When Food Means More Than Words

There are some times, as a writer, when words escape me. Usually, there’s some sort of emotional conflagration involved and no matter how I try to sit down and write, I can’t do it. Because, as I’m often reminded, all I’m doing is writing about food, and that can feel a little bit flimsy at times.

This happened to me, rather severely, in early September of 2002. I was living in Harwinton, Connecticut, in a town of 3,500 that had only gotten its first stoplight a few years before. One lovely summer’s morning weeks before, Susan and I were out in the garden, up to our knees in compost; we came back in to the house to get some water, and the phone rang. It was my stepbrother; he said the four words that no one, ever, ever wants to hear: “There’s been an accident.”

We left the door unlocked so that Susan’s mother could come and get the dog, and raced down to Long Island. Simple story: Car accident. My father and his longtime companion, who I consider my stepmother. He never regained consciousness.

Over the years, I’ve written about this a lot; anyone who knows me, and knew him — really knew him (as opposed to just believing they knew him) — knows that we had a peculiar relationship: he was my best friend. He introduced me to food. He introduced me to humor. He introduced me to Perelman and Thurber and Allan Sherman and Le Pavillion.  He introduced me to the understanding that life has far less to do with money (although it admittedly never hurts), and far more to do with experience, sensitivity, joy, and kindness.

And his greatest happiness came, he once told me, when I finished my first whole plate of Holsteiner Schnitzel at Luchow’s. I was eleven.

Food, he said, was experience; it was life. It was a Proustian conduit, a time machine, and it had the ability to jettison you back to other places and experiences—to the safety of your grandmother’s kitchen, or the raw, cold gravity of a stranger’s dining room when you’ve been left there as a child, to eat weird, unrecognizable food, fed to you by people you don’t know. Food, he said, was equal opportunity.

Between the time that he died and early September of 2002, I had a lot of work to do; there was a mountain of insurance papers and attorneys to deal with, and grief, I was told, had to be postponed to another time that was perhaps a little less inconvenient for everyone. I tried to be dutiful, and ultimately I was. But it eventually caught up with me.

“Maybe you should write,” Susan said to me. I tried, but I couldn’t.

Rosh Hashana—the Jewish New Year—fell on September 7th 2002, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, fell on the 16th. Although we were never religious in my home, we did celebrate the holidays together, and this would be the first year I would spend without my father, and the first during which I would light a memorial candle in his memory. Smack in the middle of the week was the first anniversary of 9/11, and I lost my appetite. I started to feel a little bit uncertain about my own feet and like my balance was off, as I did once when I got off a cruise ship. So I read everything I could get my hands on: C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed; Leon Wieseltier’s Kaddish. I read Madeleine L’Engle and Harold Kushner and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Thic Nhat Hanh and everyone in between. And nothing helped bridge the gap between life and death and mourning and living and remembering. And nothing, anywhere, talked about cooking and eating as a form of psychic nourishment.

And then, one morning, I went out for the newspaper, and there, in the dining section, was a short piece by Amanda Hesser, called “A Meal with Loved Ones Closes the Circle of Life.”

Feeding yourself is a way of healing, of embracing your existence, of remembering the lost, and of pushing forward.

Amanda went on to quote Kathleen Purvis, food editor of the Charlotte Observer, on the meaning of round food in the Jewish faith.

A round food is symbolic because a circle is closed, and it signifies that you have no words to speak your grief.

In that piece, Amanda went to her stove. She didn’t try anything new, as she said. She made a comforting dish meant to be shared in peace.

That September, I had no words to speak my grief, but after reading that article, my appetite came back, little by little, and I’ve never forgotten it.

Yesterday, while cleaning out my office in preparation for a move to a larger space across the hall, I found Amanda’s piece, buried at the bottom of a drawer; stained, a little bit dog-eared, it managed to show up in my life again right before the start of the Jewish New Year, which is tonight at sundown. It’ll just be me and Susan and our animals. In the coming days, I’ll be lighting a memorial candle for my father, and spending a day in quiet meditation. The one symbolic food we’ll eat will be challah.

Always plain. And always round.