I was treated to a high end, high class dinner recently at a classic French restaurant. On the menu was steak tartare, boquerones, chicken liver mousse, pork pate en croute with savora mustard, wilted spinach salad with lardons, rum cake for dessert. It was the kind of dining experience that teaches one how rich and good food can be, how it should taste and feel, and then leaves you defeated as though you’ve been crushed by a cleaver to the chest, lingering behind your teeth. We tipped our waitress. We bought beer for the kitchen staff. Had I been forced to pay the bill I would have gone home with empty pockets.
The next night Gogo and I ate cheese from a plate on the couch. We only meant to have a few pieces, but couldn’t stop cutting more until the entire block was gone.
“It doesn’t have to be fancy,” Gogo tells me.
I made macaroni and cheese from the box, found some grapes and watermelon in the fridge, drank a beer from the can, opened a bag of chips.
“Food is meant only to be enjoyed.”
The best meals I remember from childhood were potlucks in church basements. The old ladies with shoulders stooped removing tinfoil from platters and using wooden ladles to serve carrots and potatoes and roast beef and baked chicken from dishes made of glass. I would eat everything on my plate and go for seconds. Everyone in the grand hall ending with coffee and dessert. Bits of crumb stuck to the stubble of Mister Grainy’s chin, his wife nodding off in the seat across from him, tipping forward with wheezing breaths, her nose nearly dipping into her soup, her glasses on her lap.
Beautiful Gogo sitting on the other side of the hall. The smell of food and the laughter and conversation of the congregation between us. I watched as she gently stuck her fork into her plate of greens, chewed thoughtfully, smiled at her Uncle Vic telling the same story he always told about the mouse in the back of the sanctuary that interrupted the sermon by skittering across the pulpit.
He laughed, holding his stomach, his mustache shaking. The “Jesus mouse” picked up the crumbs we left behind. Coffee steamed over the cookies and brownies and meringue kisses the old ladies had made the same way every Sunday since 1944.
“And don’t ask who makes them best,” my grandmother told me, “or you’ll really start trouble.”
Gogo caught me looking at her. I winked. She smiled.
We went outside after to the playground across the street. We snuck down to the corner store a block away to buy bubblegum and drinks in colored bottles. It was a rough neighborhood at that time. There were bars over the windows of the corner store and the owner kept a baseball bat behind the counter. He smiled at us. He didn’t notice when I slipped an extra pack of candy into my shorts and he didn’t care when my sister giggled too loud.
Holding hands with Gogo, our legs swinging over the side of the I-94 bridge. She’d sneak cigarettes from her mother’s purse. We’d cough and laugh. She’d her head on my shoulder, cars shooting like bullets beneath our feet.
The sun rose in St. Paul and set in Minneapolis. We watched the light over both cities. We walked to the Little Mekong district in Frogtown and ate bowls of noodles and rice. Egg rolls or spring rolls depending on the season. Hot soup in winter eaten with banh mi sandwiches and bubble tea. We’d walk around eating Thai rolled ice cream with no concern for anyone, or anything else. She’d light another cigarette, only smoke half and throw the rest away. Someone would pick it up and finish it every time, following and hoping for more.
“Waste not,” my grandmother always told me with her eyes twinkling and wrinkling at the corners.
The best meals were in my grandmother’s kitchen and my mother’s kitchen. The things made from old recipes and the cookbooks on her shelf. The things they made for their children and grandchildren. It was cozy in the kitchen. I couldn’t reach the highest shelf. My grandmother patting the perfect part in my hair, I’d have to fix it after. My mother sneaking chocolates “Don’t tell your sisters” and I’d help her slice tomatoes for dinner.
Food is not dumb. Food is a language that everyone knows how to speak. But sometimes we forget. Sometimes it’s a slice of pizza or bowl of pasta. Sometimes it’s cheese and chocolate cake. A sandwich eaten with our hands. It can be the food eaten together at weddings and funerals in church surrounded by other people. And when you’re starving there is nothing more important than whatever you might eat next.
Gogo sat down cloudy as was her usual disposition. It took good food to turn her to sunshine. Her hand was always warm in mine and we’d leave the church behind in the dirt beneath the slide of the playground.