WHAT SHE LEFT BEHIND

My mother left the old prewar studio photos of her and Dad taken after their marriage. Her fine hair rolls up to the top of her head in the fashion of the time. My father’s short, dark moustache looks a bit like Hitler’s but it’s uneven, as if he shaved in a hurry. I doubt he gave a damn about having his picture taken but perhaps this photo was meant to be a gift to his parents. Mom never said much about those years before I was born and of course I wasn’t the least bit interested in anything that happened before Me.

My house is full of my father’s stuff. I use the low, square pine box my father’s grandfather, Ernst Hanefeld, built to carry his woodworking tools from Paris to Philadelphia. Father’s. In the living room, a long cocktail table Dad concocted for my mother out of odd legs and a walnut plank just before he died. The legs are a bit crooked, like his moustache in the photo.

Mom loved to go junking with a gal friend, counting the bills in her purse, asking Dad for more, then heading out as soon as I left for school and not back until dark. In the fifties and early sixties you could find treasures in rural Connecticut because nobody used decorators in those days.

She bought all kinds of old things, furniture and picture frames and old tinware and silverware and pewter and copper bowls and things you could make things out of. They had to be original and authentic, nothing reproduction. She glued and sanded, she caned and laid on gold leaf. She swapped and traded gave stuff away just for the hell of it. Giving stuff away is a good reason to buy it in the first place.

That’s one of the things she left me: generosity.

The old cherry table’s drop-leaves were always so loose Dad could hardly cut his lamb chop. The bottom of the drawer has shrunk over it’s hundred and fifty, maybe more, years, so it won’t hold a paperclip. Mom eventually bought a more rugged pine table two people could actually put their elbows on. I gave that to my daughter.

I gave my daughter the bright Victorian quilt Mom gave me. And the pretty Kelim rug. My dog had chewed one corner off it but the rug itself was so handsome you just had to use it. Perhaps my daughter’s dog has evened up the opposite corner by now.

Dogs, that’s another thing my mother left me. We always had dogs, hers and mine.

“Mom, you gotta get a dog,” I told her when the spaniel died.

I’m too old,” she said.

Dog dog dog, I insisted. True, she was old and not just old but getting dotty.

When that rug-chewing boy went to join his ancestors, I went dogless. But I’m not too old to have a dog again so here I am with a another. A rug piddler this time.

So, dogs, that’s another thing she left me.

What has she left me that I would I save if the house were burning down? I am too full of her stories to choose. The birch trees of her Rochester childhood, the mother she lost, the red setters that lay under the piano? Popovers—when did I last make those? It’s a lot of dust in the attic, a lot of stuff falling out of that drawer.

Oh, one other thing she left: an old, heavy, maple cutting board shaped like a pig. I’ve chopped bushels of onions on it and perhaps a hundred miles of celery for her duck stuffing. Mother instructed me very carefully how to keep it clean. I was to slosh bleach on it occasionally, then anoint it with olive oil, then put it out in the sun to dry.

The pigboard and the dog. Enough.

Shad and the River

Three thousand miles and almost sixty years away from it, I dream of the lovely Connecticut River of my childhood. Every spring about this time it flooded with the spring snow melt from its source in Northern New Hampshire down through western Massachusetts to Long Island Sound. The Sound, a grand estuary of the Atlantic Ocean, runs along the south coast of Connecticut. It seemed a vast sea to me. Long Island, that stretch of land from New York City almost all the way to Cape Cod, was only faintly visible on a clear day from the mouth of the river.

My mother was fiercely adamant that I stay away from the flooded riverside but the strangely altered banks were irresistible. For a week in late March or early April the grassy lawns of the boat landing at Middle Haddam were several feet underwater, making the river twice as wide as usual.

The smooth glittering waters snaked silently downstream at eight miles an hour. When the tide turned in obedience to the earth's spin and the moon's pull, the Sound’s rising waters only pushed the river wider and higher. The hypnotically rising and sinking debris was a fascinating nightmare: a window frame, then the rooty stump of a huge tree, then the ribs and keel of a crushed boat drifted by. An tree's arm might lift itself in agony, then drown again.

When the mountains of northern New England had given up their snow to the sun, the river subsided to it's normal level, six feet up and down every twelve and a half hours.

By early May when it was calm again, the shad began their ancient run upriver to spawn . These big, fat silvery fish, related to herring, are an old, old source of protein for critters and humans, easy to catch with seine nets set near the shore.

With the dangerous flood safely past, Mom would send me down to buy shad roe from fisherman Pat Callahan at the small public landing, a muddy bank at the very bottom of Middle Haddam Village.

Red-faced from drinking Pat and his pal were not too tipsy to haul ashore his small, flat-bottomed boat-load of thrashing, desperate shad. Knee deep in fish, outboard motor blades dripping river water, Pat scaled each one with a toothed metal curry comb, holding it by the tail and stroking hard to the gills. The iridescent scales flew into the sun's low rays like diamonds.

"Sally wants a roe, huh?"

Pat pulled a fat female from the heap and slit its belly with a curved fillet knife, then caught the roe that dropped into his hand the way a midwife catches a new baby. Dark red and river-cool, the shape of beautiful lips, the slid the roe into a plastic bag. I gave him five dollars, pricey then, and headed back uphill for supper. I left a trail of sequined scales all the way home.

Shad roe is rarely available now even on the east coast. Mom wrapped the delicacy in waxed paper, not very pc these days, and pinned it with wooden toothpicks to keep the delicate outer membrane from breaking, then sautéed it in bacon fat. We'd peel off the waxed paper and break off a browned lump of firm, crunchy roe moistened with a squeeze of lemon and a bite of the crispy bacon. A very large roe would just about feed my father and me for breakfast but two roes were better for dinner.

Mom found it as disgusting as raw oysters and never failed to mention that we were eating at least a million eggs at one sitting. True, any roe is eggs and high in fat and cholesterol. The pale shad flesh is delicious but contains thousands of tiny hairlike bones. Occasionally Mom roasted a whole shad, sans roe of course, on a plank for a whole hour. This supposedly dissolves the bones but even so you will spit a few. For me, long-cooked fish is not worth the trouble.

Here I am three thousand miles and almost sixty years from that river but I still smell its mud. And long for just one more bite. With my father at the table before me.

For more on Shad, see: http://wdfw.wa.gov/outreach/fishing/shad/shad.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_shad

One Orange

I bought a woman an orange at Safeway yesterday. I was just behind her in the checkout line, watching her rummage through her small purse to find the fifty-seven cents the clerk had rung up.

I waited, then I waited impatiently, then I realized she wasn’t going to find any money.

“Put that orange on my bill,” I said to the clerk who was gazing over the woman’s head into the distance. Discretion or indifference, I couldn’t tell.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, zipping her bag and giving me a small smile. “I guess I left my money at home.”

She didn’t look so poor she wouldn’t have a dime on her. Her clothes were clean and her hair was tidy, yet I sensed a certain despair. Okay, maybe I was projecting as I looked down at my pricey artisan bread and two quarts of ice-cream. The clerk would take three cents off my tab because I had my own bag.

“Do I need to put in my discount number?” I muttered as I watched her walk away with the one orange in her hand. Oranges grow in every yard here. School kids climb our trees on the way home and toss the peels into the street. Not just oranges but lemons, grapefruit, tangerines just drop to the ground uneaten. Fifty-seven cents out the door right here in Paradise.

“Naw, she put her number in already. I’ll run you through on that.” He toted me up. “You’ve saved, let’s see, one dollar and fifteen cents.”

Last summer I walked down to the Dairy Queen to try a flame-broiled cheeseburger with pickles because the grill smoke was simply irresistible. I was finishing it up as I walked back to the house with a mouthful of strangely seasoned meat made of God knows what, the usual junk burger, when a young woman came down the sidewalk toward me.

“Excuse me,” she said, eying the last drippy bite of burger. “Could you spare some money so I could get lunch?”

My mouth full, I nodded and fished out a fiver.

Later I talked with a car salesman about selling my ten-year-old car. He had to unlock his glassed-in, open-to-view showroom office to protect customer documents from lookyloo’s who steal social security numbers right off his desk. Apparently we are beyond shredding.

“You’ll make more money if you sell your car yourself on e-Bay,” he advised. “But be sure to get green cash.”

He meant, don’t take even a cashier’s check. Uh oh. I told him the orange story.

“My mother-in-law gave a cold Gatorade to a man at a traffic light,” he said. “It was broiling hot and the guy was pouring sweat. But he threw it at her, hard, and screamed, ‘I don’t want no Gatorade, I just want money, bitch!’”

Call me a sucker but I gotta buy hamburgers and hand out fivers. Now, how many oranges should I buy?

Dog Talk

Two weeks into Mopsy the Shih Tzu, ARGHH! We've washed the pee-pad, we've lived through the barks, we've abandoned healthful kibble for ground boiled turkey and nutritious crispy biscuits.

I've trimmed her beard and her furry feet, paid the vet for ear meds. No, she can't sleep on the bed with us, there's no room and when she scratches her neck the bed shakes.

She's learned to come for a treat, to sit and sometimes stay. Gotta work on the stay command. She obeys if I'm looking at her but when I walked around the corner of the garage yesterday as she sat obediently at the open gate to the yard, big brown eyes watching my every move, she suddenly shot down the long, straight driveway all the way to the end.

"Mopsy, come! Mopsy come back!" Jim and I hollered as we dashed after her. She glanced over her shoulder to be sure we were chasing her, then bounded off, ears and long tail flopping with every stride. Full speed, she turned right at the sidewalk and disappeared. When she realized she couldn't see us, she returned, again at full gallop.

"Good girl!" we cried. I reached down to pat her--the devil--but she ducked left into the front yard and circled it like a crazy dog, wagging and dropping to her elbows adorably. Thrilled to be the pursued! Not funny to me, damnit. As she sped past I grabbed her like a football.

"Bad Mopsy!" I scolded. "Very bad!"

She wiggled and wagged her long, plumy tail with delight. I returned her to the stay position and stared her down for a solid twenty seconds. She didn't break out again because I never took my eye off her.

Hmm.

She's really delightful company in the house. Lies on the little cushions we set out. Appears to be housebroken although it's quite a chore putting her outside twenty-seven times a day, then listening to her scratch the paint off the back door. Hates the crate, of course, and although she's debarked, she can certainly make herself heard. In fact she sounds like a St. Bernard.

But visitors terrify her. She cowers, she shrinks, she hides behind my legs. No coaxing can reassure her. I think she has really High Anxiety.

I'm not sure she will ever be trustworthy. That I can leave her loose in the house. That I can trust her not to jump out an open car window--gosh, California gets hot and I don't want to leave her home, in the crate, a day at a time.

She's darling but I'm not sure she's the right pooch for us. One of us needs Prozac.

Stay tuned.