to sit while they cook
[food relic #2] father/thorn thorn/father
My dad describes how I got a thorn in my thigh on the walk and cried, his memory differing from mine. Italian accent coming through so it’s a breathy *thhh* sound creating its own little thorn.
Thorn/Father, Father/Thorn.
I am sat at the countertop table as he is telling me this. He is making besciamella (the english usage comes from the french word béchamel) - he asks if I know how to make it and I smile and say of course, because it’s him who showed me - as a child sat on the countertop as he would repeat you have to be very careful and patient. And because when I made my first lasagna I made him email me the instructions.
My memory is like a rusty colander and a lot of what is left un-sieved revolves around food. My childhood represented by different cooking vessels and what we would eat from them. The pans from my childhood in the kitchen in the house next to Bushy Park are like this: the small saucepan with the besciamella, being repeatedly stirred with the wooden spoon; the large saucepan boiling rigatoni; the saucier with the bolognese left to simmer away for the afternoon; the extra big boiling pot for when we did homemade gnocchi, their pillowy bodies lined up on trays, then poured into the water, when they floated to the top it was a race to fish them out with the slotted spoon before they overcooked, and straight into the pesto. On saturdays, he would do the weekly shop and we would eat picnic food with salad out in the sun of the conservatory table. On sundays, it was for slow-cooked food, often a ragu, so we could leave it to alone while we went out for the afternoon.
This is one of my firelight memories. The saucepan left alone in the dark simmering way, the eerie sound of Sigur Ros playing in the background, and everything is tinged blue and there is the warm steam from the pan, and the only light come from the gas burning, and I feel somehow melancholic in a way you often do on sundays but can’t understand at that age, sensing there are some things you shouldn’t think about, but also held, knowing that I am being cooked for and looked after.
I liked to sit up on the counter next to him with my own saucepan and wooden spoon on my lap, imitating his actions. He would talk me through everything he was doing, that has always been his way of connecting. And here 20 years later, he is again repeating the instructions for besciamella, heat the butter and fold in the flour, when you have a ball, you slowly slowly start adding the milk, patiently still.
We talk about my life and my love, and I miss out all the scary details. I am watching his hands and his rings and the veins that travel along his fingers, I ask about the way he pronounces vowels and when he says air, how it sounds like huh-air he thinks I am making fun of his almost perfect Italian English, but I am just trying to occupy that snug space in his voice box that separates us to understand him better. He gives me advice and this time am glad to hear it, to feel him watching over me. My whole childhood under his care, which felt at times a dictatorship, my father-god. Who built a cardboard model of a shoe for when I kept failing to tie my own, who taught me to ride a bike by shoving a stick in the back and letting go without telling me, who taught me maths on his weekends off, and made us watch unsubtitled italian movies where he translated each line to us himself, and danced with me to Italian love songs in the kitchen, and I was always very scared of him and wanted to follow him everywhere and be held by him and thrown up in the sky.
And then suddenly, like that, thrust out into the world, waking up each day and wondering what I shall do and spending so much time meticulously planning hoping I will make the right choices and someone will tell me I am doing a good job, but no one tells me I am doing a good job, and the decisions seem to often be the wrong ones, and always whispering at men in alleyways, please tell me what to do all the time, and listening when they tell me even if I know they are stupid, and begging and begging, and doing everything to, for a moment, step outside my own brain and all the decisions, and having to get myself all tied up just to feel free of them, and feeling like I will cry everytime others cook for me and let me just sit there silenced by their care.
But here I am again, sat at the counter, and he is telling me what to do, and I am drinking it all in. And then he is cooking, and I am reading, and there is silence, and my face is getting lightly brushed by the steam, cheeks ever so slightly damp. What slow creeping peace this is. Then, like that, the kids break in, and they are showing us many things from their walk and baby maya is sleeping in the pram, so they have to whisper-shout, and his attention is pulled off away in many directions but I feel it still, bathing me all over, and the calm.
