With a fax machine, you see, he could stillwrite letters —by hand, if it were simply a note; otherwise on a manual typewriter—and then actuallysend them. He probably felt guilty enough having surrendered to the ease of faxing—like giving up the woodstove for a gas range, when everyone else had long ago turned to the microwave. He was resolutely wedded to the physicality of things—and he lived a life that allowed him to savor that corporality in full. For this and many other reasons, he inspired first awe and then affection; Matt and I will miss him sorely.
LAST GLEANING
LAST GLEANING
The time for such apples is the last of October and the first of November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still perhaps as beautiful as ever.
— Henry David Thoreau,Wild Apples
It is an evening in October. I’m back in Maine, right now walking down the road from the site where my parents have long planned to build a new house. My mother has already been landscaping there for several years, and along with the rose bushes, flowering shrubs, and flower beds she has also put in a small vegetable garden. A light frost has been forecast for the night, and I have volunteered to go cover the tomato plants with a tarp.
The house—the nineteenth-century Maine farmhouse they live in now—is at the top of a small rise. The drive loops up to it and back down to exit a dozen or so yards away. Tonight, instead of heading up the part closest to me, I cut across the patch of lawn between, passing among the crab apple trees, laden with ripe fruit. On the morning of my departure, I will pick a sackful of these, to bring home for making one of our favorite jellies. This crab apple picking has become an annual tradition for my parents as well as for Matt and me, but tonight I’m on another errand. I’m headed toward the field on the far side of the house, where a small orchard, restored by my father, bears Wolf River apples, an antique variety that is most notable for its large size. These apples, above all else he has grown here, are my father’s pride and joy.
The sun has set, but the sky is still that deep, cold blue which rather than casting light on things wraps them in a dreamlike luminosity. By the time I reach the trees, the grass beneath my feet is already lost in shadow, but looking up through the branches I can see the apples, as big as grapefruits, faintly glowing above my head. I reach up and touch them, cool and smooth in the crisp night air, feeling for ones that are firm and whole, not soft or worm-riddled. I pluck three such, tucking each into my jacket as I do, and carry them back to the house.
My father is dying of small-blood-vessel disease of the brain. This is a disease that neither I nor anyone I know has ever heard of, and it has no cure. As the blood vessels started to collapse inside his head, all his faculties began to fail, at first slowly, almost imperceptibly, then at a frighteningly accelerating pitch. When, moving out of Maine in mid-August, Matt and I stopped to say good-bye, it was obvious that something was seriously wrong. But he could still drive a car, walk a few miles, hold a lucid conversation.
A month later he could no longer make it down to the mailbox at the end of the driveway or remember how to write a check. My mother grew frantic with concern, especially since his doctor was incommunicative and vague. Finally, she took my father to a neurologist and changed doctors. By the time everything was made clear, things had gotten so bad that she had had to call the local First Responders, the town’s volunteer ambulance service, several times to lift him off the floor—often in the middle of the night, when he had fallen trying to make his own way to the bathroom. He was too weak to get himself up and far too heavy for my mother to lift.
Now, barely two months since I last saw him, he lies in the town’s single hospital bed (it goes from house to house and last held a young neighbor recuperating from a motorcycle accident), with the side rails raised to keep him in. He still mostly knows who I am and remembers Matt, but he thinks I’m a professor at Amherst College and that Matt and I live on Cape Cod, both of them touchingly understandable confusions. And all but his simplest sentences become hopelessly muddled or—as frustration suffuses his face—fade into silence.
When I enter the house, I come into dark. My mother, whose daily routine has tumbled down around her, has finally found a moment to go upstairs and take a nap. My father is seventy-seven and she seventy-four; she is a remarkably energetic woman, but the strain of caring for him—nurses come only three mornings a week—has pushed her to the edge of her limits.
The absolute mistress of her kitchen, she has never allowed me—or any other family member—to cook there. But on this visit I’m permitted to make our lunches and dinners, an experience both revelatory and eerie. This kitchen has been familiar to me as an eater for almost thirty years; as a cook, I’m a complete stranger to it. I simply do not know what equipment she has or where she keeps what she does have. Dishes that I regularly make in my own kitchen must be reimagined, improvised, here. I even work with a microwave oven for the first time in my life (excellent, it turns out, for making instant couscous).
This night’s cooking challenge, however, is still some time away. I make my way silently through the gloom to the far corner of the living room, once my father’s office and now his sick room, and settle into the chair beside the bed. My father turns his head toward me in the dark. I reach over and switch on the lamp.
“Hi, Dad,” I say.
“Hi, John,” he replies. “Good to see you.” This phrase, now his standard greeting, masks his confusion as to when we might last have met. He regards me with gentle inquisitiveness—his manner now, except when he is trying to escape from bed to “get back home.” His face lights up when I show him the apples.
“I used to grow those,” he whispers. “They’re delicious.”
“You grewthese, ” I answer. “Let’s eat some.”
“Okay,” he says. “Good idea.”
It is a conceit of mine to pare an apple so that the peel falls off in one single coil, but this is too much of a challenge with a Wolf River, especially with my father watching. I peel it strip by strip instead and drop the parings into one of his little plastic drinking cups. Soon I have peeled enough to cut us both a wedge. As I hand him his, he has to adjust once again to a missing part of his anatomy. A few years ago he cut off the tip of his right index finger with a band saw. Now, each time he uses that hand, the little stump is new to him, another of the many inexplicable obstacles that have come to fill his life. But he ultimately gets a grip on his piece of apple and slips it into his mouth. I do the same with mine, savoring the taste, even as I begin peeling and cutting the second round.
My father is right. These apples are delicious, their flavor fresh and tartly bright. It’s their texture that keeps them from being the perfect eating apple; the flesh is spongy rather than dense and crisp. This same quality makes them an excellent pie apple—they hold both their shape and their flavor, while the cooking makes them succulent—and, as it now appears, an easy one for an invalid to eat. We sit there silently for a spell, me peeling and cutting, then the two of us eating, wedge following wedge. When his interest flags, I sit with him some more, just holding his hand. The house is absolutely silent, and the bedside lamp casts the only light. The darkness moves in around us, not ominously but as if tucking us in together for the night.
Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. Their “Favorites” and “None-suches” and “Seek-no-farthers,” when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparably little zest, and have no real tang or smack to them.
— Henry David Thoreau,Wild Apples
My father lies calmly, slightly dozing, his eyes fluttering open and shut. Between the two of us we have managed to eat only a little more than half of one of the Wolf Rivers, but I know that I have made him happy. Indeed, these days it is difficult not to make my father happy; his whole affect is one of disarmingly innocent love. In this regard, he is like the apple we have just eaten, now so soft and sweet, but so g
reen and sour when I first knew him that I could scarcely bear the taste.
He was a hard father, and all I have to do is see a photograph of him in those days to remember this: there isn’t a one in which you don’t either see anger or sense it rippling just below the surface. Merely to catch his attention was to risk a blow, often enough a blowup. The only time I ever felt at ease with him was when the family was watching television. When he and I first started to get along a bit when I was in my teens, that’s exactly what we did: watch old horror movies together late on Friday nights.
Dinnertimes were the worst. The rigor of army life meant that he was usually gone by the time we kids had breakfast, and we had lunch at school. But dinner was dangerous territory—like a picnic that wasalways spread out in a pasture that somewhere harbored a bull, already snorting and pawing the turf. Our childhood appetites made things that much more dangerous—generous portions goaded him, and requests for seconds made him see blood. I still don’t know whether it was hunger or terror that made us keep asking for them; sometimes the psyche finds the strain of fear worse than what is feared itself.
Every Christmas brought an explosion. My mother loves that holiday and all the trappings that go with it; my father inevitably erupted with anger sometime during Christmas Day, often storming out of the house and slamming the door behind him. What none of us knew as children—or, indeed, for many years afterward—was that his parents had died, one after the other, during a single Christmas season when he was still a boy. He was then separated from his brother and sisters and sent to live with relatives who took him only as a Christian duty, which they didn’t for a moment allow him to forget.
His life with them was so miserable that he left them the instant he was old enough to do so and never spoke a word to them again. He enlisted in the army, whose institutional paternalism would give him a sense of security he felt nowhere else. Fighting with distinction during World War II in Africa and Italy, he rose in the ranks from a lowly private to the officer corps; he retired a lieutenant colonel. Even so, he did not become “army” in the sense that many of the fathers of my friends had, dressing their sons in miniature army fatigues and running the household with barracks discipline. His anger was entirely personal.
I was too afraid of my father to hate him; indeed, he had me so frightened that, if he had let me, I would have placated him any way I could. But I was part of the problem, not the solution; we, his children, were a constant rub on a rawness that never healed. The only way we could change that was by growing up; then, slowly, he grew comfortable with us, began to enjoy our company. It took me, at least, much longer to become fond of his.
I remember the first time I felt an intimate bond arise between us. I was in my late twenties, a high school teacher; he was in his late forties, about to retire from the military. We had gone out together to do an errand for my mother in his brand new MGB, a canary-yellow, open-topped British sports car. That he had even bought such a spiffy car had had its effect on me (in fact, I would buy it from him a few years later), because it made me realize that while in one way I knew everything about him, in another I knew hardly anything at all.
In any case, this was the time (around 1970) when McDonald’s franchises had begun springing up in earnest on the East Coast. I had visited only one or two, but I was already enamored of their fries, which, aficionados will remember, were then deep-fried in beef suet. This is the perfect potato-frying medium, and McDonald’s fries, especially if you could get them straight from the fryer, were the stuff of legend. My father and I happened to pass by one of their locations, and I was inspired to suggest that we stop to sample some.
To my delighted astonishment, he immediately complied, whipping the MGB straight into the parking lot. I went in and bought us two large servings, and we sat and ate them together in the car. It was the happiest eating experience I had ever had with my father, but for a very long time it never occurred to me to wonder why.
To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labelled, “To be eaten in the wind.”
— Henry David Thoreau,Wild Apples
It wasn’t until my parents moved to Maine that my father really began to mellow. With the farmhouse came a large tract of land. This he came to love more than anything else in his life besides my mother, his constant companion and only real friend, and he loved it entirely for itself. Once you got up the hill from the house and the fields around it, the land became boggy where it wasn’t rocky, the soil thin and acid. It was useless except for some modest lumbering potential, but my father treated it as if he had bought a stand of sugar maples or prime bottom land beside the Penobscot River.
Soon there was an ambitious vegetable garden, an asparagus patch, a henhouse, a dew pond, a flock of sheep. He had someone come in to mow the meadow for his winter hay, but he himself loaded the bales onto the trailer he hauled behind his tractor and piled them up inside his new barn. He drove the same tractor up into the woods to haul back the logs he had felled and trimmed, then proceeded to cut them into lengths and split them into the firewood that would heat the house all winter.
I visited my parents in Maine, but not often. When I did come to visit, much of what I encountered I simply couldn’t understand. Both my parents had been yearning to put down roots, and when they moved to Maine they did, quite strong ones. Not only were they attached to their old farmhouse and the land it sat on but to the town of Searsmont as well. They got to know their neighbors, joined in local events, became active in town politics—my father was for years the town’s first selectman, my mother serving on, among others, the school board, the town planning commission, and the local Democratic committee.
All this was alien to me. Unlike them, I had grown up an army brat, moving somewhere new every few years, my roots floating in hydroponic solution. As an adult, it’s only during those rare times when I happen onto an army base that I feel, and then with great ambivalence, that burst of recognition—half pang, half joy—that one feels before a long-relinquished childhood home.
Then I, too, moved to Maine. My mother was happy to have me close, but my father was thrilled: he saw first me, then Matt and me both, as potential converts to the same complete devotion he felt toward Maine for the life it let him live. When we drove over to visit he would load us up with packages of frozen lamb, cartons of eggs, bags of apples, boxes of tomatoes. After a nudge or two, we could also get him to give us some asparagus. His bed never produced enough to satisfy him, let alone to share with others. But he did with us.
Above all, he loved to talk about Maine itself and to advise me on how to live there. He taught me how to season our firewood, insulate our cottage with bags of raked-up leaves, nurse our tomatoes through Maine’s erratic growing season, and find the right local bean for our bean pot.
He also came to my rescue several times when my ten-year-old Honda Civic, a car never meant for long-distance heavy-winter driving, began a series of periodic and eventually terminal cold-weather collapses. One dark and lowering night, he drove through snow showers all the way to Augusta to get me, without complaint.
We didn’t become friends exactly—our lives were too different for that—but we were finally finding a way to become father and son. I started to notice—and then, more slowly, to accept—how much I was like him. I had his sense of humor, his dislike of ceremony, and, alas, more than a little of his easy irritability. I, too, started tasks with an enthusiasm that always seemed to falter about three-quarters through. However, there was one similarity that, once I learned it, I couldn’t keep out of my mind. My father and I were not only overweight but, although I was three inches taller, thesame weight, sometimes to the pound.
Indeed, as observation, once alerted, made crystal clear, my father was, like I was, a secret eater. For each of us, food eaten unobserved provided a pleasure s
o distinct from public eating that it might as well have been an entirely different act. To the outsider, that pleasure may seem to come from eating in excess—which, when no one is watching, is easy enough to do. In truth, though, it is the reverse: eating in private is so pleasurable, so charged with feelings of release, that once you get started it can be very hard to stop.
The problem with secret eating is not so much overeating asdouble eating—finding yourself compelled to have the same meal twice. This, in the right circumstances, can be done simultaneously (“Let me go refill that platter”), but usually the secret meal is eaten either before the others come to table or later, after everyone has left it—say, when doing the dishes (my father’s job).
On family occasions, as we sat talking in the den, my father would float off to the dining room, where my mother had just set out the smoked salmon appetizer. He would eat some, come back, then steal back and eat some more, before the rest of us, caught up in the conversation, even realized it was there. At other times, I would come into the kitchen, where he was carving the ham or the roast beef, and catch him slipping the trimmings not into the garbage—as my mother thought he was doing—but, as I also do in that situation, into his mouth.
This recognition, although never acknowledged, was mutual. We secret eaters know each other, and when we eat together, by tacit mutual decision, we keep the secrecy intact. In the summer of 1992, I asked my father if he would take some photographs of Duffy’s Restaurant for me, in return for which I would buy him lunch. As it turned out, it poured rain all day, but we did it anyway—and the photo went on the cover of the next issue of my food letter.
I forget what I had for lunch, but I can clearly recall what my father ordered: a grilled cheese sandwich with a side of fries. The sandwich, grilled to a crunchy, buttery brown, was made of two thick slices of their home-baked bread; the fries were crisp and golden and so numerous that they spilled off his plate. “This isgreat !” he said, looking as if he had just been wafted off to heaven. Then he lost himself in his plate, just as I did in my own.
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