by Ralph Maltese | Jan 29, 2017 | Uncategorized
Power Play
On a late spring day I walked out of my school hefting a folder filled with eighty essays that had to be graded. As I walked to the faculty parking lot, I was joined by Matilda, a senior in one of my English classes. Matilda was not fond of reading Huxley or Dickens or Shakespeare, but she was pleasant and quiet….one of those students who silently glides through the system on good behavior and a modicum of effort. We acknowledged each other’s presence as we entered the faculty lot. Students were not allowed to park their cars here, but parents often found it easier to pick up their children in the smaller faculty parking lot than try to negotiate the perpetual traffic jam that plagued the student parking lot.
I was almost to my car when a rust splotched pale blue Chevy pulled up. The driver, a woman in her late forties, looked up at me. Matilda walked over and, in typical adolescent awkwardness, tried to perform the formalities. “Mom, this is my teacher, my English teacher, Mr. Maltese…..this is my mom.”
I nodded, smiled, and, I believe, even bowed slightly. I watched as Matilda’s mom put out her cigarette in the car’s stuffed ashtray. “Mrs. Jones,” I acknowledged.
Matilda’s mom rolled down her window even more, and this small gesture demanded some comment, some interjection that would explode the bubble of awkward silence. I did not think…the words just rolled out like a Bronx serpent’s tongue, words prepackaged to fit almost any situation that required gentility. I simply blurted out what time and experience and good manners dictated.
“Mrs. Jones, Matilda is a very nice young lady, [true enough] and I am very happy that she is in my class.” [somewhat true—-I counted on her invisibility and docileness in class so I could deal with her classmates, some of whom wore ankle collars].
What happened next haunts me to this day.
Mrs. Jones put the Chevy in park, struggled to open her door, got out, stood up, and promptly dissolved in tears. Of course, I ran through the possible offences I may have committed and retraced my words. What had I said or done wrong?!
When Mrs. Jones finally regained control, she looked up at me, her eyes still swimming. Matilda stood silently next to her.
“Mr. Maltese, I have five children go through this school district, five kids, and this is the first time a teacher has said anything good about one of my kids.”
In all fairness to my colleagues, all my fellow teachers in the schools attended by Mrs. Jones’ children, the Jones’ family, save Matilda, was not unknown to the high school disciplinarian or the local police.
Still, Mrs. Jones, continued to cry and put her arm around Matilda, hugging her with pride. Matilda started to cry. Then I started to cry. I know not why except maybe it was the right thing to do at the time.
Here is the level 1 lesson I learned at that Matilda moment. Teachers have enormous power. I learned to use that power as a motivational tool in the classroom. To me, grades were ONLY motivators. I might give a very good essay a “B” to encourage the owner to expand his skills into other areas, and I might give an “A” to a decent essay to encourage the novice to keep writing. As a teacher, I never knew the difference between an essay graded a 94 and one graded a 95. I guess my evaluative skills were not honed. More importantly I learned how and when to dispense praise.
I am not referring to gratuitous praise. I am referencing the power to restore a person’s self-image by an encouraging word. I am also certain I abused that power—or, to state more accurately, not used that power when I should have. My only defense is that it takes a few years to become a teacher and to realize the tools at your disposal.
Here is the level 2 lesson I learned in that Matilda moment. As everyday human beings we all have the power to enrich other lives, just by simply recognizing the truth. Praising a cashier for efficiently packaging our groceries, to thanking our physician’s receptionist for scheduling an early appointment, to recognizing a mailman’s willingness to go the extra mile—-all are testimonies to the power we have to make someone’s day.
Here is the level 3 lesson I learned at that Matilda moment. Collectively we “mere” everyday beings have enormous power to change the world. I believe it was noted zoologist Jane Goodall who said something like “imagine if every single human being believed that he or she was important—that every action he or she took was significant….that the drop of water each person saved was important, that the rolled up gum wrapper that we did NOT throw out the car window was important, that the ounce of air we did NOT pollute was important…..what a different world it would be.”
The few power brokers who believe they are in charge only have the power we release to them. They take great pains to make us believe that we are powerless, that only they are the avenues to greatness and change. They are wrong. Search for and embrace the power that you already have, and flex those muscles accordingly. A kind word might dissolve a mother in tears, but it will also bring her joy, pride, and hope for her child’s future. Such is real power.
by Ralph Maltese | Jan 22, 2017 | Uncategorized
Remote Choices
My dad was an electrician, a very good one. As he mastered the intricacies of alternating and direct current, he developed certain beliefs that he held with an almost religious conviction. One of these strongly held tenets postulated that it was sinful to pay over $150 for a black and white television when a good electrician can restore a slightly damaged device for peanuts. Growing up I watched Texaco Star Theater and Howdy Doody on a variety of television sets in various states of repair. I might be listening to a show using the Cenfonix set (voice, no picture) while watching the same show on the Admiral (picture, no voice). While neighbors enjoyed watching the Philco Television Playhouse or Ramar of the Jungle on their color RCA televisions (the hedonists!), I turned the dial on the Philco or Teletone set and struggled to bring into focus Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (the fifties version of American Idol). Sometimes this involved attaching a wire to the antenna and stretching it out the window of our apartment in the Bronx, often adding one of my mother’s gravy pans to the terminus to get an adequate picture.
All of my children, and their spouses, were raised in an entirely different video culture. When six, my daughter Christie asked me, “Did you have cable when you were a kid?” It is difficult to explain to an on-demand society that we actually had to wait for those exact moments when entertainment was delivered. If we missed Gillette’s Calvacade of Sports, well, the experience was lost to the ages. I once tried to explain this mindset to one of my classes. “Imagine Mozart is your favorite musician. The only time you could hear his music in the late 1700’s was if you went to a live concert. The rest of the time you were music-less.” I paused for effect. Finally a female voice from the back of the room chimed in, apparently expressing what most of her classmates were thinking. “They must have been stupid back then.”
Modern television watching has its own hiccoughs. When I got home from the hospital, normalcy, some form of it, was the prime directive. What better return to the familiar than the resumption of a tv series we had been following before my hospital stay? We settled on continuing Narcos, the drama about the Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar. How is the warfare between Pablo’s minions and the gang of Los Pepes going? So we fire up the Hudson River Popstick, click on Narcos (somehow it remembers the last episode we watched) and sit back to watch the Machiavellian machinations. Five minutes go by. They are speaking Spanish….naturally, they are in Columbia. But the last time we watched they provided subtitles in English. Not this time.
There is about ten minutes of very important exposition between the sexy female correspondent and Pablo, none of which Polley or I are understanding. This is serious, my return to normalcy hitting an unexpected roadbump. I search the Hudson River Popstick to find a button that will turn on captions.
Oops. Not this button which returns me to the Hudson River Popstick main menu. I have to work my way through several menus to choose Narcos again, only this time it brings me to the first season which we already saw. We are somewhere in the second season…..we try episode five. Ooops. Ten minutes in, with no English subtitles, we discover we have already viewed this episode. We try episode six. Five minutes in we recognize the gunfight in the hotel. Ooops. I press the home button again. Back to the main menu. There is an array of viewing choices on my screen. Prime Television, Prime Movies, Netflix, Hudson River Original Showings, Hulu, Starz…..I suffer a brain freeze. What was Narcos on? Oh yeah, Hudson River Original Showings. Work my way down through the nested menu to second season, episode seven. This looks right. Music cued in, credits, snapshots of dollar bills and cocaine bundles. Then a conversation between Pablo and Quica. They are planning a big operation, but Polley and I have no idea what they are planning. We regret not taking Spanish in high school. My studies of Pascal and Montaigne and Rabelais in their original tongue, I find relatively useless now. So is Polley’s study of German. I find a button that takes me to “subtitles.” There is suddenly hope. I press the subtitles button, and I am given more choices. “Captions Off,” (which they are), English subtitles, French subtitles, German subtitles, and I think there was an option for Serbo-Croatian subtitles, but I am not certain.
I click on “Captions Off,” hoping to toggle the “Captions On” feature. Nope. Still just Spanish. Quica and Pablo stuff revolvers in the back of their pants and walk out to meet destiny…or they are going out for ice cream. We have no idea. We are lost. Back to subtitles menu, “Captions Off” is still on, scroll down and click on English subtitles. Nope, the president of Columbia is conducting a high level strategy meeting in his native tongue, and I am trying to read lips which is rather stupid since I know no Spanish. I inadvertently press the “Back” button which brings me to the main nested menu. Twenty minutes later I am back on episode seven of Narcos, second season. Nothing I press under subtitles gives me the English captions I so desperately need. I scroll down some more and find an option, “English subtitles with description.” I click on that option.
My entire viewing experience is changed. I now have subtitles for Spanish and English plus a woman in a steady, pleasant voice describing what I am seeing.
Woman’s Voice Over:“Pablo and Verencia meet and shake hands. They sit down, Verencia first.”
Woman’s Voice Over: “Pablo—‘How have you been?’”
Woman’s Voice Over: “Verencia—‘I am worried about you.’”
Woman’s Voice Over: “Verencia stands up. She is wearing a sexy tight knee high skirt with a matching maroon jacket. ‘I cannot stay long. What message do you want me to give your wife Tata?’”
Woman’s Voice Over:”The scene switches to the two American DEA agents.”
Woman’s Voice Over: “Murphy and Pena are seated at their office desk. [I see that] Murphy—‘We are closing in on Pablo.’”
Woman’s Voice Over: “Pena—-‘Only a matter of time.’ “ [I find myself reading the subtitles even though I am fairly proficient in understanding English.]
This description feature rather spoils one. Worse, I am becoming addicted to it. I envision myself watching an old Law and Order episode.
Woman’s Voice Over: “Green—-‘Lennie, the victim is a twenty year old shop lifter.’
Lennie bends down over the blanketed corpse. He is wearing a frayed sport jacket and a tie with a mustard stain from a half-eaten Sabrett’s hot dog. He lifts a corner of the blanket and studies the girl’s face. ‘Well, she won’t be doing any heavy lifting soon.’”
Do I really need this option? Telling me what I am seeing? Polley and I return the next night to watch episode 8. I twist and fondle the Hudson River Popstick, trying to summon the courage to try once again to turn off the description and just have subtitles for the dialogue in Spanish. Twenty minutes later I surrender. The Woman’s Voice Over continues to describe what I am already seeing.
I admit that my ability to choose what I wish to watch has improved dramatically since my childhood when I tried to dial in Kukla, Fran and Ollie on one of my father’s restorative projects. I have more choices, but having more choices means more decisions to master. I also have to master control of the three remotes perched on my end table, each of which is governed by its own internal logic, each of which has to be turned on in a certain sequence, and each of which requires an investment of time to master.
Woman’s Voice Over: “Ralph typing last sentence of blog, moves mouse to save document and close program. ‘I think I will go downstairs, turn on the tv, and try to find reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation.’”
by Ralph Maltese | Jan 16, 2017 | Uncategorized
Hour of the Wolf
As Polley, my guest blogger, wrote last week, I was in the hospital for a serious condition(my gratitude to her for writing a superb blog—-okay, I am prejudiced). Every night I went to sleep around 11 PM and awoke at 1 AM and stayed awake. I spent some of the dark hours reading my history book or watching dubbed movies about the collapse of ancient Rome featuring scantily clad young women who could not make it in commercials for laxatives and buff young men whose prime acting ruse was to look perpetually puzzled, or watching reruns of Chopped. But I spent most of my time thinking. Herewith some of those late hour thoughts:
As a philosopher observed, we go about the everyday mundane things in life because if we constantly spent time considering the profound and metaphysical we would go crazy. In the wee hours of the morning, what director Ingmar Bergman referred to as “the hour of the wolf,” there is plenty of thinking about the meaning of existence, my personal role, if any, in the scheme of things, and, thus, ample time to reflect and go crazy. I mean, if you cannot contemplate such things when you are on the brink, when do you contemplate them? So I considered and I thought and I summoned up everything I have ever read or studied or experienced and came up empty. Still it filled the time.
Which leads to another thought. 2:04 AM. Six hours to breakfast. Let’s see. How to make the time go faster. I relive my camping and fishing experiences with my father, fondly recall my courting of Polley in graduate school, smile broadly at remembrances of Christmas mornings as our children descended the stairs to see what Santa brought. I summon up the Bronx and my not-so-pleasant elementary school experiences, then flip through almost four decades of teaching high school English. I am almost exhausted from running through my rolodex of memories, and I look at the wall clock to see how much time has expired. 2:06 AM.
Which leads to another thought. A moaning patient down the hall keeps on crying out, “Angela!!!…..Angela!!!!!…..Angela!!!!!!” I know the nursing staff is in control—beautifully so—-but I am tempted to struggle out of bed and walk to the woman’s room and pretend I am Angela…anything to help her calm down. I like to consider mini-universes. Like most people when I drive past a hospital, I simply see a lifeless building of concrete and mortar, but inside the hospital is a hive of human activity operating according to its own organic rhythms and heartbeats. It possesses its own sense of time and purpose and protocol….especially protocol. I imagine other institutions are like that. I know schools are. Einstein was right when he replied to a question, “What is time?” His reply, “Time is whatever clock says it is.” I knew I had to adjust to the hospital clock. Daytime hospital is a sequence of routines so routine that I learned to listen to the distinctive sounds of the hospital carts—blood sugar cart sounded sleek and stealthy, vital signs cart clangy and clumsy, breakfast cart creaky and heavy on the linoleum. The people and the machines enter and leave the room on schedule. What seems like hundreds of doctors in various stages of becoming doctors, from gray haired institutions to medical students, visit me daily to ask questions and apply their stethoscopes to my body. There are other visits: nurses, nurse’s aides, the newspaper guy, the housekeeper, the trash emptier, the volunteers, the food bringers. The hospital day is filled with activity. My mind depends on and anticipates the routine. But hospital night is something else.
Hospital night is bereft of all the daytime visitors save for a nurse and nurse’s assistant. The darkness of night blankets the window and unable to get to sleep, I think. The IV in one arm, tubes sticking out of my neck, the only possible position is to lie down facing the ceiling which is not as interesting at 2 AM as one might think. I shimmy down some so that my gaze takes in the top half of the far wall. I believe I am the most boring man in the world…having spent the last three days observing my room’s ceiling…I have nothing to offer…then, again, compared to the seriousness of my medical condition, the blustering and bellowing of the world, especially its “leaders,” seem pretty trivial to me. And then those hour of the wolf thoughts come creeping into my mind. The nerve-gnawing thinking comes like a ground-hugging fog in the late hours, along the floor of the room and up through the bed and into my soul. Existence, non-existence, fulfillment, unfulfillment, ego and non-ego, every haunting question that has tormented every human being since the first of us realized his or her mortality. Dawn seems a long way off.
Which leads to another thought. How amazing is technology?! The book I am reading on the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair recalls the agony of many adults over toothaches. Some even die from dental infections. How far have we come since then? Several times a day someone comes into my room to check my vital signs. A cuff is place on my arm. Blood pressure checked. A device wipes my forehead. Temperature taken. A clip is placed on my forefinger. Oxygen level checked. A pin prick, a drop of blood placed in a handheld device, and blood sugar measured. Then there is the dialysis machine which filters my blood and removes unnecessary fluid. How do all these devices know what to do? I know I will suffer the human weakness of taking all this stuff for granted, but in the hour of the wolf I marvel at the technology. However, science has its limits. I gave my students this analogy: “Science gives us a temporary model of how the universe operates as best it can. The humanities tells us how to operate in that universe.” The important questions of meaning and responsibility are not addressed by science. That is not its domain. Such truths are revealed to us obliquely, through the arts.
Which leads to another thought. Upon admission to the hospital the staff works fast to find out why my levels of bad stuff in my kidneys are high. There could be several reasons, some of them not very good at all. There is this moment of knowing and not knowing, of certainty and non-certainty that is interesting. I remember a story about a Japanese war lord who sends his eldest son into battle to determine the fate of his kingdom. After a time a soldier returns to the war lord carrying a box. In the box is one of two things: the head of the rival war lord or the head of his son. At that one moment, before opening the box, two possibilities exist. The war lord waits. As long as he does not open the box, there is hope.
While awaiting the diagnosis I shared the war lord’s feelings. Yes, knowledge is power, but, sometimes, in uncertainty, there is hope. I hung onto the uncertainty. When the news came that my condition was serious but reversible, I was relieved, even happy, but the anxiety takes a toll, and I will never be the same person in totality again. Maybe that is a good thing.
Which leads to another thought. One does not go to a hospital to rest. There is no rest. One goes to a modern hospital to get well, and the getting well part requires energy and effort, not to mention patience. A patient must be patient. See? So I struggle to get out of bed, take a walking tour of my floor, IV drip in tow, to get those muscles going. I’ll rest and recover my sleep when I get home. Most of all, I try to summon the energy to not be a victim.
Which leads to another thought. This experience reinforces what I have already learned. In this age of specialization you have to be your own health care advocate. Ask your doctor how this newest drug will affect your system. Every single prescribed pill you put into your body may potentially affect your renal or liver system or cardiac system or all of them. Remember the commercials for various drugs—-“Ask your doctor if Xocoytin is right for you. The potential side effects include abdominal pain, vomiting, drop in blood pressure, paralysis, diabetes, suicidal tendencies, and possible death.” This should scare the hell out of us. You must be the overseer of your own health. Ask, ask, ask!!!
Last night, in my bed at home, I slept through the night, dreaming past the hour of the wolf. No calls for Angela. Enough thoughts. Time for some serious thoughtlessness—-how about them Cowboys!!??
by Ralph Maltese | Jan 8, 2017 | Uncategorized
GUEST BLOG ENTRY January 8, 2017
Another Whack-A-Mole
Ralph has generously yielded this space to me since he has been a bit indisposed this week…to say the least. A sudden pesky little bout of kidney failure has him sitting in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of his neck, wiggling to get comfortable around the injection site from his kidney biopsy. The tubes lead to a port for temporary dialysis. And temporary is the word on which we are focusing, just as we latch onto every bit of hope in the words of each doctor who stands at the end of Ralph’s bed: reversal, healing, letting the kidneys rest, you get the idea. Ralph has the supreme challenge of enduring each assault on his body with grace and humor; most of the time he meets that challenge spectacularly. I loved the way he and the guy pushing his gurney, James, alternated lines from The Four Tops, singing their way down the hall toward the surgery where Ralph would have his biopsy. I love the way he scrawled a message on the whiteboard under the heading, TODAY’S GOAL: Olympic gold medal, synchronized swimming. While this revelry is occurring, I am waiting and worrying and thinking about all kinds of things like when I’ll ever take down the Christmas decorations or how long my Blue Apron ingredients will last. But mostly I am thinking about courage, the quiet courage I witness all around me in this surreal world called “the hospital.”
With apologies to one of my favorite holiday movies, courage is all around you. Consider:
The tone of voice of the nurse in the adjoining room as she soothes a frightened woman who is in pain and confused by surroundings so different from her nursing home;
The gentle touch of the nursing assistant who takes Ralph’s blood while chatting lightly about nothing…or everything;
The steady hand of the surgeon as she inserts a needle into delicate kidney tissue to extract a sample;
The pride of the cleaner who scoops up soiled linen and leaves the room spotless so that Ralph returns from dialysis to a neatly made bed and welcoming pillows;
The patience of a busy doctor who cautiously delivers frightening news and then smiles softly, touching my arm because he is able to be more positive in his diagnosis;
The strength of the transport “driver” who uses his powerful muscles to support a shaky Ralph and guide him carefully back to bed;
The blank stare on the face of a woman in a waiting room as she gazes at a television screen and waits and continues to wait;
The pain behind Ralph’s stoic expression as I re-enter the room after a team has just inserted the temporary port in his neck.
Courage and compassion and sheer stubborn determination are everywhere in this hospital. I am in awe, and I am grateful. Ralph has had a traumatic experience, a sudden kidney failure that test results indicate is reversible. With several weeks of dialysis, his kidneys should now begin healing, but we are both humbled as we ponder what could have happened, and what in fact does happen to many brave families every day. So hug somebody and congratulate yourself on your own courage for facing life’s risks one scary day at a time.
by Ralph Maltese | Jan 1, 2017 | Uncategorized
“Mangia!!! C’mon, Eat Something!”
My mother had a saying, “His eyes are bigger than his stomach.” This was directed at people who loaded their plates but left the dish full, a criticism usually aimed at ravenous politicians as well as gluttonous diners. When I mentally return to my boyhood holidays, my nostalgia is often “bigger than my stomach.” Or so I think. When I become objective again, I realize that Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Day and any other celebratory event at the Maltese household was always accompanied by enough food to satisfy a hungry army on the march.
My mother and her sister, my kind and loving Aunt Marge, would collaborate on planning the table. Today some people complain that guests for dinner are finicky about their diet, and hosts have to take into account what their guests want to eat. “Matilda is a tuber vegetarian, only eats turnips. And Maurice is on a Jurassic diet, only eats swamp weed and dinosaur eggs.” What is new about that? Mom and Aunt Marge….
“So, Marge, for Christmas dinner who makes what?”
“Bobby likes the mushrooms fried in olive oil and garlic. I’ll make that.”
“Should we have lasagna or pasta?”
“Jimmy likes lasagna with ricotta and sausage.”
“And Ray likes pasta, with meatballs and maybe sausage.”
“Right. We’ll make both. I’ll do those dishes.”
And so the planning went. Every sitter at the table would have his or her dish available. Watching Mom and Aunt Marge cook was equivalent to watching an Indy 500 pit team collaborate. “Marge, I need the whattayacallit.” “Okay, Lee, I’ll go down the basement and get it.” Somehow my aunt knew what the whattayacallit was.
My younger brother Jimmy and I would be interrupted in our playing with our new Christmas toys and told to get dressed and help with the cleanup before our relatives arrived for the 2 PM repast. My aunts and uncles and cousins would shake the dusting of snow off their coats and before they sat down my mother would be asking them, “Want something to eat before dinner? Olives, salami, cheese? I can make you a quick sandwich.” Most would refuse, but there were one or two takers. “Maybe a small sandwich, prosciutto…and some provolone? A few pimentos on top? Thanks.”
While the adults chatted about the state of health and relationship difficulties of all relatives and friends not present, I shared my toys with my cousins or we just reenacted Dick Tracy, detective nonpareil, or Davy Crockett at the Alamo. In a short time, the Italian dinner bell sounded. “C’mon, everybody sit down. Time to eat. Mangia! Eat!”
A small digression. When my soon-to-be-engaged-to-me girlfriend Polley came to my house (and our dinner table) for the first time, it was Midwestern Anglo-Saxon face to face with Eastern Italian. She, of course, wanted to make a good impression on my parents. My father started her off with a tumbler of Italian red poured from a jug. My mother then slid a five inch by five inch slab of thick layered lasagna on her plate. Now what Polley did NOT know was that the ten pound hunk of lasagna that filled her up was an Italian hors d’oeuvre. She was shocked to realize that the main meal was still to come. In front of her appeared stuffed roast beef, baked potato, sausage with onions, steamed broccoli drizzled with olive oil, roasted chicken, salad, and, for this special occasion, cannolis and bubba rum pastries. As Polley worked her way through each dish, my father replenished her tumbler with vino red. A short while later I looked at her flushed face as she asked, “I am really sleepy. Mind if I lie down for a few minutes?”
As Polley recovered lying down on our living room couch, I asked my parents what they thought of her. My mother smiled, no words necessary. My father nodded his head, a good sign, then paused, shrugged and said, “But, girl can’t hold her liquor.”
So as the guests sat down at our holiday dinner, they all started off with lasagna or linguini with meatballs and from there they had to make choices: baked chicken with roasted potatoes, roast beef stuffed with garlic and parsley, eggplant parmesan, cauliflower with oregano, ham with scalloped potatoes, mushrooms sautéed in butter and garlic, sausage and onions, minestrone soup with little meatballs, braciole sitting atop rigatoni, mashed potatoes with gravy, sauteed broccoli rabe, all followed by a big bowl of ensalad (Italian dressing—oil and vinegar). And whatever they chose to eat was washed down with Hearty Burgundy. Dishes just kept on coming out. My mother and Aunt Marge who sit down for a total two minutes, are admonishing everyone to “Mangia. Eat. You are skin and bones. Have some more pasta…No? How about more roast beef? No? Sausage and Onions?” We are all yelling back, “Sit down. Eat. We have enough food. Come on. Sit down! You have to eat, too.” This dialogue is the only conversation for the entire two hour meal.
When the serving plates are half empty, the men sit back, unbuckle their belts, and stare at the ceiling. My Uncle Ray tilts his head back until it touches the chair rest. “I ate too much.” My father grips his chair’s armrest and adds, “Me, too. Should have saved some room for dessert.”
Uncle Ray would tease my mother. “Eh, Sister-in-Law, why did you make so much food? Jesus fed thousands of people with five loaves of bread and two fish.” My mother retorted, “Yes, but did everyone have enough? And what! No pasta?” If my mother and Aunt Marge were there, the five thousand faithful would have feasted on a great deal more than a few rolls and a couple of pieces of baccala.
In an hour or so, the snoozers have aroused from their digestive mini-naps, dishes have been put away, leftovers stored in saved empty Polly-O ricotta containers, the table cleared for dessert. Rather, desserts. Once again the tablecloth is hidden by plates now filled with cannolis, babba rum cakes, sfogliatelles, pizzelles and panatone, almond cookies, spumoni ice cream, and zeppoles—-all accompanied by demitasse coffee spiked with anisette. The young ones eat their desserts with White Rock Cream Soda. This is the time for true conversation concerning politics, the state of the world, the local athletic teams, and, most importantly, what dishes should be served at the next holiday event.
After dessert, most guests leave, citing the long ride home to Long Island or the Bronx or middle New Jersey, the trip inhibited by stomachs rubbing the steering wheel and night vision hampered by one cannoli too many.
After dessert cleanup the holiday celebrators have shrunk to my Aunt Marge and Uncle Ray, perhaps their sons Vicky, Artie, and Bobby, and my brother Jimmy and me. Time for a few games of Pokeno!!! When the joy of Pokeno dims, and the winner pockets forty cents, the adults reach into their pockets while the kids break out their stockings filled with pennies. Poker hands are dealt and played. In a few hours the losing player is down 86 cents. Usually it is the winning player, ahead 52 cents, who asks, “Any of that sausage and onions left?” This is the signal for leftovers to be reheated, new dishes made, and the poker table becomes crowded with fried mushrooms, pulpo salad (octopus), sausage and onions, and almond cookies—along with leftover ham, roast beef and chicken.
Not too long after midnight the stomachs of the poker players/diners have drugged their owners into calling it a night so their bodies could spend the next week digesting the food. The leftovers will be consumed over time.
After Polley and I married, a visit to my mother’s ended with her stuffing brown shopping bags with steaks and chickens and roast beefs and “gravy” (pasta sauce) and whatever else she thought we would like. “Mom,” I would protest to no avail, “we have a small refrigerator in the apartment. We can’t fit all that stuff!” The packing of bags continued. At first Polley took this action as a slight, as some lack of confidence in her ability to stock the larder.
What we both learned was a common cultural concept typical of Italian American families but one that other cultures share as well. When I taught The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, one of the major themes I hoped my students would grasp was “The less people have, the more willing they are to share, while the extremely wealthy (the owners of the farms) are less likely to share, to form a bond with humanity.” In my family, food was one of the currencies of love. When my mother created a couple of gallons of fabulous spaghetti sauce, she would sing to it. “Son, it must be made from love…otherwise, it won’t come good.”
When Aunt Marge and my mother planned and cooked a feast, they were not only providing delicious nourishment. They were giving of themselves. As we all sit down at the table this holiday season, it might be wise, and just plain nice, to duly recognize those gifts.
