Pepere

Last week I made a tortiere for the department holiday luncheon. A tortiere is the traditional French-Canadian Christmas meat pie. On Christmas Eve (Reveillon), French-Canadians would attend midnight Mass, come home and gather to eat tortieres, drink beer and open presents. When I make a tortiere the smells take me back to the nostalgic place of childhood; of seeing the world from a stature so small everything is wondrous and big.

 

My grandfather was born in Quebec at the end of the 19th century. His family moved to Rhode Island when he was just a baby. He played semi-pro baseball (second base), hated “I Love Lucy,” followed the Red Sox, made his own cigarettes and loved me. I grew up in an environment one doesn’t too often find these days. My grandfather owned a “tenement house” in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Each of the four apartments was occupied by members of my family. My grandparents lived “first floor front,” my family lived “first-floor rear.” In the second floor apartments were two sets of aunts and uncles and their children. There were eleven cousins in the house. In the apartment just above ours my aunt and uncle lived with six children. These apartments had four rooms. I never heard any noise. My mother tells a different story. My brothers held a grudge for a very long time and reminded me repeatedly that because I was born they lost their living room. One set of parents, two sons and a daughter required three bedrooms. In a four room apartment that meant three bedrooms and a kitchen.

 

When I was very little some of my cousins were already teenagers and they taught me how to dance the Frug and the Mashed Potato. My  cousin Susie would tell me about the latest in her seemingly endless string of boyfriends and dreamy-eyed, she would sing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” for the current one lucky enough to bear that name. My three oldest male cousins would come downstairs so that my mother could alter the hem on a new pair of pants they needed for that evening’s date. They were very handsome and played musical instruments. They successively all joined the Navy and when they came home they wore their white or navy blue bell-bottomed sailor uniforms, the little white sailor cap worn cockily to the side. Women swooned. My cousin Michelle, just a few years older than I told me about sex and destroyed my belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. She was a dare devil and the rebel of the house, and my hero.

 

But for me, the figure in the house that loomed the largest was my grandfather Samuel, my “Pepere.” My grandfather was a “machinist.” I still don’t know what that means. I don’t know if he operated machinery in the textile factories that were the economic foundation of Woonsocket, or if he repaired them. I do know that because he was a “machinist” he always had work, even during The Depression. I was the youngest of the grandchildren living in the house and when he retired I was not yet in school. He was home. I was home. I was his shadow.

 

My family’s apartment and my grandparent’s apartment were separated by a narrow hallway. I pattered across that hallway so early in the morning that I'd still be wearing my pajamas and I watched him while he made his breakfast. I don’t even think I knocked. Pepere ate the same thing every morning of his life and it was so gross, I never took a bite. I think he offered a little to me every now and then just so he could see the look of terror on my face at the prospect of actually taking a spoonful. First, he filled a bowl with Wheaties and added the milk. Then he cracked a raw egg over the cereal and placed the bowl at the back of the stove to warm. Now mind you, the egg wouldn’t cook. He allowed the mixture to sit, which meant that the egg white oozed through the eventual soggy mess. And then he ate; egg white and yolk and Wheaties dripping from the spoon. In the winter my grandmother always had a big pot of oatmeal cooking on the stove and I ate that, but not in the usual way of course. I’d spoon big dollops of the cooked cereal on the corners of my buttered toast and eat the gook-smeared toast with my greedy little hands. It is a comfort food for me, even now.  When I am sick I make oatmeal and toast and spoon the oatmeal on the bread; it makes a precarious journey from bowl to mouth, the oatmeal so heavy on the toast, the bread is always on the verge of limping over.

 

My grandfather played the harmonica, the piano and the mouth bow. The latter a marvel to be sure and I recognized the sound years later when I heard the boing-boing of it on a Buffy Sainte-Marie album. I think the only time he lost patience with me was when he tried to teach me the piano. Day after day I just couldn’t get it. He resorted to applying little Scotch-taped letters to the keys to help me along but to no avail. And rather than risk furthering his frustration, I quit.

 

He had a wood-working shop in the basement and he gave me little chores to do, like sanding or varnishing. I had a little sterling silver charm bracelet with filigreed charms of Catholic saints, a gift from a pious aunt. Because of my love for Church (not the aunt), it was my most precious possession. One day my grandfather presented me with a new charm. He had carved a basket from a peach stone, varnished it ‘til it shone and attached a little silver ring to the miniature handle so that I could add it to my bracelet. After his death, I lost the bracelet on the street, in the snow and when the snow melted I searched and searched into spring. Up and down the street, again and again I walked with my back bent, eyes to the ground.

I never found it and I was heartbroken.

 

I know that every child likes to think they were the favored child of an important adult in their lives. But I really was my grandfather’s. My mother said so. To everyone else he appeared gruff and grumpy. He lost his temper at the never ending parade of cousins and friends on the front porch, despite his bellowing, “Get off the piazza!” I don’t know why French-Canadians would call a porch a piazza. It hardly seems like a French word to me. We heard his profanities, muttered in French when he found orange peels under the piazza.  My little girlfriends were afraid of him. I thought they were silly. Towards me, except for the short-lived piano tutorial, (and even then, he’d walk out of the room rather than speak a hurtful word), he was never anything but gentle and loving.

 

To be continued…