<< previous   next >>

pot luck

“Fry an Onion and He'll Be Happy”

I know I am one of the lucky ones. I say this because I still have a grandmother (two actually). A few weeks ago it was my Persian grandmother’s birthday—my Bibi. And so I took the train down to Long Branch on the Jersey shore to visit her. She doesn’t live there (she lives in Queens), but she and my mom were staying at a hotel on the beach in Long Branch for the week of Passover. I took the A Train to Penn Station early Friday morning and boarded a southbound Seacoast train. There were very few passengers, which was nice. I got a window seat of three all to myself. I had my book: What is the What, by Dave Eggers, my iPod, a bottle of water, and I was happy as a swaddled newborn.

While my blog probably does not make this even remotely clear, I was raised in an orthodox Jewish family. I went to Yeshiva for six years and it wasn’t until I was in junior high school that my dad, who was not (and still is not for the most part) an observant Jew, decided I needed a secular education and put me in private school. And so I am now what most people would consider a reformed Jew—I eat clam chowder, I love pork buns, I feast on Chinese food on Christmas, but I fast on Yom Kippur, and ban bread on Passover (orders of bacon cheeseburger hold the bun makes perfect sense to me). But the generations that came before me are orthodox and they observe the holidays to the strict letter of the law. And so Bibi and my mother go away for Passover every year to a hotel where everything is kosher for Passover and also where they are in striking distance of Atlantic City for their gambling fix.

Bibi estimates that she is in her nineties though she does not know for sure. She has no birth certificate. All she knows is that she was born in Meshhed, a Jewish village in Iran (close to the Russian border) where she lived until the early 1900s when it was quite unsafe for Jews to remain. She has told me stories about Meshhed, about using tree trunks as cutting boards and learning to cook rice from her mother in a pot over a handmade fire. After leaving Messhed, she moved to Turkey, then Palestine, where she married my Baba. Eventually they settled in London where she and Baba had three children—my mother, my uncle Ronnie and my aunt Janet. They lived in London for a few years but when the air raids got bad during the war, they moved out to the coast where Bibi and her sisters and their families rented a hotel on the beach. I have some graying black and white photos of Bibi from that time. In the one that hangs in my foyer, her dark hair is pinned into neat curls around her face and she is playing on the sand with my mother, who was just a pudgy little toddler then. 

“So come on Bibi, how old are you?” I ask, when I wish her a happy birthday, greeting her in the lobby of the hotel under a too-large crystal chandelier. “I don’t know Andy, maybe 90?” she says, patting the seat next to her on the sofa for me to sit down. She is so small that she is almost overtaken by the pillows of the couch. Her short hair is combed back and she wears a loose cotton black dress with colorful painted ladybugs on it. Her hair is completely white—not silver or gray—alabaster white. It is striking. She looks beautiful. “Come here Jun,” she says again. Jun is a Persian term of endearment. That or Junigiga. I have no idea how to spell these words but I have been called a Junigiga for many years. At times she also calls me a Toochmasag, which literally translates to a son of a dog or a bitch, but it is also used as a term of endearment.

One of her friends seated nearby asks her how it feels to be getting old. She waves her hand in the air and shakes her head, smiling so her white teeth show off her tanned, deeply lined skin. All Bibi has to do to turn brown is look at the sun. She’s been by the beach for a few days and she looks as though she’s been to the Caribbean. “Getting old?” she asks, coyly. “That’s ridiculous. I AM old,” she declares with a laugh.

We have lunch in the big ballroom with about a hundred others. To reach the ballroom, I push her in her wheelchair. She can walk, but it is a slow shuffled gait and if she were to walk, it would take about an hour to make it from the lobby down the long hallways to the main dining room, and so we now push her in a wheelchair. She’s not happy about it, neither is my mom, but it is what it is.

There is a buffet with every kind of Passover food imaginable—matzo pizza, lasagna, omelettes, egg salad, tuna salad, pickles, potato pancakes. Each round table is set for 10 and equipped with a few boxes of matzo, a couple of bottles of wine and some soda. I make her a plate and we sit and eat. I pour myself some water and a ginger ale for Bibi. Our conversation when we eat is always the same. She eyes my plate like an eagle and after assessing my subpar meal, declares: “You’re not eating enough!” This comes out in her usual rasp, her funny Persian-English accent barely audible. Her voice is now always small and gravelly. She smokes too much and it’s likely her vocal chords are almost done working. “As you can see, I am not malnourished, Bibi. I eat a lot.” “Take this,” she’ll say each and every time we have this conversation, and ferry an item of food from her plate to mine. It can be a spoonful of rice, a drumstick, or a samoseh (think samosa but this is the Persian kind), but she will always put more on my plate and then watch to make sure I eat it. Only then will she be satisfied.

After lunch I wheel her outside to the boardwalk for some air (for me) and a smoke (for her). She smokes Merit 100s—long, thin cigarettes that look like skinny cigars. These are constantly either between her brown fingers or perched between her lips. A plume of smoke is almost always floating around her head. She stopped smoking years ago, but after her daughter was killed in a fire, she started again. I can’t really blame her.

We have to make it through a set of heavy double doors to reach the boardwalk, and this does not happen without a struggle. If you’ve ever pushed someone in a wheelchair you know that it’s hard to get through a set of doors on your own. A man seated nearby sees me struggling and he continues to sit there, not making a move to help, as I push open the doors and try to get her wheelchair through with one hand, while keeping the doors open with my ankle. I realize my ankle is now bleeding. The weight of the door has torn my skin. Wonderful. But he sits there, not moving, still. I manage to get Bibi through and out to the boardwalk. “Did you hurt yourself, Jun?” she says, seeing the blood dripping down my ankle. “No, it’s okay Bibi. Don’t worry.” I put her in the sun and tell her I am going to put my feet in the sand for a minute and that I’ll be right back.

I head down to the beach and take off my sneakers. It’s windy and cool and the ocean is choppy under a cloudy sky, but the chance to sink my toes into the sand is one I can’t pass up. I wipe the blood from my ankle with my sock. It’s not that bad, I see. I take a little walk and watch Bibi from a distance. She is in her wheelchair. She has added a pair of sunglasses to her look, and is clearly enjoying every drag of her cigarette. She tilts her head back a little bit with every exhale and the smoke swirls around her in ribbons. She looks very hip.

I walk back to where she is and sit down on the bench next to her. “So, Bibi, what’s the key to a successful marriage?” I ask her, taking her hand in mine and kissing her on the cheek. I hug her, too. I am often amazed at how much I love her and just want to hug her and hold her tight. “You know Baba and I had a wonderful life together,” she says, pausing for a moment to look out at the water. “Can you believe he has been gone for 28 years now?” We are both silent. “No, I cannot,” I say, finally, marveling at the number of years that have gone. I still remember the day he died. It was the summer time and I’d just come home from day camp. I was 10 years old. I found my mother in the kitchen. She sat me down at the table. I don’t remember exactly what she said or how she told me but I do remember that it was the first time I had ever seen my mother cry.

“When he comes home from work, don’t start in with issues or problems,” Bibi tells me, smiling. “Let him relax. Have a nice supper together. Always have dinner together. And then afterwards you can talk about what is on your mind.” “That sounds like good advice, Bibi,” I say. “I like making supper for Craig.” I tell her about the pizzas we made a few weeks ago. I tell her about the dough and how it was a little too crispy. She tells me not to over mix the dough and to let it rise at room temperature. Then another piece of advice pops into her head: “And if you’re late with making supper, just quickly fry an onion in a pan. He’ll come home and the house will smell so good. He’ll be happy.”

We sit together and look out at the sea. The water is getting rougher. The wind is starting to pick up. “Let’s go in Bibi, it’s getting cold.” I turn her chair and do the circus acrobatics required to get her inside the double doors. “Where do you want to go?” I ask her. “Should we sit here in the lobby? Do you want to go up to your room?” “Jun, I want to be where ever you want to be. I just want to be together.” “Yes, Bibi,” I say, giving her another hug and wrapping her shawl around her. “Me, too.”

<< previous   next >>

Posted: May 11, 2008

Share ! Post a comment