I wrote "Bon Appétit" as an assignment for a creative writing class at El Camino in 1995. That is to say, I was given a totally different assignment, and this is what I turned in. Amazingly, I still got an A.
I reworked this a couple of times as my rebellious emotions mellowed with age and my writing skills sharpened with time. For Dad, whose birthday would have been yesterday, and for Jolene and Joselyn, who were with me at the table.
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| Joanie Harmon, "The Power of Three" Digital photograph, 2005 |
Every Thursday morning, there was a farmer’s market at the Redondo
Beach pier. My parents would take my sisters and me to do the week’s shopping for fresh fruit, vegetables, and
fish. The sun seemed brighter then, with the sky a pale and cloudless blue, the
color of a 1964 Ford Falcon.
My sister and I would follow our parents silently through
the stalls, drinking in all the sights, smells, and sounds of a world beyond
our sterile suburban existence. At home, nature thrived on man-made terms in
neat ceramic planters and manicured lawns. At the pier it was less controlled,
the shoppers and diners drawn by the opportunity to eat fish that had been breathing
only minutes before it was cooked.
Our father was the chef of the family and selected ingredients for a weekly menu that would make today’s
dietitians raise their eyebrows in horror. My favorite part of the trip was to
watch him select live crabs from a swirling tank of sea water. We marveled at
these crustaceans that looked like the gaudy toys we bought at the supermarket.
But these fantastic creatures were transformed into dinner through a steamy demise on the kitchen stove.
In the days before salt, sugar, butter, and love were taken
out of food so that we could all live a little longer, Dad would serve thick
steaks with baked potatoes wrapped in foil. He would fry up the fat that he trimmed off and let us eat it as "cracklings." Liver and onions were served with a strip on bacon, and spaghetti with meat sauce was topped with fragrant shreds of
parmesan cheese. I would pluck the tomatoes that he grew in the backyard off the vine and eat them greedily before my mother would make me wash the sunshine
off of them.
My sisters and I ate with gusto and abandon, never counting
calories or the number of helpings we consumed. For the most part, a youthful
metabolism took care of any excess. Our parents made food a celebration, an
embodiment of parental concern and well-being at home.
While Dad reigned over the kitchen, Mom applied her hand to
the rest of the house and our collective psyche. She slipcovered the sofa with
clear vinyl to protect it - and anyone from getting comfortable, and installed
electric icons of the Virgin Mary around the house to protect
us from ourselves. Every window in the house was covered with decorative iron
bars that were supposed to keep intruders out, but only succeeded in keeping
its inhabitants in.
The one redeeming feature of Mom's décor was a profusion
of flowers from the weekly shopping excursion, supplied by a local family that
grew their wares on several acres in Palos Verdes. I was intoxicated by
the brilliance of pink stargazer lilies, flaming red and yellow poppies, and
smoky blue irises that made my 64-color box of Crayolas pale in comparison.
These flowers would fill the house with an unparalleled light and scent that
could only have come from the earth, a welcome antidote to the iron bars and
dark Spanish furnishings that Mom favored.
Each in their own way, our parents embodied the conflicting
sides of our natures. Dad had a zest for life that pervaded the
simplest thought and action without compromise. Mom had an equally strong
tendency, with good intentions nonetheless, to subdue such abandon. Dad died
when I was eleven, taking his decadent cuisine and blue skies with him. Mom attempted
to fill both parental roles and put us on high-fiber, low-cholesterol diets
that cleared our systems of unnecessary toxins - as well as part of the joy of
living.
The sundrenched bouquets from the farmer’s market were
replaced by concoctions of silk flowers that never wilted or left
water rings on the piano. Once at Christmas, I scorched the varnish on the piano lid by burning candles arranged on fragrant - and very, very dry - pine boughs that went up in unexpected flames. Disaster was quickly averted, but the scar on the piano
remains as a reminder that life is messy. Growing up, apparently, was as well.
In my own home as an adult, I tempered my mother's heightened sense of
order and denial with generous portions of Dad’s joie de vivre. I left my blinds and windows open. I would regularly offset a healthy dinner of a
big salad with half a carton of Chunky Monkey for dessert. My middle-aged metabolism demands that I work
off the excesses of good living at the gym, but it’s worth the effort. Thanks
to our imaginative parents who made the acts of everyday living an art, my
sisters and I are quite adept at having our cake and eating it too.
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