The Simplest of Traditions
I freaking love food. Love it. I love an 8-course meal where each portion is on a tasting spoon, and I love a gloppy tuna noodle casserole with toasted breadcrumbs on top. It’s not that I have an undiscerning palate (although my brother would tell you I’ll eat anything). No, my thing with food is both sensory and emotional. I have a soft spot for the comfort foods that evoke warm, fuzzy memories, even if those foods are questionably executed, even if those foods seem too basic to stand out. My Grandma Mitzi’s meatloaf with a carrot hidden inside. The Dove chocolates my Grandma Vicki always had on hand. Eating a turkey sandwich on white bread with simply mayo, salt and pepper the day after Thanksgiving at my dad’s house. The pretzel rods my mom always had stocked.
Yes, I know it’s not the food itself that builds memory, but those who we enjoy it with, the taste evocative of a moment, a memory, a person. The food is what we use to lure our loved ones to the table, and then we fix them there with life updates and shared memories, with laughs and sometimes tears. We talk about what shows we’re watching (the great unifier), and skim the surface of politics, and play catch up. And then, like shedding a winter coat, we are back to what we’ve always been.
When my mom was alive, she was the one who always got us all together for the Jewish holidays, and now that she’s not here, it feels like my mantle to carry. Can a 40-something be a matriarch? I can be like the matriarch’s younger, cooler sister. But title aside, I feel like it’s on me to carry on my mother’s tradition of gathering everyone together, of honoring who we are as a family, and who we were.
So this past weekend, I hosted everyone for what I called a “Yom Kippur-ish” meal. I’m not religious, the cultural traditions of my heritage resonating with me far more than the prayers and the synagogue. But I’m Jewish, and my ancestors were Jewish, and as a people, we’ve gathered for centuries and centuries at the start of a new year. And because that’s what we do, that’s what I did, with a non-traditional Yom Kippur feast of steak and salmon and loaded baked potatoes. But we did have challah!
Between mouthfuls of food, we talked about our family, those with us and those not—the aunt who told dirty jokes and the one who always wore tape on her nose, the cousins I reconnected with on social media (and the one I had to block cause #politics), the audio we discovered of my great-grandfather describing life as a blue-collar Russian immigrant in Pittsburgh, and the dark family traumas that we acknowledged with wide-eyed looks across the table and whispered about to the person next to us.
When the sun went down, we lit the yahrzeit candle, another Jewish tradition, to honor our loved ones who have passed. We were all silent for a minute, I know thinking of my mom, as well as all of the moms and dads and grandparents and friends who were with us, but not with us. It is a reminder to me, still trudging through my own grief, that the years pass, and that life goes on, but that all of the people we have lost still have a seat at the table. Saying their name and telling their stories brings them into being, places them firmly right here with us. Here, but not here.
The steak was overcooked, as was the salmon, the potato skins too crispy, the dill cream sauce too thick, but the chimichurri turned out alright, and the fruit tart was excellent, as were the wines. Eh, no one will remember. But we will remember the faces around the table, everyone getting older, many of us with the same familial smile. I don’t know if anyone will remember what we talked about, but we’ll remember how nice it was to be with people who get it, who get us. We’ll say we wish we did it more often, and mean it. I wish we did it more often. But life gets busy, life goes on, and in between it all, you sit down with the people you love for a precious, precious pause.