From “The
Old Man,” a collection of reminiscences about my father, Stanley Kubacki.
Sandy is out of town for
a few days, and last night I found myself hunting through the kitchen for food
that 1) I could eat for dinner, 2) probably wouldn’t kill me, and 3) should
have been thrown out some months back.
Dinner ultimately consisted of seven frozen battered shrimp from three
different containers and a half dozen pigs in blankets that I had purchased
during the Obama administration, all so covered with frost and freezer burn
that it was difficult to determine initially which were the shrimp and which
the pigs-in-b’s.
Some
years ago, probably in the 1990s, when my mother was off traveling, I visited
my father at home and walked in on a similar scene. On the kitchen counter were twenty cans he
had pulled out of the pantry, a can opener, a large glass of iced water and a
smaller glass I recognized as a scotch on the rocks. In one hand, he held a spoon and in the other
was an open can of cuttlefish.
Cuttlefish
are cephalopods, like squid. Wikipedia
describes them as having:
“large, W-shaped pupils, eight arms, and two tentacles furnished with denticulated suckers, with which they secure their prey. They
generally range in size from 15 to 25 cm (6 to 10 in), with the largest species, Sepia apama, reaching 50 cm (20 in) in mantle length
and over 10.5 kg (23 lb) in mass…. Studies are said to indicate
cuttlefish to be among the most intelligent invertebrates.[4] Cuttlefish also have one of the largest brain-to-body size ratios of all invertebrates.”
The
can itself was dented and the paper label identifying the product was
discolored. I don’t know how long these
particular intelligent cephalopods (just how smart could they really be?), had
been on the shelf in my parents’ kitchen, but I glanced at the expiration dates
of the other cans (pork ‘n beans, sardines, pears in syrup, etc.). They were not recent.
“Living
pretty high on the hog with Mom out of town, aren’t you?” I said. I should mention he was, at this time, a retired judge with a healthy
pension, money in the bank, and a paid-for house in one of the nicer parts of
Philadelphia.
“Can’t
waste food, son,” he replied.
“Do
you eat the stuff you like first? Or do
you save that for last?” I asked, though
I think I knew the answer.
“Well,”
he admitted, “this cuttlefish isn’t very good.”
*
My
father’s father, Stanley Ignatius Kubacki, about whom I know virtually nothing,
died when my father was a child, leaving a wife, three daughters and
Stanley. In what I must assume was a
marriage of convenience, my widowed grandmother married a widower with six
children of his own. Then another child
arrived. The thirteen of them (if you
are doing the math), lived in a row house in Port Richmond, the Polish section
of Philadelphia.
My
father’s step-father, whose name I will not share with you, hated my father and
wasn’t all that fond of his step-daughters either. I’m sure my father could have told me many
stories about his step-father, but one of the few he shared involved the barrel
of apples, and I heard it many times.
With
eleven children in the house, food was never plentiful, and one way to feed the
masses was with a barrel of apples purchased every autumn and kept in the
basement. This was the only food in the
house that was not served up in portions at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The apples were available whenever you wanted
one, but with one caveat. If there were
apples with bruises or brown spots, you had to eat them first. And of course, while you were eating the
bruised apples, the perfect apples were aging and getting bruised from sitting
around in the barrel. And then you had
to eat those apples before you were
allowed to eat the good ones, and so on, and, as my father put it, his voice
rising at the thought of the outrage that had been visited upon him sixty years
prior, “YOU NEVER GOT TO ACTUALLY EAT A GOOD APPLE!!!”
The
only other story he told from his childhood also involved chow, and the
scarcity of it. Again, it’s not that the
family was destitute, but there were eleven kids in the house, it was 1927, and
they were a working-class family in a working-class neighborhood.
It
seems that one day in Port Richmond, an inventor arrived, a “scientist” from
the old country who had come to America to raise money for his latest
invention, a perpetual motion machine.
He was immediately embraced by the neighborhood, which was thrilled to
have such a brilliant man in their midst, and he was offered lodging in this
house and that, free meals and so on.
One of the priests invited him to give a lecture in the church basement
where he might score a few bucks in donations.
One
night, this honored gentleman appeared at the table in my father’s home, and as
the potatoes were being passed around, just as they were about to reach young
Stanley, the man commandeered the serving plate and shoveled the remaining
spuds onto his own plate as my father, then eleven or twelve years old, sat
there stunned and speechless,
“And
that was it for me,” my father told me.
“I knew there was something fishy about perpetual motion machines but I also
knew I couldn’t just denounce this man, so the next day, after school, I went
down to the main library downtown and looked through encyclopedias and physics
books and I came home with proof that there is no such thing as a perpetual
motion machine. It’s impossible. So I showed my mother and I told all the kids
I knew and I told the neighbors and my teacher, and the word got around, and
gradually his invitations dried up and he had to leave Port Richmond.”
“And
were you a hero then?” I asked.
“No,”
he said. “They hated me for it. I had punctured everybody’s balloons and I
was just a snotty little know-it-all.
You know, son, no prophet is without honor, save in his own country.”
I
heard the prophet-without-honor line a number of times from my father, but it
was many years before I learned it was actually one of Jesus’s favorite gags.
*
For
my sister and me, there were lessons to be learned. I don’t remember actually being told that
children were starving in Africa, but the messages were clear: 1) eat what’s on
your plate, and 2) we don’t waste food.
The one inviolate rule of dinnertime was that you had to eat the food in
front of you or you sat there staring at it until bedtime. And though I was not the most finicky child
eater, there were certain dishes (chili, I recall), that I could not
abide. I remember nights sitting there
for an hour or more, alone, with all the other dishes washed up and put away,
staring into a pile of some execrable substance that only seemed to get larger
and larger the more I looked at it, until it came to occupy my entire universe.
On
one occasion, my father chose Thanksgiving dinner to teach us a complex series
of lessons about food and charity.
I
could not have been more than six or seven when he announced in October that we
would forgo Thanksgiving dinner that year and send the money we would have
spent to a food bank so they could feed some of those less fortunate than we
were. Instead, we would have grilled
cheese sandwiches that night.
Well,
this was welcome news as far as I was concerned. Thanksgiving dinner was always something of a
minefield at best, since one rule for meals was that I had to have at least a
sample of everything on the table.
Stuffing? Ugh. Cranberry sauce? Gag me.
I had nothing against Thanksgiving itself but the dinner was far from a
beloved ritual.
When
the day arrived and I was called in for dinner, I had forgotten his
announcement some weeks before, so when I entered the room I was puzzled by the
absence of food on the table. Instead,
my father sat in his accustomed place with a yellow legal pad, his checkbook,
and his fountain pen before him. He
began by explaining the reasons for this change in our holiday routine, one of
which seemed to be that my sister and I had come to expect food on the table every night. Therefore, we had to learn that other people
didn’t always have it so easy and the way to teach us that lesson was to make
us understand that food only appeared when actual money was spent to purchase
it, and since we were sending that money to the food bank this year, we would
not get dinner.
Well.
Even
at the age of six, I could see the flaw in this argument. It was true, of course, that I had come to
expect food on the table, and in the refrigerator, and in the cupboards, and on
the pantry shelves in the basement, but the reason I had come to expect seeing
food on my plate was that he and my
mother had put it there every day of my life! Sometimes I didn’t even want it, but there it
was, as relentless and unchanging as the tides.
Was I now to be condemned as morally corrupt because my parents fed me,
I ate the food, and I never thought there was anything wrong with that? And if, at any time during my childhood, I
had refused dinner on the grounds that there was a poor person somewhere who
didn’t have enough to eat, I know exactly what the response would have
been. First, I would be told to eat my
dinner. Then, after the meal, following
a hushed private discussion between my mother and father, she would make an
appointment for me at the dentist’s office because this is what she would do
whenever she suspected I might be having problems of a psychiatric nature.
I
did not attempt to rebut his argument at the time. This was obviously a matter of critical
importance to my father, and it would have been futile to try to dissuade
him. Also, it was an argument I did not
want to win since I still had no use for the stuffing and cranberries. Nevertheless, the accusation that I had
somehow acquired an elitist, Rockefeller-like attitude about food rankled a
bit.
Following
the lecture, he uncapped his pen and got to work. On the left side of the paper, in
consultation with my mother, he listed all the ingredients that went into the
meal: turkey, of course, and potatoes, green beans, sweet potatoes, cranberry
sauce, pearl onions, etc. For the more
complex items, my mother supplied the list.
Biscuits, for example, were not listed as “biscuits,” but as flour,
sugar, salt, baking powder, cream of tartar, butter, an egg, and milk. And for each item on the list, she supplied a
price for the amount used based on her years of experience as a supermarket
shopper. Turkey? $4.
Bread for the stuffing? $.38.
Even the salt and pepper was accounted for, at a penny or two. For the use of our electric stove, he
allocated some percentage of our average monthly electric bill. Then there was the water to wash all the
dishes afterward---couldn’t forget that.
At
the end, he had a long column of figures on the right side of his pad, which he
summed up and then circled with a flourish.
“$14.47,” he announced, and then opened his other pad and drafted a
check for that amount. “This will be in
the mail tomorrow.”
My
mother had all the bread and cheese ready to go in the kitchen and it only took
a few minutes for her to make the sandwiches and another few minutes for us to
eat them. I sat there with my empty
plate for a minute afterwards, wondering whether there was to be a grand finale
of some sort, but there didn’t seem to be, so I finally said, “I’m going to run
around outside now, OK?” And permission was granted.
I
grabbed my football and went out the door, looking for one of my friends to
play with, or wrestle with, or go to Pennypack Park with, or something, but it
was 4 o’clock on Thanksgiving Day and everybody was having dinner or away at
grandma’s house. There was nothing to do
and nobody to do it with. I walked down
to Solly Playground and there was nobody there either, but the gates were open
so I took a ride on one of the swings.
When it got dark, I went home. It
was a very quiet Thanksgiving, but it’s the only one from my childhood I can
remember.
*
I
hope I do not give the impression Stanley was cruel or unfair to me or my
sister. He was not. However, his early experiences with food, and
the search for it, never left him. In
one of my attempts to get him to tell me about his experiences in WWII, I asked
him what was the best thing, the
thing he like most, about the war. He
thought about that. “Well,” he said
finally, “you always got your chow.”
Also, I don’t think I’ve known anyone who enjoyed a restaurant meal more
than he did. Nothing frou-frou, of
course---a two-ounce portion from the “tasting menu” was not his style. But a huge chunk of red meat and a plate full
of side dishes would disappear and all that would be left was the smile on his
face.
On
the other hand, my sister and I grew up hearing our mother tell him, “Don’t
wolf down your food!” shortly after we would sit down for the family
dinner. We would look over and his plate
would be empty, though the rest of us had barely begun. Then there were the many times he would start hacking and coughing at the table with
food stuck in his throat. My mother
would scold him when he recovered, and he would try to slow down, but the habit
was too deeply ingrained, or he was too stubborn, or something. He just had to get that dinner down his
gullet before somebody took it away from him.
Once,
on a cruise ship, with ten of us around the table, he stopped breathing. (That’s the scary one, when they can’t make a
sound.) I was sitting next to him, so I
stood him up and grabbed him from behind and tried to execute a Heimlich maneuver,
but I had only seen it on TV and had no idea how to do it. Fortunately, one of the waiters was trained
and instantly stepped in and saved his life.
Then,
around noon on February 11, 2001, I got a frantic call at home from the
caregiver who had just served him lunch.
I raced over and tried to resuscitate him, getting instructions over the
phone from a 911 operator. Then the
medics arrived and they tried as well.
No luck. We were too late. He had died at the table from a piece of food
that got stuck in his throat.
Copyright2021MichaelKubacki
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