Miriam Feder

In my early travels I saw people cook smelly things in woks on the street. I would ask “what is it?” “again…please,” a third time… Now I was embarrassed and I still didn’t have a clue what he said. My rule became: if it’s very hot; buy it; bite it; and if you don’t like it—toss it. If it’s good who care what it was? Eat more.

I had endeared myself to my father by being willing to eat anything–pickled herring at one month. Either I didn’t mind smelly things and weird textures, or I had a sunny disposition and strong desire to please. Of course I was delighted when my father shook with a belly laugh.

A picky eater wouldn’t have stood a chance in my house. The worst scorn and judgment would have been flung her way. I carefully carved out the two things I really didn’t want to eat that I thought I could get away with–mushrooms and asparagus. I ate everything else I ran into–even scary calamari tentacles. Surprise! my Mother suspended her own quick judgment and helped me out on the mushrooms—“she’s probably allergic to them anyway.” My Father never accepted these small phobias and made each restatement a small terror. “What— you don’t eat mushrooms?”

Girlfriends who asked my Mother what was for lunch or dinner received powerful disapproval. Linda was known for only eating Juniorette noodles. In anticipation of her lunch visit, my Mother, a non-driver, knocked the tail light off the ’59 Imperial. Look at this old boat on-line if you what to see what a disaster this must have been. Those expensive noodles were the punch-line of many a commentary. Juniorettes referred to Linda’s entire family. She was not invited again.

Food was love. And it occurred by my Mother’s rules, tastes and family history. When I came home from college, grad school, life—anything I might once have liked would be trotted out at every opportunity. I realized my home was one continuous meal.

Mostly I came home to blitzes: generous pillows of slightly sweetened ricotta cheese wrapped skillfully in buttery-fried crepes, topped with sour cream and cinnamon sugar. My Mother hasn’t been able to make a blintz for years. But if food is love, blintzes are an orgy—one that paradoxically demands monogamy. Eating frozen blintzes would be a very tacky affaire.

Many of my friends “discovered” real food in their 20s and 30s. I’ve shunned their studied, foody-ness and recipe servitude. I know that baby boomers—despite their uber-remodeled kitchens and gourmet devotionals— were usually raised on canned vegetables. Well-off families ate frozen, but for some reason fresh eluded most tables in this fertile country of truck farms. Fresh and crisp–rarer still. My college roomies were terrified of the pans full of Velveeta free stir-fried veggies I cooked from produce grown not ten miles away.

Eating is a sensual, earthy experience that supports life. Not an effete substitute for interaction, nor an excuse for obsession. Like most things, when it gets precious it becomes a pain in the ass.

Not that there isn’t something to be learned from a recipe. My scorn is part defense—I’ll admit. I can’t really stick to a recipe. I always have a creative addition, a lazy substitution. Most of my cooking is from the hip. It surprises me how much I absorbed from not paying attention to Mom. Marinate…. Marinate… Repetition would often help these little experiments develop into jewels, but it seems too….repetitive. Make it again? But….this time lets try…

It’s hard to truly incorporate foods and pots I didn’t grow up with. I understand Mom’s defaults. I have tackled eggplants. They seduce me in the grocery store, with their luscious purple gowns, but I know they never wandered into my grandmother’s kitchen. Yes I do Tofu. But unstudied, it drifts away from my thoughts. In the last two years I’ve added tempeh. It’s a good vehicle for sauces.

It’s a precious time, these days. But a table full of food is still the easiest way to show love, generosity and welcome.

What is Chanukah all about? Chanukah, my children, Chanukah is the festival of socks. Each year the great Bubbe comes to the foot of each child’s bed and takes a sniff.

“Och, gotenyu. What a smell. I can tell you need new socks, you little stinker.”

And so, all over the world, at Chanukah, children get socks to replace the old worn out and stinky ones from last Chanukah. So now you know! Now we understand our non-Jewish neighbors, who always like to borrow our traditions and adjust them just a bit, come to hang their stockings by the hearth. Their Great Bubbe goes in drag and has a yen for fireplaces. Do we have fireplaces? No. Who would chop the wood? Who would make the fire? But it’s good for the Goyim. So socks connect us all with a sense of the warmth of the season.

Chocolate, my children, we celebrate Chanukah to appreciate how good the world is when there are eight days in a row of chocolate at our table. We have chocolates to share, to give and most importantly to eat. We even have chocolate to drink-noch. We make chocolate into money and gamble for it with our dreidels. If we are very lucky we get many Gimmels. Gimmels are for great—a great miracle happened here. Of course I’m right—I just won all the chocolate. Ante up so I can spin again before my dreidel cools off.

And why is chocolate so important? It’s the most delicious thing of all. It is rich and warm. It can be wrapped in beautiful paper and please the eye, even the eye of a grumpy Shin spinner. It gives you energy. It’s energy and hope that make you spin again and again and eventually you might get at least a Hay and split the pot. Chocolate makes you sweet on the inside, which makes you sweet on the outside which makes the world sweet.

Nuts kinder, nuts. This is what we want on Chanukah. The earth has given us nuts of the season and we use these to play and play with our dreidel. Nuts of all kinds, with their pretty little wooden homes. Round mahogany homes for filberts, thin crowded pecan shells crammed with sweetness. Stout comfortable walnut shells so that walnuts may play Chanukah games before they serve as Charoseth next Pesach and even dark crinkly homes for Brazil nuts, full of oil, like our beloved lamp.

Oh but you must think I am silly to forget the star of the whole show, quietly waiting in the dark for me to notice—our humble and most-dear Chanukah friend—the potato. The potato gives it’s all for Chanukah, allowing it’s pale flesh to be shredded, and stirred with eggs and onion and ladled into hot grease, flipped on it’s back, splashed with sour cream or applesauce (ok, you can have both) chewed and swallowed and maybe even some day soon, digested. This gentle giant promises all year long, reminding us how much we love Chanukah for the excuse to make latkes, for the better excuse to eat latkes, and for all the oil we can consume with each latke. And this, this little potato, really this is the secret of Chanukah. How the perfectly ordinary, so common among us, shines with greatness in the lights of hope, happiness, family, food and song.

What? You say Chanukah is not the potato, not the nuts, not the chocolate, not the warm snuggly socks? You’ve got to be kidding. Not even the beautiful menorah all bright with her warm candles? Songs—are you sad because I forgot the wonderful Chanukah songs where everyone knows the first two lines and hums the rest slightly out of tune? Is that what you think?

Oh, no. You think it’s us? Me, and the children, and our friends, and the guy I work with, and my neighbor, all gathered around the menorah while I look for the matches, turn down the soup that’s boiling over, flip the latkes one last time and finally make the brocha. You think that’s what Chanukah’s all about? Well, maybe you’re right.

 

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In Big Words I’m exploring some simple words we all know that seem to get bigger and bigger as my understanding and perspective shifts. This reminiscence is about my Father–fortunately a big character in my life.

As I tossed about restlessly, I could almost see him. For an instant, he broke free of that snapshot I carry in my head–the rounded 65-year old body, fixed with the bemused-and-perhaps disapproving look, about to burst into a hearty laugh from his barrel chest, followed by a cough or two and a gasp. I tried to morph his image back into the younger man he must have been when his arms would catch me, racing to his knees.  Daddy traveled so much, he was always like a special guest in the house. But he loved being a Daddy.  You could tell.

He performed the Friday night blessings in a heartfelt tenor that discouraged joining in—although he wanted participation. At 40 he began his athletic career by risking his apple-shaped body on thin blades of steel, braving the too, too cold and the smelly relief of the warming hut, so I would have someone to skate with. It was an invigorating shared misery. He always smelled salty after these adventures.

By the half-in half-out drifts of morning, I did see him, sense him. I called to him, a little fearful, as usual. I felt unsure of the world and afraid of his disapproval most of all.

Sylvan was a little surprised to find what a conventional life he led. He always acted as if he knew different worlds and could have walked through any of them comfortably. He seemed part Sam Spade, part Enrico Caruso.  He idolized FDR and always mistrusted the establishment. People trusted him with their money and family problems and he helped.

He was rocked out of his small town ethnic America by the call to war: a war against fascism; a war against genocide aimed at his own people.  He left the claustrophobia of the old neighborhood and was thrown in with other young men of every stripe, people he never would have met in ordinary times.  He was Father to some, brother to others. He shipped overseas and was taken in by a grateful British housewife. He was commissioned In North Africa to buy supplies in French. He saw death, he knew women. He came home from war a pacifist.

I wish I had the day to day stories. “What did you really DO in the War, Daddy.” But instead I often rolled my eyes and whined “Dad” when the tales would begin their cycle again.

If he had lived longer, would I have gotten to know him better?  Would I sit still for the repetitive stories, ask the probing questions, complete the pictures I stoppedgathering almost 20 years ago?  Or would I be annoyed at his slowness and frailty, at the obstinacy and routines of old men.  Would I have continued to be too rushed by the crush between generations to note the gifts of either one?

When I watched my mother slip into dementia, I would sometimes think “What would HE think about her.” I’d be embarrassed for her as I’d picture him there before us, critical as always. Then I’d remember—who is he to criticize her; he went and died. Where does he get off rolling his bulging eyes, judging her absent mind?

Sometimes I wonder why I had to run so hard away from my parents.  Sometimes I’m in their clutches still…. I’m grateful for their wisdom and for the strange weave that they made in me.

 

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Thanks for a big brown bird, soft and crunchy stuffing, sweet yams, a tart cranberry relish and ample bottles of wine. Thanks for a fresh green salad and don’t mind if I skip the smashed potatoes, rolls and that baked broccoli-cheese traditional. Who would notice?

Thanks for bringing this group together year upon year, through marriages, visiting parents, babies, toddlers, widowed mothers, t’weens, divorces, rearrangements, and— for some time now— only one Grandma left. Maybe sometime we’ll be the grandmas. Will that add to or take away? Yes, well, don’t anyone hold their breath.Thanks for all the spills, the misses, and fine nights of charades.

This is what my Thanksgivings have looked like for most of thirty years. A tight and cozy table at a friend’s house with once-a-year linen and platters upon platters. It must have been a whole year between each one of these food-a-thons, but I’m surprised they add up so high.

Thanks for good fortune in our own lives. We’re fortunate that our sadnesses have been transitory: real but not chronic. Long suffering has stayed distant from this table. Death has come only for the older ones.  We’ve come to know that’s not always the case and so we’ve grown so very grateful.

Our children…they already grew up so fast. Now that we see the rate of spin, we know their lives will fly right by at an increasing rate. We know that the next ten years might have some harsh surprises for them—for us. No rush, no rush—but no slowing it down.

Take a few moments before dessert. Take a basket, choose teams and try to recollect the movies ofthe year, the book titles nobody read and the songs that separate the generations.  Let me hold onto this enormous good and gather in all the smells and tastes, the warmth and the story, the hopes, the disappointments and the familiar smiles. Let me taste them like another course, no matter how full I am. Four and twenty lifetimes baked in a pie. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.

 

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I’m looking for a “special object.” What makes something stand out as special?  My eye floats across my surfaces.  I live in a high-stuff environment, much to the dismay of my inner monk. My objects have objects. There are small delicate family treasures, like crystal, china and stone. Then there are gifts from dear ones or things I’ve collected traveling. Things might be interesting, beautiful, occasionally valuable, inspiring, and maybe even tender. But what object has meaning?

Should it be something I purchased or something that was gifted or handed down? Are items from the past more meaningful or should it be something very now?  There are other variables: breakage; repair; connection; guilt; luxury; resentment.

Maybe it’s something I made myself in a moment of inspiration or creative therapy. Quickly my brain starts it’s muttering: that should have been finished better; see where the glaze pulled away?  I needed to allow more time between processes. The comments remind me I should be more careful, more attentive. I should try it again, learn from my mistakes, become a better craftsman and then I’d have the object free from doubt.

But the next time I’m creating I become distracted in a different direction being brand new yet again. Again—always—I invent as the clay is drying in my hands. Quick.  Yes, it would have been relatively easy to follow the plan and make the dinner predictable and fine, the file complete, the display transforming. How much would it take to melt away the tiny flaws and show mastery? Would that take a different me?

I don’t have the soul of a perfectionist although sometimes have the soul—or perhaps the soul-lessness—of a critic. Sometimes I can be that mind that looks for imperfection behind every trace—the cat who seeks reward for bringing a lifeless bird through the kitchen door for Mistress. Critic wants to protect, but instead she prevents.

“A precious object,” I remind myself. My eye lights on a small stuffed hedgehog.  Some years ago it pulled me into the zoo gift shop, where I quickly surveyed the entire stock. I sorted keenly and bought the very best three, anxious to spread these treasures to my little family.

When I bring my eyes to the little fleck of fabric woodsiness, I smile inside. There’s no weight of regret, criticism, disappointment, death or imperfection. There’s a bit of silliness and anachronism, perhaps, but its cuteness has withstood the test.

But is this THE object?  I think of Morgan and Rhubarb, my worn, over-loved stuffed animals from childhood. They came to my adult home a dozen years ago, tucked away in a family bureau. I rarely take them out of their plastic bag.

Instead, quite convinced, I pick a stone bear fetish from New Mexico. Perhaps I’m cheating—this is an object of obvious power. Or perhaps that’s exactly what I’m looking for. I share the coolness, smoothness, healing and power of the bear. By holding it, by using it, I derive its power. Sitting on the shelf it has none.  It becomes a special object in my hands. Maybe its special-ness is not in my hands alone, but in my hands the tiny stone bear has power.

 

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After the guinea pigs featured in Special Delivery there were more critters–of course.  This is the journey through reptiles and that most unbelievable pet–the rat. Can you imagine inviting rats into your house–ON PURPOSE?

I’ve always loved animals but I’m timid with them. I wrote endless reports on animals in second grade. I learned my eagle-eye parking skills combing the curbside at Lincoln Park Zoo most Saturdays. I knew all the dog breeds. I longed for companionship—but I wheezed. A mynah bird was my heart’s desire.

First in the line of furless pets were goldfish—an unrewarding, often suicidal pet. I would make fish gravestones for the toilet seat. This at least kept my parents entertained. I graduated to turtles. They were much more interesting; they could be carried, raced, and kissed—if no one was supervising.

I had a series of little red-eared turtles, too insignificant to remember. But I had one rather more complex turtle. He was a little bigger and a little more feisty. There was no debating his name—he was born to be Speedy Gonzalez. He usually ran in the right direction and fast.

They told me I’d outgrow the allergies but I didn’t, so my daughter had reptiles too—lizards. Turtles were politically incorrect, by then. The reticulated skink arrived for her 7th birthday. This animal was perpetually terrified. It was hard to catch, let alone hold and play with. When we sat down to the Passover Seder that year and the youngest asked “why is this night different from all other nights” we all knew the answer was because Skinky lost his tail after the visiting family mobbed and grabbed at him. Hours later, after both hunger and the Red Sea were crossed, the lonely tail was still twitching.

We took in a friend’s skinks, which were much bigger and better socialized. They would sit on our heads and whisper in our ears—charming lizard tricks. They also chomped down crickets like t-rex taking on a subdivision. They terrorized our original skink. We bought peace with partition. Eventually, we needed something bigger on the cuddle factor.

Some people just cannot have rats—that naked tail gives them the creeps. That was my husband. But for the rest of us, the rat is the Cadillac of rodent pets. They’re smart. Our rats were never so highly trained as the rat-lady’s rats that we’d visit at the pet store. Those rats would do anything you wanted, after a little belly massage. Who wouldn’t? But rats like to be handled and played with and they are good parents. I for one, had no compunction about selling baby rats to pet stores for snake food.

Typically we’d get rid of the old pair and all but two of the babies. Once, we kept two boys and a girl. I felt obligated to the little gray fellow, after he escaped for two days and collapsed, near death, in the laundry sink. When that little gray rat birthed the second of our litters to arrive in one week— and the same week as every other domestic rat in the metropolitan area birthed—I knew that rat sexing was not my strong suit. The pet stores all turned us down and the population explosion was terrifying for all of us.My daughter had become totally bored by the whole little-animal-thing. It was time to be done with it. At 4:30 one Friday, when the Audubon society said they would take all the rats for their injured raptors, we loaded up the car and got the lead and the rats out. Pet free at last, at least until the killer bunny.

 

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In Print

 

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Ah, once again it’s here–National Ice Cream Month.  Yes, really.  Even in Portland it’s been hot beyond belief and so an homage to one of the truly divine foods. Here are some ice-cream recollections. In Print

You can hear more about my adventures with fresh peach ice cream.   In the meantime, stay cool!

 

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Couldn’t we just take the love and leave the nagging.  In Print

 

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