Comfort Food

Things are getting a little crazy for my Mom.

This past week my Mother went down to Long Island, where my Grandma Susie, our beloved eccentric matriarch with her house full of knick-knacks and the hard Texan drawl is preparing to move into her new Condo. Susie is absolutely tickled pink by the whole move, simply can't wait, and there is a part of me that wants to get her alone and let her know that if she wanted to buy a swank one story condo, there were easier ways to get it done than to break her hip trekking up her uneven old stairs. (Or rather, coming back down.) But Susie is on the mend, and perkier than ever now that she's trading in the cluttered grandma digs for a sleek new pad. Susie, it seems, is somewhat of a Bionic woman, and only needs the occasional replacement part to make her better, stronger, faster, not to mention somehow funnier, brassier, and yes, younger. My Mom, on the other hand, is a little tense, and I'm guessing the rest of the family is right there with her.

"I just...I can't...I CAN'T TALK NOW. BYE." This is what I've been hearing the past week or so as she's been joining my Long Island family in the quest to get Susie into her new place. And I get it, I do. The closing on the condo, the endless stream of stuff to get packed and moved, 40 plus years of Grandma stuff that's been collecting in the old house. And then there are the doctor's appointments, and the movers, and the furniture, and my grandmother's little dog, who barks so long, and so hysterically whenever ANYONE enters the house, stranger or not, that her cries become something closer to one long, sustained whistling cry, interrupted only by Susie's addition of, "Cookie! Cookie! Be quiet!" (She never will.) So Mom has been, yes, a little tense.

That is until my Dad came down to join her. Now granted, my parents are those rare types in this day and age who make each other better just by being in the same room with one another, a novelty in this new era where so many unions seem to have expiration dates stamped right there on the marriage license. My parents genuinely love each other, in a gross, constantly voiced way that mortified me as a kid, and then caused me to have absolutely no tolerance for anything less out of my own relationships as an adult. (Thanks, guys.) But that doesn't mean that my Dad carries around my Mom's OFF switch wherever he goes. Far from it. He sometimes knows exactly how to find her buttons, the bad ones, and then hit them all at once like a kid in an elevator. It happens. Yet somehow the other day after my Dad arrived on the scene, my conversations with my mother changed.

"Your father's making lasagna tonight!" She was absolutely gleeful about it. "And last night, he made dinner for everybody! He roasted a chicken, a whole chicken, with mashed potatoes and carrots with dill and beer! Your father is wonderful!"

What was so special here? My Dad's always been known to cook. This is no great surprise. And yet somehow I just knew that throughout this entire ordeal, there had been a lot of pizza. Perhaps some bagels too, or some takeout falafel. But there had definitely been a lot of pizza and a lot of soda. Because real meals are always the first thing to go when things get a little crazy. My Dad is a problem solver, the guy who, when you vent to him about a problem with no solution, often comes back with, "Yes, but what do you want me to do about it?" A furious answer of, "NOTHING, GAWD!" (Often from a very angry, very adolescent me) only ever seemed to befuddle him.

The beauty of food is that it is so often the answer to the problem, even when the problem has absolutely nothing to do with food. Not enough sleep, not enough time, not enough money? Brownies. Depression, unemployment, grief? Casserole. My Dad is a smart, wonderful man who has only ever wanted to make the three wacky women in his family happy, even when we provide very few answers on how exactly to do that. So my Dad's answer to a financial pain in the ass, a house full of boxes, an eccentric old lady and her yippy little dog? A roast chicken. Mashed potatoes. Lasagna.

Food, lovingly cooked and applied with care can be the response to so many issues that often we take it for granted. But for my Dad, a man so often struggling with his high strung girls and the question of, "How can I fix it?" the response was simple. Make meals. Restore balance...with meat and starch. And the response from my mother was, at least in that one moment of normalcy, a great big sigh of relief.