A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  After some thought as I muddle around my kitchen, I decide to substitute the made-from-scratch lemon gelatin with Jell-O. I feel as if I am cheating, in a small way betraying, the sanctity of what is written on the cards, though before I turn in for the night and let the jelly set I shave in some lemon rind and squeeze a little juice into the liquid. I know that during the night the elements will mix and the taste of lemon will prevail over all the other ingredients. In the morning, a day when I am not teaching, the snow is a brilliant white with blue shadows in the yard, and I mix the jelly with the egg whites until they are almost identical to the layer of new fallen snow that drapes from the branches of our pine trees. Before I let it set again, I scoop up a mouthful and stare at the spoon before putting it in my mouth. It is almost snow pudding, but it is missing something, and again, I don’t know what it is.

  One evening my grandfather raised his spoon as he lapped up the snow and told me how he had spent his winter days as a boy. He lived on the lip of the Don Valley. In the winter, there was always a rink on the flats below his home. He and his chums would come home from school, deliver their papers quickly while there was still daylight, and then toboggan down the steep hill with their skates slung over their shoulders. Their mothers, being good and thoughtful souls, would stuff baked potatoes into the toes of the skates. When they donned their skates, their shoes were kept warm by the spuds. On their climb back up the hill, they would take the edge off their appetites — they always worked up good ones in the open air of the rink — and eat the potatoes and toss the skins over their shoulders. As the snow melted and the grass emerged in the late months of winter, the hillside would be littered with the last evidence of the potato shells as they bled back into the earth from which they had come. Spring would emerge green and tender. The colour green makes me think about creamed celery.

  What I love about creamed celery is not merely its texture in the mouth, but what it means to prepare it. I strip the stalks from the bundle and pare the back of each miniature tree of life to remove the strings and tethers that would toughen it and make it worldly. Paring celery always suggests a freeing of the stalks from their own bounds. And as I work my way through the bunch, I realize that I am nearer and nearer to the heart. At the core of a bunch of celery are delicate stems and childlike yellow leaves that are small replicas of the whole celery. The main stalks stand around it, protecting the heart from the chill of the refrigerator, from the bumps and bruises of the world the way families look after their children.

  After cutting the larger stems into bite-sized pieces, I begin the cream sauce. It is called a roux or more commonly a rue. That word haunts me. I want to rue the word itself. A rue in cooking is merely butter and flour, a means to an end, a cornerstone upon which a soup or a sauce is built. It speaks of the pain a person must endure sometimes in order to achieve something finer, the way great things often start with simple foundations. As words go, rue is one of the most ambiguous and ambivalent words. In French it means a street, an avenue, a conduit that will lead somewhere in the same way that every day leads to a different place in time and life. It also means ‘regret’ in English, the haunting presence of the sin of omission, of what was not said to someone as they lay dying, what was not within the comfort zone of a person in an important instant before the moment was lost. I arrived too late at my grandmother’s deathbed to say goodbye. I rue the day I was delayed.

  My grandmother told me a story of Teddy Roosevelt’s visit to town during the First World War. He made his speech in the red stone castle of the old Armoury just weeks before he passed into history. He had argued that the United States needed to be in the war. “We shall rue the day we left our fellow English-speakers in peril.” That was what rue meant to me as a child. Teddy Roosevelt. The obligation to history shared among friends. There it is in the card in her hand. The spelling is hers. She loved to cook and never learned a word of French. Not roux, but rue. Her culinary skills were acquired by watching her mother, and her mother’s skills were learned in Ireland from her mother and grandmother. The simple paste at the base of a cream sauce was an ancient art passed from generation to generation. I wish I had paid more attention to my grandmother when she was cooking.

  To make a roux one must follow the 2-2-1 principle. Two cups of flour, two cups of milk, and one teaspoon of butter. After the celery has boiled to a delicate softness, I set the pot aside. I need to use at least a portion of a cup as a vegetable stock to add to the milk to cut the heaviness of the sauce. I slowly stir the flour into the melting butter in the pot, letting the ingredients thicken as if by magic. Then, I gradually add the celery water and milk to the roux and stir it slowly over low heat until it thickens. I toss in a little salt, a little pepper to ripen the taste, and the drained celery. As I look out the kitchen window, I am again reminded that the food one eats is often a reflection of where one lives. Some would call that a confusion of the senses, a form of synaesthesia. I call it the poetry of life. The white and the soft green are there in the boughs of the trees beside the patio where the chickadees are darting in and out of the barren hydrangea tree. They are hungry but very much alive on a cold day, and I will fill their feeder when I am finished my cooking.

  The meatloaf is next on my agenda. Out of the corner of my eye I see my microwave oven beckoning to me but I know that it is out of bounds if I am to be true to the past. In the cupboard under the countertop, a place where I might have hidden with a cookie tin when I was small, I root around and discover that I still have my grandmother’s meatloaf pan. The sides are undented and square. The meat is cold around my fingers. I knead the bread crumbs with the chopped celery and tomato chili sauce, which is not my grandmother’s famous fruit chili sauce that she laid in bottles in her cellar every harvest but a bottle of local preserve I picked up at an organic farmer’s market. A pain shoots through my hands and reaches into my brain.

  My grandmother had arthritis. She also had an upright piano in her living room, and as she grew older the piano grew more silent. Life perpetually takes away those things that one loves, and though the music stopped as she grew older, the meatloaves did not. She was willing to bear the pain to make this dish. If anything, the meatloaves became more resonant in their taste, more determined to fill an empty stomach on a winter night, and more beautiful in their aroma as time passed. My choir days and the Thursday night meals with my grandparents came to an end when my grandfather passed away. After he left us I felt I should not impose on my grandmother. I was older. I could come and go on the bus with confidence, and instead of joining my grandmother at the table, I left another empty place for my grandmother to face and ate unmemorable burgers with my friends at a local greasy spoon. I also gave up singing. On my last evening in the choir, I stood alone after the other choristers had left, and sang a few bars to the empty church and listened as my voice echoed into silence. I thought of my grandfather who never heard a note I sang because of his deafness. By the next autumn, my voice had changed. When my grandmother passed away, I didn’t have anyone to sing for anymore.

  To love someone is to suffer pain for them, not just to experience joy. I held my daughter aloft to watch the Santa Claus Parade and the ache in my shoulder made me think of my grandmother’s arthritic hands kneading the cold ground meat for the weekly meatloaf I loved. The card with my grandmother’s recipe for her weekly meatloaf has my name written on top of it with a little star beside it and the word ‘favourite.’ As was the case with the other recipes, I made the meatloaf to recreate the choir night meals, but there was something missing in everything. I often asked her what her secret ingredient was — I had heard a commercial on television where someone kidded about having an ancient secret to a dish. Her answer was always the same. “I put love in it for you.” But what does love taste like? Is it less or more salt? Is it the flavour of a person’s hands as they feed the ingredients into a mixing bowl? Is it the patience a person takes with what they do, or the familiarity they possess with a recipe? She k
new what I loved and wanted to give me that love in the patience, honesty, and the even the pain of what she made. I could taste it.

  Meatloaf

  1 lb lean ground beef

  1 ½ of cornflake crumbs

  1 egg beaten

  1 cup chopped celery

  ¼ cup chopped onion or shallots

  Some chopped red pepper

  Bacon strips

  ¼ cup chili sauce

  Salt and pepper to taste.

  Method:

  Grease pan. Top mixture with bacon strips. Bake in 350 over for 45 to 50 mins. Look at it every now and then.

  Serves 4.

  I look at the card and I am puzzled as to who the fourth person is. I know for certain that nothing went to waste at my grandparent’s house. Perhaps they split the extra piece with each other over lunch the next day, a poached egg, and a piece of toast on the plate to keep the meatloaf company. As I grew older and could eat more, I was always offered seconds and never turned them down. There was a hunger inside me that I could not satisfy. That same hunger was what drove me to find the recipe. I wanted to know if the tastes could still sustain me and whether they were worth sharing with others, not merely as a recollection but as an instruction in how to describe and write about what a person finds meaningful in life.

  During the week of my rummaging for the recipe cards, my wife and daughter test the creamed celery, the meatloaf, the snow pudding. My daughter loves lemon things and begs me to make the snow again. My wife loves the custard. I see the smiles on their faces as they ask for more. The sugar cookies disappear one afternoon when my daughter’s friends come over to play video games and to text message each other even though they are in the same room.

  Though the world of infinite possibilities collapses around me as I grow older, I still hold the cards in my grandmother’s hand, the cards that she was dealt, and that she played not merely to win a game but to make the playing of the game beautiful. I understand just how she played them to make the most of what she was given. I try to tell my daughter about the dishes and about the nature of frugality she will eventually have to learn, if not during her student days on a tight budget then in her life after college when survival is not merely an obligation to others but an art one learns. Learning to use everything life gives one is a language in which the word love is said over and over again to fill the mouths of others.

  I take my kitchen handiwork into my class. My students are a tough audience who want to create something but have no idea how to go about it and often resent those who try to show them. I begin by telling the class that fiction is not merely making up stuff but about making something.

  “Let’s say a story told you something you could use, something that could be useful to you to help you through a day. Let’s examine the idea that a story could feed you and warm you up inside or make you realize how much you loved someone or how they loved you.”

  I lay out the spread on a paper table cloth and set plastic cutlery and paper plates before them. “I am going to read you a story you can eat as an example of what we are discussing today. It is called ‘The Cards in Her Hand.’ For your assignment this week, I want you to write your own story not about food that has been passed to you out of a drive-thru window but about food you want to share with others because it is out of the ordinary, food that feeds your thoughts and your imaginations, that offers you something other than just junk inside you, food you connect with love and the people who have loved you and the magic you would want to pass on to others.” Some of the students in the back row roll their eyes.

  “Stories are as much about real things that you know and experience as they are about what you make up. You don’t have to recycle the plots of video games or sameold-same-old television shows. Look into your own lives and make a story, piece by piece, ingredient by ingredient. Balance it, so it offers a variety of tastes and surprises and recalls things you might have forgotten or that others have long overlooked. You have mouths and minds to feed with ideas, right? Those ideas come from you. They can be made and remade over and over again, always new, always fresh if you can find the recipe.”

  A boy in a reversed baseball cap shakes his head as if I have lost my mind.

  “Man, I only eat hot dogs and Kraft Dinner,” he says.

  But I refuse to let his food choices be the point I am trying to make. He needs to be fed but he is starved inside, maybe not physically but in the realm of discovery. He is speaking through the hunger of his mind that has not yet learned how to feed itself. To live is to fuel the imagination as well as the body, and at the same time to feed the body is to enable the imagination. “Your choice. You can taste it or you can just guess what it tastes like. That said, guessing at something is not what makes for good fiction. Come and get it. You don’t have to try it, but here it is if you want it.”

  A braver student shuffles up to the front of the classroom and picks up a paper plate and cutlery. I continue with the challenge of the assignment. “Read the tastes, the textures, the simplicity that is spoken through what you take into yourselves.” I try to persuade them. “All the experience in life is waiting to speak to you if you will let it. Your obligation as writers is to enable others to enter into what you have known, and to know what you have loved, lost and tried to regain.” A few more come to the front and gather around the spread.

  A young woman with a round face and rosy cheeks takes a bite from the snow pudding and it melts in her mouth. Her face glows with wonder and surprise as she tries to speak to me. She swallows and exclaims: “I had a word for it for a moment, and then it was gone. It was … it was …oh, what’s the word…like turning over a lucky card in a game of chance or finding someone in a crowd I had thought was gone from my life. It was…it was like the first warm day of spring when everything comes back to life. You know what I mean?” I nod.

  There must be a word for it, but I can’t find it. I shall go home and search through the cards to see if my grandmother wrote it down on the back of something she loved to make.

  Catchers

  Paul described all this to Luke though he was certain his lover could not hear him. One of the stories was about hair, long hair, and how an old man in a tower would let the blond lengths of it down to street level to entice beautiful young men to climb up to his apartment. When the young men reached the top, the hair was white as blank paper. Paul had seen pictures of eccentrics in India who never cut their hair during their entire lifetimes. The ends were the colour a person’s hair had been in youth. The grey would appear partway up the strands, and then fade into the white of old age where they reached the man who, by then, would be old bones. By the time the climbers were at the top, Paul said, it was too late to turn back.

  Luke was dying and had given up shaving. He had started a beard before the invader came to live inside him, but now that he was in his final days, weakened by the presence that trashed his life from within, Paul wanted to reclaim the Luke he had loved when they were both young men. Paul wanted to find the man who lay beneath the matted tangle.

  With scissors, at first, then carefully with a straightedge so as not to draw any blood into the white lather through which the bristles sprang, Paul began to shave his partner’s face. The razor scraped the growth down to the flesh — cheeks, hands, and the pale chest hidden beneath the dirty red t-shirt Luke refused to launder. In the days before the silence overtook him, Luke told Paul the shirt was lucky and argued the only way it would come off was if the undertaker cut it off with a pair of scissors. Like the hair, it was an extra layer of armour Luke had donned in his fight against death.

  Years before, when the hair and moustache were shorter, Luke reminded Paul of Einstein — hairier, though with the same sympathy in the eyes that were so beautiful. Now that Luke was gaunt and skeletal, the eyes were the one thing that continued to speak of the man that once was. Gentle and deep, the eyes protruded now and did not look at Paul as much as they looked into and through him. And though that lo
ok frightened Paul, he saw what the young men had seen when Luke caught them in the moonlight.

  Luke and Paul had been together for forty years. And as it had been in the beginning, Paul continued to tell Luke stories to amuse him, to keep the blood running through Luke’s veins, though gradually, as each day passed, life wanted less and less a part of Luke. The stories were mostly nightmares. Luke loved the terrors that tumbled through his brain. If he woke, sweating and exhausted from having been part of them, they were good stories. The earliest stories had been about beautiful young knights who went into the enchanted forest and fell in love, not with the vacuous princesses of court, but with each other, and on returning to the world of the disenchanted, slew the dragons that breathed fire on those who loved each other. Such stories were beautiful to them, and drew them closer, and made them weep.

  They had marched together on their crusade during the early days of the cause before the city that now embraced them and forgot them in its embrace was unwilling to accept who they were. They fought the blue-uniformed catchers at the bath houses. They ran from the night sticks and the paddy-wagons and hid in the darkness. The more they lived, the more the two men knew the scars of the fight. Those early days had been the days of the Knights’ tales. But now, with the politicians turning out in glitter to glad-hand sweaty palms on a brilliant summer afternoon when everyone celebrated everything except the truth that Luke and Paul had come to know, the stories were harder to tell and became more terrifying. Paul’s stories scared their friends, but Luke always wanted to hear more. Sometimes Paul would play the piano to add music to the tales. Luke told Paul that those the stories were the record of their lives together, the promise that as long as the narratives continued their relationship would live. That is why Paul told them, and kept telling them, even when they were certain that one was speaking and the other was beyond hearing. Paul found it hard to tell his stories when the snow of their last winter together fell with the silence that snow brings.