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.
I sing to my grandsons, one via the wonders of video "Skype-ing," and
the other up close and very personal. I perform the usual stuff mostly: "The Wheels on the Bus," "Old MacDonald,""Itsey-bitsey Spider", and "The Alphabet Song," with everyone's favorite line: "L-M-N-O-P."
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.
In our house, the first smell of Thanksgiving was not turkey roasting or pumpkin pie but the bleach-sweet steam of my mother ironing the good tablecloth. I remember it from a time when I was small enough to creep unnoticed beneath the ironing board while she painstakingly transformed an undistinguished hump of wrinkled linen into a curtain of shimmering white. With a curt flick of her wrist, my mother sprinkled each length with water from a yellow, plastic bottle designed for this purpose, and then the iron would sizzle a path just above my head. Soon I was surrounded by a linen tent. The smell sparkled like hot stars.
Back in the days when evening television was interactive family entertainment, when Ed Sullivan and "College Bowl" were on, my family used to gather in the TV room. In our house, that was the bar. It had a Fleetwood television built into the wall, with the controls built in next to the silk-covered sofa on which my mother would always lie, on her back, her head propped up by four pillows.