CHOW

 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