What's Revealed In A Grandmother's Handwriting?

The envelope that arrived in the mail was slim.

My sister's note paper-clipped to the Xeroxed pages read, "Get your apron on!  Happy cooking...."

The faded handwriting setting out the recipes was unmistakable: Baci's.

Baci was our maternal grandmother.  She told stories and secrets abut her life that defied belief.  And yet she stuck to them until she was no longer around to repeat what her life had been about from the time she set sail away from war-torn Poland under the name of her dead infant brother to come to this country to work as a butcher, a hair dresser, and a light bulb packer for Westinghouse, among other jobs, that helped send her only child - our mother - to college.

This much I know is true: she could cook. There on the pages splayed out on my kitchen counter were the foods of my childhood: Christmas Nut Snow Balls; Cream Puffs; Poppeyseed Rolls; Meat Balls; batter for frying chicken in Crisco; Hamen Tashen; Golabki; Kluski; and more.  All I have to do is close my eyes and there she is standing in the Rahway, New Jersey train station clutching a cardboard box tied up with string, inside layers of waxed paper preserving something she baked in one of the many tiny walk-up apartments she lived in.  Baci was in her element behind a stove, sweaty hair pushed up over her brow, an apron double-tied around her waist.

Food feeds our body.  Stories feed our soul.  Both feed our imagination.  I've always said that the best way to world peace is to host a great big block party where everyone brings a dish to share and tells everyone gathered there something about it.  At times like that we find we have more in common with each other than not.

It's time for me to get my apron on.

Comments

[Michele]

Reading this in the parking lot before an appointment...brought tears to my eyes. Thanks for sharing.