Post 26: Food Is Love

Ignoring all manner of diets, doctors, and foreboding lab results, Aunt Cam served GranMag everything that not only elevated her joy but also her erratic blood pressure: fried chicken and milk gravy from the drippings, candied yams, half-runner beans in season, pickled beets, cucumber salad with purple onions, and homemade yeast rolls and butter. Lots of butter. While Aunt Cam’s food never actually killed anyone, it was likely a silent accomplice.

Aunt Cam’s dinner table was a treasure map, each place setting yielding a story. The table linens likely came from an antiquing trip in New England. The German china was taken in trade for cigarettes and chocolate bars on the black market in Berlin after the war (Aunt Cam had accompanied Uncle Lee to Berlin in 1946 during the Army’s implementation of the Marshall Plan, and became a highly proficient trader in domestic goods). The crystal goblets were procured from an estate sale in Vienna during the same period.

The ornate flatware was purchased from a silver dealer in New York in the ’50s during the same trip where Aunt Cam found and bargained for the handloomed Persian rug underfoot. She discovered the dining room table in a barn in a rural part of Virginia’s Eastern Shore and bought the chairs from elderly friends who were moving. Over the course of two winters, my mother made the chair seats, each hand-done in intricate needlepoint. The set of eight were Mama’s birthday present to Aunt Cam the year she turned fifty.

At the dinner table, Aunt Cam’s stories were always big and infused with more than a little drama. They often left adults suspect of whether her truth was absolute, exaggerated, outright manufactured for effect, or some combination of these. At five or six, I was much too engrossed in the story to even begin to question the storyteller. It was only years later that I began to catch some of the inconsistencies between Aunt Cam’s 1963 versions and the same stories resurrected some thirty years later.

Dinner at Aunt Cam’s culminated in dessert. In true Southern style, she would conclude dinner for her mother and me with one of two specialties: homemade apple pie (Aunt Cam’s recipe) or coconut cake (Aunt Emily’s recipe). When she could coax Uncle Lee to bring up the ice cream maker from the cellar, dessert would come with a side of fresh vanilla ice cream. I shudder to think about GranMag’s blood sugar levels as we rose from Aunt Cam’s dinner table.

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John, I am hungry. Really hungry. Why am I feeling hunger? Or for that matter, the dull pain in my abdomen? If I’m in the Hereafter, shouldn’t hunger and pain be off limits? And, I’m annoyed. There is no rest in this place: voices yelling my name. Wake up. Can you hear me? Wake up! We’re right here. Who? I can’t understand. Is it you, John? Why are you yelling at me? All I’d really like right now is a piece of Aunt Cam’s apple pie. Now that would be heaven.

                                            *                     

True to their farm heritage, GranMag and Aunt Cam went to bed as soon as the dinner cookware and dishes had been cleared, washed, and put away. By 8:30 p.m., the house was quiet and Uncle Lee and I were earnestly engaged in a card game, checkers, or chess. An hour later, Uncle Lee would carry me up to my small room above the kitchen and put me to bed.

            Sunday mornings meant church, specifically the Episcopal church around the corner from Aunt Cam and Uncle Lee’s storybook New-England-style colonial. Uncle Lee sang loudly and confidently in the church choir of eight. Aunt Cam sat with GranMag and me in the front row, occasionally looking over her shoulder to see who was and who was not in attendance.

When I asked her how we got to sit in the coveted front row seats, she replied, “Oh, honey, that’s easy. Your uncle Lee works harder for the bishop than he ever does for himself, and I pay for every damn thing this ancient building needs, so we’ve earned more than a seat. We’ve got the whole pew.” A curse word in church on a Sunday would earn Aunt Cam a disapproving look from GranMag, who would then turn to me with her knowing grin. It was easy to see that, despite seemingly vast differences in propriety and temperament, Aunt Cam got her piss and vinegar from my sweet, serious GranMag.

After a fried trout lunch in our booth in the Briarwood Grille, Uncle Lee would take GranMag back to the house for a rest, and Aunt Cam and I would head for the Tazewell Zoo. In hindsight, the zoo was rather cramped and tattered, but with Aunt Cam, it never got old. Their claim to fame was a rather large salamander-like creature with two right feet. Saving the best for last, Aunt Cam and I meandered through the zoo at my child-like pace. After delaying as long as possible, we paid homage to the coveted but confused-looking mutant creature and then piled into Aunt Camille’s cavernous Volvo.

Refreshed from her nap, GranMag was packed and waiting for us on the front porch, enjoying the relaxing back and forth of the slider loveseat. Our visit’s end accelerated at this point, as we were all mindful of the Powhatan Arrow’s exact and unwavering departure for home at 2:49 p.m.

Uncle Lee drove us to the station. Proudly at the helm of his mammoth grey Pontiac Bonneville that surrounded us in leather and chrome, he got us to the station at precisely 2:30 p.m. On the return trip, there was no detour to the station café, and we were usually two of a total of only five or six other departing passengers. An earlier arrival would have been a waste of valuable visiting time.

It was, at this point, that I often found myself feeling overwhelmed with sadness, upset by the ending of our adventure that had begun only the day before. My bemused Aunt Cam offered her standard and effective hug along with words of consolation: “Sweetie, you’ll be coming back to visit us real soon, right? You’ll see. And we’ll take a drive and get a milkshake at Mellman’s, ok?” This always seemed to quell my tears, mainly because I knew she meant it, that she wouldn’t forget it, and that the drive and the milkshake would (and did) come to pass on subsequent visits.

With a gentle tug of GranMag’s hand, I heeded the conductor’s authoritative call to board. We stepped onto the Powhatan Arrow, settled into our window seats, and turned to wave goodbye to Uncle Lee and Aunt Cam. I would press my face to the window as we pulled out of the station, holding the image of the two of them as long as I could, until they and the station became specks against the backdrop of Big Walker Mountain.

As Briarwood shrank and then disappeared into a fold in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the mighty locomotive pulled us forcefully, and then steadily back through Elkhorn Tunnel down the eastward face of the mountain. With billowing smoke trailing behind us, we cut across the southernmost end of the Shenandoah Valley.

I sat quietly and fully contented, studying the colors of the hillsides and feeling the warmth of GranMag beside me. Completing that pact we had made with the conductor, the Powhatan Arrow raced toward the Virginia valley I called home and delivered GranMag and me without incident to the N&W station where both my parents would be patiently waiting on Platform Five.