I talk all the time about how I don’t remember events, but I do remember meals. The good, the bad and the ugly, but most of the time the food I remember is associated with a person who has touched me. Food is Love. God is Love too, but food is a lot easier to whip up and give to someone than God.

My grandmother made the Worlds Best Pork Chops. My happiest childhood memories were in her kitchen. She had appetizers of celery and carrot sticks, shoved into a Welch’s Jelly glass half full of water to keep them “fresh”. There was always blackberry Jell-O in a blue pyrex refrigerator dish. I have that dish now. Unfortunately she took the World’s Best Pork Chop recipe to the grave, but I do know how to make her hamburgers. They were, unequivocally and without any room for argument,  the worst hamburgers I have ever had in my life.

And every once in a while, I make them exactly the way she did, in the exact same frying pan she used.  And it’s like she’s still here and all is right with the world.

When I was five, I postponed running away from home to stay for my mother’s stuffed cabbage. Everything was ready. Every toy, every stitch of clothing I’d collected in my five years was piled on the bed, ready to go wherever it was I was going. Right up until the smell of stuffed cabbage wafted into my room. Running away could wait till morning. She was no fool, my mother.

Christmas morning smelled like blintzes. I get the irony, but that’s the way we rolled, man. Blintz skins were made one at a time in a small pan, which I own today. They were laid out to cool on with clean dishtowels that covered the kitchen table, before being filled, rolled and subsequently fried for breakfast and served with sour cream. My father & I stole the warm dough as it cooled when she wasn’t looking. Like I said, she was no fool. She made just enough fuss to let us think we got away with something. She’d also made extra, knowing half the joy of blintzes was in stealing the still warm skins.

And today, every time I go home there is fresh chocolate pudding in the refrigerator. There always has been.  The first thing I do, when I get to her house is check the refrigerator, because food is love and even if I’ve forgotten, it’s always there. If I’m lucky, they’re still cooling on the counter, the pot has yet to be washed and I get pot lickings. Another epicurean delight I shared with my dad. The pudding pot and spoon.

A friend from Israeli stayed with me recently and made me an Israeli breakfast of eggs and a particular salad. It was amazing. She’s gone home, I miss her, and so, I make the eggs the same way and it’s like she never left.

In a Jewish home, and I’ve seen it in my Italian family’s homes too, you have to take something to eat. Something. Anything. Otherwise, we’ll lose our minds trying to figure out just what we can offer you that you will like. It is beyond comprehension that you don’t want something.

Food tugs on the heart strings, or it does on mine. I have collected all the pans, pots and bowls those loving meals were made with. I can turn back time simply by chopping, mixing, baking what it was you made for me with love that day, those days.

Food is love. If you refuse my food, you refuse my love.

Two years ago I was turned down for a graduate education program, a blessing in disguise. I’ve been told my whole life that I look like a school teacher, but I do not, repeat, do not have the skills or temperament. It’s a case of wanting to want.

I want to want to be a teacher. I think I should. I shouldn’t. Really. I shouldn’t. But I forget.

I wasted a week in anger this past month trying to force the admissions office to tell me why they rejected me, two years ago. I went on a wild goose chase to a handful of different officials, each one pointing me towards someone else until I was back where I started.

I got aggressive and sarcastic.

They stopped returning my emails.

What was that all about? I’m in a graduate program for something I love.

I want control.
I’m not working, my life is in flux & the need for control rears it’s ugly head. Big time.
I think I need to know everything, need to run every show.

When I was as kid and the phone rang, I’d race to get it. Frequently, my dad beat me to it. Afterwards when I asked, he wouldn’t tell me who it’d been. He did that too, on family outings. I’d be told only to get my coat, but not where we were going. Drenched in the cold sweat of my absolute powerlessness, drowning in the fear and panic of having no control over where I was going, those trips were excruciating. It didn’t happen every time, just often enough.

I don’t know if he withheld this arbitrary information out of petty meanness or he thought it was funny, if it fed his need for control or if he was simply trying to teach me to chillax and overcome the obsessive need I had to control something, anything, everything. Probably some combo platter, but it felt mean.

I still struggle with needing to know everything & having to run the show. Really, I need to accept that I’m never even going to know most things and the “show” generally runs perfectly well without my help.

I got an email last week. Graduate applications are destroyed after that particular semester begins. I spent all that time and energy, all that anger, trying to force people to look at something that no longer exists.

Everything in life is a lesson. Everything. The best I can hope for is to get the lesson the first time so I don’t have to keep replaying the same tapes, four times, five times and on and on.

This was not my first lesson about powerlessness and resentment, but it only lasted a week, so it I’m down to the Cliff Notes versions, rather than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

TELL ME: What lessons do you struggle with, find that you keep repeating? Which ones are you glad to be done with? Post your thoughts below. Talk to me

I sat in a cramped anteroom for twenty minutes as a handful of people went in but oddly, no one came back out. I was a little suspicious, I always am – daddy was a con man, after all, and okay, I’ve been guilty of a bit of the bait & switch as well -  but I try to dismiss that innate prejudice and just show up.

It was exactly the kind of scam I warned tadpole actors about when I was an agent. The “casting director” talked fast, shuffled papers and running a vocal version of three card monte, offered to get me work immediately. Immediately after I paid $99 for headshots they’d shoot themselves, right then, right that very second, c’mon, c’cmon when do you want to start, let’s go, let’s get things moving…

No thanks.
I didn’t come here to spend money.

In any good scam, it’s important to keep marks clear of each other. I was hustled out through a labyrinth of back hallways to a door on the other side of the building. Shades of P.T. Barnum. This way to the Egress, indeed.

One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.

When something sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is. It’s classic Damon Runyon, but my dad told me that story and I believed they were his words for years.

The Big F, gave me a lot of stuff, he was all about survival, all about not getting taken advantage of. Guys like Sky Masterson were his heroes & they became mine for better or worse. I learned to be skeptical, to trust slowly, if at all, and thanks to that I’ve made it through life with a minimal of cider in my ears.

My friend Leah’s dad says “All you have to do is dream the dream and do it. The rest will work itself out.”

The Big F made sure I’d never go hungry, or be homeless. His feet were firmly planted on the ground, I don’t think he ever felt safe enough to dream. He gave me all he had to give.

I’m going to borrow a bit of Leah’s dad. I don’t think anyone will mind….

TELL ME: Are faith and dreams survival skills? Post your thoughts below, talk to me.

Not a thief, not a Catch Me if You Can con man, but a con none the less.  Of course, this was before he married my moms.

Before he married Big Edie he was a lot of things. I was raised on the stories of a Fred before my moms, before me. That’s him, front and center with his Navy pals. He was a handsome rogue & a gypsy tea leaf reader. He read crystal balls, minds, tarot cards, handwriting & palms. He worked the carnival side shows & the burlesque halls. He rode a motorcycle & wore black leather. He was The Wild One. He was Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone rolled into one. A real buckler of swash, he had style & flash and was bigger than life to me as a kid. I was awed and I was terrified.

I fought for the privilege of saddle soaping his leather m/c jacket. It was years before I was allowed to touch the crystal ball.   

He knew everything about everything and when he didn’t he sounded like he did. With facts and statistics at his fingertips, he won every argument in the house for the first fifteen years or so of my life. Until the day Big Edie questioned him, Where’d you get your facts?, she asked. He laughed like hell. He’d made it up. All of it. You could never tell if he was telling the truth or weaving a story just for the sake of a story.

I learned to be suspicious, and that while ‘smart’ matters, seeming smart is sometimes enough.

He gave me my love of the slightly shady, of all things circus & carny, strippers & burley-que queens, freaks & sideshows, werewolves & vampires. He taught me to avoid three card monte, the necessity of a shill, the difference between a long con and a short con and the art of misdirection.

I learned to hide my soft parts, and to think on my feet.

I was raised on the Wizard of Oz (a long con, in Technicolor), Damon Runyon, Yellow Kid Weil and P.T. Barnum. There’s a sucker born every minute, kid, a sucker born every minute.

I was one of those suckers. I believed he could read minds, see the future, create magic. He was make-believe and we bought it, starting with the woman who ran the gypsy tea room when he was a moviestar handsome teen with deep set eyes who looked the part.

I believed in the stories and the magic when I was a kid. They kept him untouchable, kept us all at a distance; the con kept his own soft parts safe.

Maybe all parents have to have feet of clay sooner or later. Maybe every little girl thinks her daddy is magic and sooner or later struggles with the fact that he’s only human. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, he’s not a bad man, he’s just a very bad wizard.

How is it so easy to write about my mother, and so hard to write about my dad?

The fact that I shrink from writing about him tells me I’m not quite ready to sleep in Thursday mornings and drop Therapy Guy just yet.

With Big Edie, it’s all very clear. She’s my crazymaker. That’ll never change. I love her so much that if I loved her one tiny bit more my heart would explode, there’d be bits & chunks of my heart splattered all over the wall.

With Fred, the feelings are not quite as easily identified.

I discovered Fred natural spring water last summer. I have two empty bottles in my kitchen cabinet  I cannot bring myself to throw out. The man has been dead for almost 9 years.  

He had a photography studio, the logo was a five foot tall representation of his face. The studio closed when I was 15. I am 52. The giant face, paint peeling, chipped & faded, is in my coat closet, facing the wall, behind the coats. Sometimes I tell myself I keep it because my Aunt Magda designed it. Uh-huh. I say that. I do.

Fred taught me life lessons the best he could. He taught me what he knew.

If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, get yourself a job in a restaurant. Valuable advice, easily adapted to all sort of situations.

I learned how to turn a dollar into two with bar bets I couldn’t lose. And how to pick the sucker who would pay rather than punch me in the nose for getting over.

One of my earliest memories is of shooting crap with my dad against the fireplace wall in our house. It was how I learned to count, shooting crap & play blackjack. Big Edie yelling from the kitchen, “Don’t take the kid’s money.” Fred yelling back, “If the kid’s gonna learn to gamble, the kid’s gotta learn to lose.“  I sat mutely while he scooped up my allowance. My three pennies. I was three years old.

I learned not to risk anything I wasn’t willing to lose.

I was terrified of Fred. And I worshipped him.

He taught me how to survive on nothing, or almost nothing. How to get by if I had no money, no place to live, no where to eat. I’m grateful for those lessons.

What I didn’t learn was how to handle abundance of any kind–love, attention, money, time, talent, dreams, friends. He passed on what he knew, that’s all he could do.

The lessons of love & abundance I’ve had to learn on my own and it’s been harder than it sounds. I didn’t grow receptors for that stuff. And so, me & Therapy Guy, we have a future together. I believe he’s planning on an Ivy League college for his kid. I believe I’m paying for it. Lucky for me, I know how to turn a dollar into two.

She drives me crazy, my mother does. You know what they say, no one can push your buttons like the folks who installed them – and Big Edie & I are preternaturally close (hence, the endearment, Big Edie). She doesn’t see it like that, as co-dependence or enmeshment or any of those other psychobabble terms. “We just have a really good relationship“, she says.

She knows when I’m hurt. Physically or psychologically, without seeing or talking to me, she has that innate Jewish mother’s remote viewing where they know if you’re hurt even before you do. She gets “twitchy”. She’s not always right, but I like that her radar is tuned to my well-being, station KJSD.   

We have no secrets. Mothers & daughters should have some, Therapy Guy says. But I don’t know any other way & so we tell each other everything. Except of course the important medical stuff, the stuff we should be sharing, the stuff we promise to never keep secret. That we hold back from each other for just a little while to keep the other from worrying. We both do it. We both lie to each other about it.

She’s got this new Italian boyfriend, her first since Fred died in 2000. That’s a long time between hugs. Each time I visit since they “hooked up” I see a woman more comfortable in her skin, more the Big Edie I imagine she was before the years of a hard marriage took its toll. She laughs & smiles all the time. She’s flirtatious & playful. She’s spoiled & silly.

She’s feisty in a way she thinks is absolutely freakin’ adorable. Apparently, the Italian thinks so, too.

My mom is a caretaker, so is her guy. They care about each others feelings, share chores and responsibilities. I  watch her putter after someone who enjoys her company. I love seeing someone putter after her. They are companions, companions with respect and affection for each other. It’s a wonderful thing to watch.

I’m a little jealous, I admit it. Therapy Guy tells me I need to get over it, move on & get my own boo. I’m not sure that I do though, because I’m not that kind of jealous. She was always the pretty one, the attention getter. She was the object of my father’s obsession. I don’t resent her having a boyfriend, I expect her to have a boyfriend.  But my inner spoiled baby is surfacing, the only child that still wants to be the the only one.

I can let that go. The drive out to Long Island becomes a trip back in time where I get to see what Big Edie was like as a girl. When I call on the phone & hear Sinatra in the background, I know they’ve been dancing, old school, in each others arms, bodies warm and touching. They tease each other like high school kids who still have little secret crushes on each other, even after they’ve gone to prom. He shops for bargains, not saving a dime because he buys double, giving her half the produce, the eggs, whatever it was that was on sale. Her refrigerator is stocked with enough food to feed my entire office for a week. The Italian has gained 30 pounds.

Mother’s Day is the day you’re supposed to treat your mom special, take her out to dinner, treat her fancy. That’s not how we roll. We cooked together, two grown assed women and fifty two years of love and baggage maneuvering in a tiny kitchen. We ate, she laughed, drank her wine, the boyfriend cleaned up, she made fun of us both whenever she got the chance and was as cute as she possibly could be.

Before the boyfriend, at the end of a visit, Big Edie would freshen her lipstick, walk me either to my car where she’d stand and wave from the curb while I buckled in, or to the train station where my 79 year old mother would stand on the platform waving like an idiot, trotting alongside the train as it pulled out. It mortified me. Which is exactly why she did it. It cracked her up.

Sunday, after dinner and ice cream, I kissed them both goodbye, kissed her again, hugged her. I left my mom with a guy that thinks she’s just the bees knees & doesn’t want to change her not one bit. I rode the elevator downstairs alone. I can’t say what kind of day it was for her, but for me, it was a great Mother’s Day.