Food and Memories

Tonight I was at the local Mexican supermarket in my neighborhood…

Seeing the brown faces at the deli
Or the grandmother's picking out produce
Or the smells coming from the carneceria
made me think of my Grandmother.

So I grabbed an apple turnover from the paneceria,
brought it home
and now I am enjoying it with my hot tea.
(I gave up coffee three years ago)
It's almost like my Grandmother's old ritual
of sitting down at 9:30 or 10 at night
and having a little pan dulce
with her cafecito.

That's pretty much the extent of my Spanish.
Food.
And food is pretty much my entry into
a lot of experiences.

I noticed that there's a ramen festival in San Gabriel
next weekend.
That's something my Dad would have taken me
to.
Everytime something tastes delicious I think of him.
He loved the stories of my food adventures:
the orange creme angel hair in Florence,
the wild boar ragu,
wines,
sushi,
anything adventurous and exotic. My Dad loved to hear about it all.

And my Grandmother would take us to the market
and we would watch the tortillas being made by machine.

My Dad would take us to really stinky Chinese or Korean
markets.
Or we would go to the Chinese deli and eat something that
was chock full of sodium.
I remember the looks I would give him
when he was sick
and he dragged me to the Asian market
so he could get jok, a rice porridge,
or lau lay with butterfish and pork.
It all had too much salt in it,
and he had to watch his salt
because he was dying.
But he was really dying from hearing me
talk about all the foods he couldn't eat.
But he didn't care.
He didn't want to live
in a tasteless world.
So if he was digging himself
into an early grave, he was
happy to hold the shovel.

I wish he had just told me earlier,
"Listen, I don't want to live, so
let's just go out eating whatever
the fuck I want to."
I wish now we could have had some
crazy extravagant meals.
It would have been fun to take him out
and show him a few things I knew
about eating.

I remember the last lunch we had out.
We met up with his friends at a steak house
in Van Nuys called The Sherman Room.
He ate all the steak, fries and ketchup he
could handle.
I looked the other way.
I wish I had been more permissive.
Food was what he loved.
And I kept restricting him from it
because I thought it was keeping him
alive.

I kept restricting love.
How ironic because that's
what he did with me
my whole life.

I guess I learned from the master.

My Grandmother never kept any indulgence
from me.
Her tamales were the best.
We haven't made them in years,
since my Dad got sick.
I think we need to make them again this Christmas.

I miss them both.
It's hard.
To have those memories
and not to continue to share
with them,
or create new ones.

I am grateful for those memories.
I am grateful for the traditions that have been passed on.
I am grateful for my ability to cook.
I am grateful that I have a niece and two nephews to pass on those traditions to.