and would I like to join her, they need another actress. Me, panicking: “Is that in front of a live audience?”

Ever since joining the club, my diet has changed. Health club? Good God no! Book club, country club, beach club? Wrong again! I am now a card carrying member of the worldwide group of “empty nesters.” The club one is automatically granted membership to once their last or only child leaves the house for college or life elsewhere. No dues, no rules, and absolutely no where to go!

When my husband and I dropped the youngest of our two daughters off at college this past September in London no less, (our eldest went east to upstate NY, but not far enough for our baby, she needed another continent!) there were, of course, tears. I did cry myself to sleep the night after we said goodbye. Exhaustion and jet lag could’ve played into it a bit. We should have planned the trip better. A week to shop for a college room in a foreign city, plus a winter wardrobe (her Southern Cal cutoffs and T-shirts wouldn’t do in London come October) and her own kitchen setup as her dorm had no cafeteria just a communal kitchen on every floor that the 8 residents to a hallway shared, was a race I barely won.

Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom, as I learned with the first college drop, sets it up so well. The last few weeks before they leave, the kids are so nervous aka obnoxious, you really can’t wait to kiss them goodbye, put the pedal to the metal and head home. The old gal was on the job this time as well, but London is so far away from Los Angeles and this was my baby! Even though she had me running in and out of every frigging vintage shop in London for the winter coat that didn’t exist, and up and down the escalator at the largest Tesco ever created until I begged for an oxygen tank, (“Excuse me Sir, would you happen to have an inhaler I could borrow?”) I fell to pieces after we left her. So much for the year of living dangerously. Senior year when I didn’t know who to kill, her or me...or my husband, for if I hadn’t married him to begin with...