What was I thinking last Monday?
I say this not with reproach, but with curiosity. LuthorCorp takes a beating in this space, and well it should, but I must admit that this week I am actually grateful for it. This week was every bit as tough as I’d feared it would be, tougher, even. It was not fun, not by a long shot. It took almost all of my energy reserves and attention. It kept me focused on tasks at hand and enmired in packaging trivia. In short, it kept me distracted, so distracted that I was able to get through Monday.
Monday was October 25, the one-year anniversary of my grandfather’s death. There is very little I can say this year that I didn’t already say last December, on what would have been his 83rd birthday. I feel much the same as I did this time last year and as I did at Christmas, save, maybe, for the anger that simmered constantly beneath my grief. My grandfather was 82; he had lived long, well and with toughness and grace, and I knew I should have been grateful for that, but I couldn’t be. Having survived two diagnoses of colon cancer, radiation and chemotherapy, he spent the last year of his life in and out of the hospital, getting weaker and sicker and depressed, cancer-free but barraged by other health problems his doctors couldn’t suss out. He died two weeks after what was supposed to be minor surgery to drain fluid off his heart. It turned out that there was no fluid on his heart; his heart was inflamed and beating at only 15% of its normal capacity. On the day he died, I was on a bakery crawl with some of my friends from a baking bulletin board site. My mom was supposed to join us, but three days before, she called me to say she thought she should stay close to Grandpop, as he was not recovering from surgery as well as we’d hoped. I remember being sad for his being in pain, but he had come close to death so many times before, only to bounce back, I never suspected that this time would be any different, any more final.
In the days following his death, I knew I’d be sad, and I was. I knew I’d miss him, and I did (and do still). What I hadn’t counted on was the fury at the unfairness of the end of his life. He had worked hard all his life. He adored his wife and kids. He certainly was braver than I will ever be: he had worked for Bell Telephone when it was the safest job in the world, where once you were in, you were basically guaranteed a job until retirement and a pension after; against the conventional wisdom of the day, he had left the world’s safest gig to start his own business, an answering service that thrived during the decades that he owned it and continued to thrive after he’d sold it and trained the new owners. He had earned a quiet and comfortable death, the kind where you spend your last day on earth taking long walks, playing guitar with your best friend, shooting pool in the afternoon, eating a leisurely and fabulous dinner, kissing your wife goodnight and falling happily to sleep, never waking up again. What he got was something entirely different, something much more painful and depressing, and while I knew that some people wouldn’t even get to have that, and would gladly trade places to have the years he had, I still couldn’t shake the five-year-old’s voice in my head, hollering but it’s not *fair*. I managed to bury that voice until Christmas, or more specifically, until four days before Christmas, my grandfather’s birthday. I would talk to my mom—how heartbroken she was! how I ached for her!—and I wanted to tear to ribbons whatever force of nature would put a person through something like that. Limousine drivers would cut me off in intersections where I had the right of way, and I would have to force myself not to reach through their windows and punch them in the head. Customers would call, asking us did their cartons get delivered? was I sure? well, how did I know?, and I would bite my lip to keep from saying you know, all those cartons will be in some landfill somewhere by the end of January.
My grandfather, of course, would have no patience with this. He was not a fan of weeping at funerals, or of religious funerals. This turned out to be a source of laughter for my mom and stepdad and brother and me, for the minister at my grandfather’s memorial service was filled with talk of Jesus and resurrection, and as he talked ever longer about rising with Jesus, we all sat together, imagining Grandpop muttering “Jesus Christ, this guy doesn’t shut up. I wonder if I’ll rise from the dead if I go give him a kick in the ass right now.” A threatened kick in the ass was his favorite form of dispensing justice, of realigning karma, and it never failed to crack us up, particularly my brother, who used to be reduced to helpless giggles at this threat. Every time I want to cry for missing Grandpop, I just think of him threatening to kick my ass for crying, and I smile. I think of all the stories we wanted to tell at his memorial service, but had to save for afterwards so as not to offend his more conservative neighbors, such as his repeated quip that my mom’s birthday was the only one of his three children’s birthdays that he could remember, because she was born nine months to the day after he came home from the war. Or the story of my mom’s cousins, who at the ages of two and four were at my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner; my grandfather had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and they begged to be recorded, begged to hold the microphone and sing. Grandpop, always a sport, invited them to sing a song, and in their baby voices, they sang “Jesus Loves Me.” “Well,” Grandpop said, “if Jesus still loves you after that, then he must be a pretty good guy.” I think of the little songs and poems he made up; he had dozens, but my favorite has always been:
This is Mort
He likes big words
They shoot from his mouth
like rabbit turds.
I do miss him, I do, I do. But this year, unlike last year, I don’t want to rend the universe for taking him away, and this year, unlike last year, I am ready to make spiced beef again. Spiced beef was my own Christmas tradition; fueled by my obsessive reading of Elizabeth David and Laurie Colwin, I persuaded my mom to let me contribute an entree, not just a dessert, to the Christmas table. There are many traditional English and Irish recipes for spiced beef, but I used the one from Mrs.David’s Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen. To make it, you take a nice big piece of bottom round, about 6 or 7 pounds, rub it with brown sugar and refrigerate it for two days; then rub it with a mix of salt, black pepper, crushed allspice and crushed juniper berries and return it to the fridge. You keep it in the fridge for 10 days, taking it out to rub it with the spice mix. At the end of ten days, but the day before you want to serve it, you wipe the spices off and roast in a low oven, in a covered roaster with a little water in the bottom to keep the bottom from scorching. You roast it for about five hours, then take it out of the roaster, place it between two boards, weight it down with a heavy skillet or a 5-pound dumbbell and keep it in the fridge overnight. Take it from the fridge and slice it, cold, in paper-thin slices (or take it to a simpatico deli guy and ask him to run it through the meat slicer.)
When I brought it to table, I explained that this was a cured beef dish, meant to be served cold. I could see funny looks being exchanged around the table, but those looks disappeared sharpish as soon as forks were brought to mouths. I was pleased enough that everyone liked it, but I was thrilled much later, when my mom told me, as we finished cleaning up the kitchen, “Grandpop told me that that was the best beef he had ever eaten in his life.” Grandpop was a fooler about all the right things in life, but he was never a fooler about food. He was 75 that Christmas, and he made me feel like I had earned my stripes that night, making the best beef to be found in 75 years of eating well. We had spiced beef every Christmas after that, until last year, our first Christmas without him, when Mom asked shyly if I would mind not making spiced beef last year, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But that was last year, and this is this year, and I know, I know in my heart, if I tell myself “it’s still too sad, making spiced beef this year,” my grandfather will send a thunderbolt down, narrowly missing my head, and growl, “Too sad for spiced beef? That’s the most ri-god-damn-diculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Yes, sir. 