Untitled (Tend #16-18)
by Maia Dolphin-Krute
I am doing a Genealogy Roadshow puzzle, where all the pieces look a bit like me only you don’t know how many pieces there are or exactly where you might find them. Some pieces are marriage or birth certificates; others are an address or memory, which you hope is remembered correctly. Why is family history such an easy thing to become obsessed by? I used to be obsessed with words or science or organs, but now I stay up at night trying to find a marriage announcement for my grandparents because my great-grandmother’s missing name is the current biggest thorn in my side.
Probably I’m just getting mellow in my old age, where the funniest thing that happened this week was my parents hanging inflatable mistletoe over their table even though the thing looked like a gallbladder or liver and my biggest concern is whether the cat’s eye still looks teary (she’s fine). Mellow is usually about food (wine, miso) or maybe color (an earthy ochre compared to safety vest yellow); it’s something easy on the eyes or palette, something that doesn’t offend the senses. In food, it’s frequently a quality of fermentation, the softening of flavors as they sit over time, the earthy taste of mold. The family genealogy puzzle starts mellow, but the thing about Jewish families is that anyone who didn’t come here was killed. My great-grandfather had been a medical student in Russia (now the Ukraine), where he was conscripted at Cossack-held bayonet point into the Russian army to serve as a medic. When he arrived in Massachusetts in 1922 (having first had to walk from the Ukraine to Romania for papers, then go back for his wife), he started working in a hardware store and worked there for the rest of his life (living around the corner from the library where I wrote my second book).
*
Today I bake a poppy seed cake, the recipe for which I found in my grandmother’s box of recipe cards: an index card in her handwriting, neatly titled “Tybee’s Poppy Seed Cake.” Tybee would have been her aunt, briefly excommunicated from the family for having married an Irish janitor (who worked at the public school where she taught). During this excommunication, my great-grandmother continued to pass her food out the window, whatever that actually means. Her cake came out neatly speckled and very sweet; my husband ate all of it.
*
I invite my neighbors to a backyard ice sculpture contest. I make a true-to-life sculpture of the cats who live or used to live here, one with his calico pattern etched in, the current cat resident with the ice tip of her ear knocked off. The winner creates a life size model of the couch on the back porch, complete with the bag of someone’s ex’s clothes that sat outside here for many, many months.
At my wedding, fruit will be served from an ice sculpture in the shape of the Boston Young Men’s Hebrew Association, where my great-grandfather was president in 1916; I’ll stack apples on the front steps. Next to it will be a cornucopia straight out of the pages of Martha Stewart Weddings (1993), in the design of my great-great-great-grandmother, who killed a burglar with an ax (I just keep a hammer on my side of the bed). The ornamental cabbages that make up the swirls of her hair I grew in my own backyard. Martha would be proud.
I am doing a Genealogy Roadshow puzzle, where all the pieces look a bit like me only you don’t know how many pieces there are or exactly where you might find them. Some pieces are marriage or birth certificates; others are an address or memory, which you hope is remembered correctly. Why is family history such an easy thing to become obsessed by? I used to be obsessed with words or science or organs, but now I stay up at night trying to find a marriage announcement for my grandparents because my great-grandmother’s missing name is the current biggest thorn in my side.
Probably I’m just getting mellow in my old age, where the funniest thing that happened this week was my parents hanging inflatable mistletoe over their table even though the thing looked like a gallbladder or liver and my biggest concern is whether the cat’s eye still looks teary (she’s fine). Mellow is usually about food (wine, miso) or maybe color (an earthy ochre compared to safety vest yellow); it’s something easy on the eyes or palette, something that doesn’t offend the senses. In food, it’s frequently a quality of fermentation, the softening of flavors as they sit over time, the earthy taste of mold. The family genealogy puzzle starts mellow, but the thing about Jewish families is that anyone who didn’t come here was killed. My great-grandfather had been a medical student in Russia (now the Ukraine), where he was conscripted at Cossack-held bayonet point into the Russian army to serve as a medic. When he arrived in Massachusetts in 1922 (having first had to walk from the Ukraine to Romania for papers, then go back for his wife), he started working in a hardware store and worked there for the rest of his life (living around the corner from the library where I wrote my second book).
*
Today I bake a poppy seed cake, the recipe for which I found in my grandmother’s box of recipe cards: an index card in her handwriting, neatly titled “Tybee’s Poppy Seed Cake.” Tybee would have been her aunt, briefly excommunicated from the family for having married an Irish janitor (who worked at the public school where she taught). During this excommunication, my great-grandmother continued to pass her food out the window, whatever that actually means. Her cake came out neatly speckled and very sweet; my husband ate all of it.
*
I invite my neighbors to a backyard ice sculpture contest. I make a true-to-life sculpture of the cats who live or used to live here, one with his calico pattern etched in, the current cat resident with the ice tip of her ear knocked off. The winner creates a life size model of the couch on the back porch, complete with the bag of someone’s ex’s clothes that sat outside here for many, many months.
At my wedding, fruit will be served from an ice sculpture in the shape of the Boston Young Men’s Hebrew Association, where my great-grandfather was president in 1916; I’ll stack apples on the front steps. Next to it will be a cornucopia straight out of the pages of Martha Stewart Weddings (1993), in the design of my great-great-great-grandmother, who killed a burglar with an ax (I just keep a hammer on my side of the bed). The ornamental cabbages that make up the swirls of her hair I grew in my own backyard. Martha would be proud.