Mom Conquers All
A buddy tells me that when he grew old, all his stories turned to events when he was young. Other friends have told me their first memories consist of loved ones picking them up from a crib or seeing light dance on the ceiling when they settled for their afternoon nap. I have those memories too, but the earliest ones that resonate surround my mother, bandana positioned over her ever-thinning hair, as she grilled in our postcard backyard. Those sunny and sweltering July and August Saturday afternoons I remember best.
Section One
Chapter 2
Comparing those images to today’s sensibilities, I see how television and film frame families in stereotypical gender roles, no matter what their era, and ours followed a few directions from that script, but others appeared in dramatic reversals. For instance, grilling in my house was women’s work. I have no faded photos of Dad with a bleached toque and apron peering into his kettle. It was Mom who manned the barbecue fork—her only long-handled tool. She did everything the hard way—she never considered the concept of the right tool for the job. Mom crafted all projects to last all day long, as if she could clock in the hours to win a prize with each day’s completion.
Her nature probably molded out of the “can do” and “do without” values she inherited as a late teen during WWII and from her own family’s upbringing. I always interpreted my mother’s propensity for grilling from the way she was reared: she learned to do things on her own, a toughness she adopted early because she needed it to survive. As a Depression-era teen, she catapulted into the workforce when her father died unexpectedly one afternoon while she was a student in the tenth grade. On that same day, her mother informed her that she would have to quit school to support the three in their family, which included her younger sister Muriel. Jobs a tenth grader could apply for came down to arduous ones that males vacated after their country called them to war. Grand-mom, whom all the grandchildren called Nanny, narrowed them further: she could apply as a factory laborer at Luden’s Cough Drops factory or as a knitter’s helper at Berkshire Knitting Mills. At her Luden’s interview, Mom purposely sabotaged her chances by telling the interviewer she wanted the Berkshire job desperately; she told the interviewer she had prayed hard that Berkshire would hire her. Of course, she repeated the same story at her Berkshire interview. It worked. The Berkshire interviewer hired her on the spot.
That same kind of toughness reappeared when her mother abruptly decided to remarry and honeymoon with her new beau in Florida, leaving 16-year-old Mom and her younger sister, Muriel, alone. Nanny said she didn’t know when she would be back, if ever.
“Nanny,” outside daughter Muriel’s home (circa 1969).
“I don’t know how to get the coal furnace started in the morning, fire the stove, or even how to cook,” my mother protested. “You’re abandoning us!” As a result, Mom determined to master live fire cooking and heating—food and fuel, coal stove and furnace—because she learned it, well, by fire.
Nanny’s supposedly wealthy husband of Florida fame, Bill, turned out to be penniless, and so she returned alone, intending to reclaim her two daughters to serve her in “the parlor room.” But Mom had grown up in Nanny’s absence and refused. Next, her mom decided to pour her disappointment into a protracted and confusing spousal support case against Bill, whom she accused of expecting her to adopt his “diet of hamburgers,” as she said in court. She almost won, especially when he showed up an hour late to the hearing. “How can anyone show up on time when all the clocks in the building are wrong?” he told the judge. Bill, a loner, was unaware that the synchronized court clocks, as well as most of the nation, had reverted to daylight savings time. The courtroom visitors erupted in laughter.
The newlyweds settled amicably and even reconciled later, a good result because a win would not have brought her any windfall anyway. They settled together to live the rest of their lives at his small vegetable farm and his lean-to shack in Pennsylvania, just outside of Reading. Bill later told my father, “Whatever you do, Dick, don’t let a woman get you into court.” The only thing clear to me was that the two newlyweds had married with like-kind.
When Mom married and set up our house, she tried to leave that family behind without losing her can-do perspective. I believe she chose to cook on a charcoal grill not only for the sweet savor that charcoal delivers, but also for the challenge, working with the same elements her mother left for her to figure out. What other choice could prove more familiar?
Dad certainly wasn’t going to work a fire. He grew up in a household where his mom did everything, though most of that activity centered on cooking for their family of five. His older brother Charles, nicknamed Red for his fiery crop of hair, had shoulders developed on the football field. He commanded a lot of teen adulation as a high school football star. He ate in quantities like his team, sitting down after practice to eat twenty hamburgers produced from his mother’s frying pan, all smothered in ketchup and onions. One of his football buddies and he would then shuffle five miles downtown to a theater and smuggle in another dozen hamburgers to devour during the movie.
It just seemed natural for Dad to keep the paradigm going in his own family. Dad liked charcoal too, but not enough to investigate the intricacies of cooking. To him, all cooking was akin to baking—precise measurements of ingredients that allowed breads to rise—or not. The volatility of charcoal grilling looked too much like the precise measurements he had to calibrate as a machinist, measuring by micrometer as he babysat lathes with their precise cuts on specialty metals. Yet, he drew the comparison all wrong, misjudging watchfulness with precision. True, grilling has recipes, formulas, techniques, and temperatures, but grilling is more of an art than a formula with fixed numbers. Anyone can grill a Tri-Tip under low-and-slow temperatures while still having the option to stoke the fire and cook it hot-and-fast.
Nevertheless, Dad preferred dwelling elsewhere—at the bowling alley, the golf course, or the lounge chair in our living room—and let Mom do the “woman’s” (and man’s) work on his time off. No one would mistake Dad for lazy, however. He worked every hour of overtime he could. But when he came home with steel filings puncturing pinholes throughout his dark blue work dickies, he remained at rest.
He did take on a few family duties, but these consisted more of hobbies. Before my Dad passed away, I asked him, the family photographer, if any of his shots captured Mom grilling. He couldn’t recall any: “Maybe a slide,” he said, reluctantly, referring to the long metal files called slide magazines that fit into a track that fed a high-intensity bulb projector. Grilling then was such an ordinary task in our house that Dad never thought of snapping pictures, and if he did, he would have to pull himself up from the living room recliner. He remembered rightly. I reviewed pictures of her treasured flowers graced in family photo albums and slide magazines. However, going through them and the disorganized array of photographs, I never found any of Mom grilling.
“Grilling then was such an ordinary task in our house that Dad never thought of snapping pictures. . . . ”
Dad took lots of pictures of our small row home and particularly its patch of backyard tucked away. That space functioned like a back trouser pocket: a place to store something you didn’t want to show upfront but yet within your possession. This backyard wedged between a shotgun house and a cinderblock garage, a structure my Dad and his cousin Chick assembled on summer nights and after working ten hours each day in the machine shop. The backyard, situated as a bordered rectangle with plants, herbs, and vegetables, featured a large centerpiece of ground with geraniums my mom wanted to showcase. She sure had a green thumb, picking up cuttings fallen from front yard plants on her daily walk and bringing them back home to nurture into vibrant, flower- and herb-bearing plants. Later, she branched into tomato plants, lettuce, spring onions—all developing lusciously. I remember eating those vegetables with grilled meals. We always seemed to have seasonal produce available, often from our own garden and from particular vendors at two farmer’s markets.
At the grandparents’ farm, I remember the sugary corn we picked, husked, and ate the same day from July to the end of August. I also remember Mom laying single dollars onto Nanny’s front desk to pay for any vegetables we did get there—sometimes adding a few more bills. Nanny always protested, but not convincingly or for very long. Through her sister, Mom had learned that she, the older sister, was expected to pay while Muriel was exempt because her husband had “held back household money.” He had spent it on gambling and prostitutes. All this information passed unfiltered within my earshot, including the news that my aunt found one of Frank’s sex workers hiding in the garage.
So all grilling in my extended family rested within our backyard. Nestled into the corner of the yard sat an important accessory for grilling—the trash can—that served a curious purpose. Each neighbor’s house, as well as its backyard, touched, rather than bordered, one another; the open-wire fences marked boundaries at drunken angles that neighbors easily crossed. Mom’s grill was an off-brand, brazier style, a brown enameled bowl with no lid to reflect the grill’s heat or to cook food by convection. The grates were nickel-plated, hand washed inside the house and never scraped with a bristle brush while hot. My mom determined at the outset, like most things she bought, that this thing was going to last for decades. One of the legs of the tripod that suspended the original kettle had felled some time ago and wouldn't reattach. All this was told to me, because I only remember the grill as disabled but still functional. Undaunted, she enlisted the battered aluminum trash can to serve as the third leg. And so grilling limped along. It was quite a sight to view her manipulating a bent aluminum trash lid with such aplomb that it counterpoised the grill to create a balanced grill surface. To me as a toddler, she looked like Atlas shouldering the world.
Her grilling ritual remained simple. First, Mom would empty a small charcoal bag onto the landscape of the lower grate, ensuring a thin layer covered every space. Then she would douse the charcoal with enough lighter fluid to scorch the earth. Next came the throwing of several lit matches—one at a time—struck from a match cover and flung precisely in the center of the unlit coals from a great distance. This action accompanied another: backing up to an even safer distance after flicking each one. The matches launched like fiery arrows through the backyard. The first few attempts were met with a dwindling blaze, the charcoal unconvinced to ignite. So Mom would start the whole process again, always witnessed by our spinster neighbor Florence, her beak nose crooning over her long neck as she leaned dangerously close to the flame. “Maybe you should use more lighter fluid,” Florence would comment, which my mom always dismissed with a hiss.
A blaze eventually ensued that licked the empty plastic clothesline overhead and which crisscrossed the yard. After thirty minutes of uncontrolled but continuous flames, Mom would plant the top grate with aluminum foil to prevent food sticking to the grill and to aid later cleanup. It didn’t matter what food it was: foil proved as ubiquitous as lighter fluid.
And there were only four items ever on the menu: Hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken and whole white potatoes were the mainstay with chicken pieces an occasional choice. Potatoes in Mom’s technique required special procedures, however. She prepared them by cleaning the skins vigorously under cold water and then wrapping them tightly in foil, with punched holes like measles dotting the foil and spuds. She dispensed no oil, salt, or pepper. The taters were the first to go on the grill, the most checked, and the last to be done. In fact, potatoes controlled the whole timing of when we could eat dinner.
After an hour, she would pull a sample potato from the grill and bring it into the kitchen for us to inspect. Here was the next ritual. Was it done? We would first sniff the food. Then we would massage the outside foil to determine if something pliable lie lay inside. Finally, Dad would take a fork and, plunging right through foil and potato, give it a taste. We all looked hopefully at Pop. Beneath the tunnel of escaping steam, Dad, more oft than not, would slowly frown, “Not yet.” This too was a ritual. Without a word, Mom would then take another fork and sample the dry but chunky interior to verify. “Still not done,” she would announce as the definitive judgment. Back on the grill it went! She would repeat this back-and-forth at least three times.
After the second potato testing, Mom formed the hamburgers from ground chuck into tight, squeezed patties and placed them directly over the splattering flame that coiled around the foil beneath. Proteins on the grill required corporal punishment. Then she would thump the hamburgers frequently with the spatula as they inflated under the heat. Hot dogs received similar mistreatments, but since she didn’t need to prepare them, they could be positioned on any available grill space, quickly splintering under the intense direct heat.
All the bad technique, method, and limited menu paled when I remember Mom bringing her charcoaled food to table. It was an epicurean feast. The potato would melt tenderly under a fork as a reward for waiting. When I grabbed them, the hamburger and hot dog would crunch lightly, but remain tender inside. And then there was the aroma at the same time as the taste. Incredible.
Like so many things I recall from my childhood, my parents did the best they could with what they believe God and their own parents gave them. As their sole child, I see what they inherited as small but significant. I am grateful for what they passed on to me, one being the freedom to grill.
