Our daughters tell their friends that their dad is not a crybaby, and that I only cry on special occasions. Special occasions, like breakfast. Like Hallmark ads. Like chick movies. Like Super Bowl ads — remember the horsey and the puppy?
And other special occasions. Like eating an apple. I have carved up a gorgeous Honey Crisp, put the slices in a bowl, and am about to toss the core…but I stop. Most people toss the core into the garbage disposal or the compost pail, but I can’t do that right now; because the sight of the remnant on the cutting board conjures up a snapshot of my mom, for whom an apple core constituted a meal unto itself.
This Depression Era lass was beyond frugal. She never wasted a thing; and I have such a vivid memory of Audrey devouring an apple. She would gnaw on it until the only thing left was the stem. She ate the seeds and everything. It was a sight to behold. And it wasn’t just apples; you should have seen her scavenge a chicken wing, right down to the marrow. You could have sold tickets.
Which is why on this morning I am a little weepy in remembrance of my mother’s quirky habit of making a banquet out of everyone else’s leftovers. When there was a family gathering at the local Denny’s, Audrey didn’t order anything except a cup of coffee and an empty plate; and when everyone else was done, she would scrape the stuff from all the other plates onto her own. That was Audrey’s dinner. I told her once that she reminded me of Charlotte’s friend Templeton the rat, who goes to the fairgrounds at the end of the day and gorges on the smorgasbord of throwaways and leavings. Strangely, she was offended by that.
And she took her own sweet time. This is the woman who could take half-a-day just to finish a wing. Yes, it took a lot of patience to go out to dinner with Grammy, but that wasn’t the hardest part. Sometimes she would get antsy and begin to snitch stuff off the rest of our plates before we were finished.
“Daa-aad! Grammy’s eating my fries.”
After a while we all agreed to a change of habits. Rather than guarding our plates, and then waiting for her to finish, we began to share a portion of our orders with her. Each of us gave her a morsel; that way she could eat right along with us. Call it table tithing.
Yet some habits are hard to break; she didn’t want to give up the scavenging. So after dinner, instead of scraping our leftovers onto her plate, we scraped all the orts into a doggy bag — or in her case — a combination chicken wing bag, mac “n” cheese bag, cold fries bag, Caesar salad bag, meatloaf bag, little piece of fish bag, a BLT bag, and so forth. She got to take home her favorite form of dining, and we no longer had to wait her out. She would feast on that hash for days. Just for the record, she never took home any dessert scrapings, because no one in our family ever left even a hint of cheesecake on the table.
Once on my birthday, I asked the family if I could pick something off each plate around the table, in honor of their Grammy. They said they were cool with it, but when the check came, they all had forgotten their wallets; and I ended up paying for my own birthday dinner.
Back to the apple core! Why does this simple scrap of fruit make me cloud up? Even though it is close to twenty years since Audrey passed, and even though she lived until just two months after her 99th birthday; even though all of that, there are still some days and some moments when I miss her like crazy.
And there’s this. At the core of me, I am a crybaby.
Tidings from Tim 