I think it was hard for our father, sometimes. I mean, there he was, one of the best surgeons around and he was always being tested by his children.

Our father was a curious character, brilliant and highly skilled in his field, but often oddly deficient in mundane areas. When I lived in Spain, I would give a quick call home from a pay phone and instruct, “Call me in ten minutes!”

I would be home in under five minutes and would wait, and wait, and then wait some more for that phone call. I knew my dad had probably answered the phone in his study upstairs. The international calling instructions were by the phone in the kitchen. So he had to navigate through his study and the mountains of books and papers, down the back stairs. I knew he would stand in front of the instructions and would run his long bony finger over the words, tapping on the parts that seemed most complex. Before even lifting the receiver, he would mime out the dialing process, nod, then pick up the receiver and call.

It was excruciating, being an ocean and some land masses away and knowing that this man, who could solve almost any problem, was vexed by making a phone call.

Yet in his own way, he passed every test, and passed it well.

A case in point: once at dinner time, one of my brothers said,

“So, Tata, if you are a neurosurgeon, shouldn’t you be able to carve a turkey better than that? You’re so messy.  I mean I was at Bobbie’s house and his dad carved up a big old roast chicken and it was way better looking than anything you ever cut up.”

Our father looked over his shoulder and answered, “Maybe… but I know how to put it all back together again.”

I am no Bear Grylls, survivor guy extraordinaire, but I have been in dire cooking straits before. There is basic survival cooking:

Pop-Tarts heated on the dashboard are quite acceptable and never over-heat to tongue-burning temperatures.

More advanced survival cooking:

During college, my brother used to set a can of Chef-Boy-R-Dee on the radiator in the morning before he went to class. He swore that it was the ideal mid-afternoon snack on a cold winter’s day.

My sister perfected the dorm room grilling of a grilled cheese sandwich.

Cover the bottom of an iron with aluminum paper. Butter bread on both sides. Set on a plate. Remove plastic wrap from American cheese-food product. Take one slice of buttered bread and lightly press on warmed aluminum-foiled iron. Once it starts to steam a little, flip bread. Do the same thing to the other slice of bread.

Now, add the slice of cheese product to bread and press the top slice of bread over the cheese.

Be patient! Cold cheese sandwiches are nasty.

Finally, there is super-advanced survival cooking:

When I was in college, we discovered that the Foreign Language building had a mini-kitchen. We trekked to the hardware store in the village and bought a pan. When the mood struck us, and when the language lab was open at night, we would sneak our pan in and make pasta. A strand of pasta would be tossed at the ceiling with a vindictive, “The best tense in Italian? The pasta perfect!”

I know two people who take notes: my son’s high school principal, and my friend who died this past weekend, José Luis.

The principal is a man of unswerving integrity: his note-taking jogs his memory and reminds him how and where to fill in blanks in the school’s functioning.

José Luis was a film director and a human observer, and his integrity was for the sake of his art. Back in the 80s, he carried a little pencil and slips of white paper in the breast pocket of his shirt. You would say something that would make him throw back his head in a burst of laughter. Then his head would return to its vertical position, and then swing down as he wrote your phrase down.

“I can use that!”

He would note a color, or he would catch a person wrapping a lock of hair around her thumb, and make a note of that gesture.  Gestures often seemed to him the most direct way into a character’s mind. He would write down, “Wrap hair around thumb!” Then, he would look up at you in triumph.

“Details, details, big life is in the little! You must learn to see what is around you!”

I have always watched. I am the youngest: I watched and saw lots of stuff, but I never wrote it down.

José Luis thought so fast that his mouth had trouble keeping up with his ideas. He would speak with his Andalusian accent at a speed that would make rappers seem on pause. I used to wait while words hurtled out of his mouth, watch when he would take a breath, and be thrilled when the words finally got out of the starting gate and started galloping around the track.

I wonder where those slips of white paper are? I know he had them filed, back when he still lived in Madrid. I wonder if he has a pencil with him where he is now? If so, he is jotting down, “Sunrise, golden with pink, all lit up. A transparent salmon?” or “I have never seen so many harps!”


Rest in peace and Technicolor, dear friend.

The beach where our mom had dropped off my brother and the French boys to camp was about twenty minutes from our farm, or to her mind, too close.

The next camping trip she plotted for the boys was to Mount Katahdin, a good three hours north, and the last bit not a road-road but a logging road. Mama drove them up and I can only imagine the light heart that beat in her chest as she drove back to our coastal farm.

She arrived home in the best of moods. She planned to pick the boys up in two days and boy, were we going to have fun without them! My older sisters made dinner, we cleaned up. Mama was having a real vacation day.

Until about midnight. Our dog started barking. Intruders!

No. My brother and the French boys back from the wild.

They had decided that this camping trip wasn’t to their liking, so they started walking. The luck of the French was with them and a lumber truck took them from Katahdin into Bucksport. In Bucksport, they had run into someone my brother knew who worked at the paper mill. The man had driven the three campers right up our driveway.

Mama very rarely admitted defeat, so she did what every wise woman does when she sees forces working against her will: she threw away her idea of banishing the boys, dusted off her book of dares and practical jokes, and gave us a summer for the record books.

So, we had this summer house up in Maine. It was a farm house and in the summer it was always full of people. Most summers we had French exchange students.

One summer two French boys (they were 17-ish) overlapped. One was a great kid, full of fun and spirit. The other was, for want of a better word, surly.

Our mom was fine. She had eight kids, difficult, silly, surly, she managed us all. Well, until she didn't feel like managing us. One afternoon she had about had it with surly boy and so she dropped one of my brothers and the two French students off at the head of a trail that led down to a beach. They each had a backpack with a sleeping bag. My brother had his Boy Scout mess kit. I know Mama threw a jar of crunchy peanut butter, a bag of hot dog rolls, and some hot dogs in my brother’s backpack.

“Have fun! I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning” She rejoiced as she pulled away. “Let’s go for ice cream! Reverse dinner” she almost sang.

That’s what I knew. We went for ice cream, went home, had something for dinner, cleaned up, read a bit, and went to bed. About 11:30 at night the phone rang. It was my brother. He was calling from the girls’ camp main office on the Cape about five miles from where our mother had left him.

She wasn't happy, but she went and got the three boys; they were full of themselves.

“Oh, ho! We are good, n’est-ce pas? We find ze only camp wit girls for miles! We are good, eh?!”

My brother stretched happily over the back of the kitchen chair, smiled, and rubbed his stomach. “Yeah, we did all right. Good thing the bear left us alone.”

“Bear…?” Now Mama was all interested.

“When we were walking out from the beach, I thought it was old Harvey who stunk….” To his credit, grumpy Hervé smiled expectantly, following my brother’s tale.

“You would stink, too after eating ze ‘orrible food you bring for to camp!”

“What’s wrong with hot dogs?” Mama wondered out loud.

“Nofin’ iz wrong wit ze ‘ot dog, it iz ze soup that was so bad. We stink from eating it.”

Mama knew it was her dear son who had conjured up a dish and she looked at him with cautious admiration, “Ohh…?”

“I made traditional crunchy peanut butter and hot dog soup….we threw the rolls off the path for the bear and we sang to keep it away from us.”

The boys ate some cereal and then headed off to the boys’ “dorm” in the loft of the barn. Strains of La Marseilles and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary followed them out of the house.

As youngest of eight, I was often left to fend for myself. It wasn’t neglect; it was more a thing of time management, our mom had so many of us to wrangle. When hunger struck and a pre-school child was left to forage, creativity kicked in. To be fair, my sister who is just a year older collaborated with this, my favorite childhood culinary delight.

You will need:

A plastic sandwich bag

A handful of elbow macaroni

Water

Salt, to taste

Put elbow macaroni in bag. Cover, just barely, with water. Twist lunch bag and put it on the floor heat vent (if you don’t have one of these, you need a very sunny window sill).

Run around the dining room table until you just can’t run anymore then turn around and run in the other direction until you can’t run anymore, grab a salt shaker. Slide your back down the wall near the heat vent. Sit down next to your co-chef; open the plastic bag, sprinkle on some salt, and bite into a glob of starchy goodness.

Cooking by the window.

Chef KARLOS ARGUIÑANO always says that a dish looks better with a sprig of paresely. 

After William and Katherine of England gave birth to their second child, the world waited to hear what they would name their daughter, and I thought of my own naming:

 When our mother was expecting me, my parents already had three sons and four daughters. They thought that I would be a boy, you know, to even out the numbers: four of each. They only had a boy’s name picked out, chosen in honor of my father’s only sibling, his adored brother Stashu. Yep, my name, if I had been a boy, would have been Stanislaus Florian.

I decided to be born a girl.  This immediately put my parents on the spot: what to name this baby girl?

My siblings had some ideas: “Trigger” or “Dale” (as in Dale Evans who played opposite Roy Rogers who rode Trigger). One brother pushed for “Sheila”, he had a crush on a Sheila and thought that if his baby sister had the same name, well, it would be kismet. This is the same brother who routinely offered his sisters up the Discalced Carmelites in exchange for good marks on tests.  As far as I know, my sisters didn’t offer much in the way of suggestions, but all my sisters had long and lovely names that had been changed into nicknames.  Our mother didn’t care for nicknames.

The nosey neighbor, Isabel Branigan, cracked, “Well, every good Catholic family needs a Mary…” My parents took the bait and my first name was chosen. “It is such a short name no one will ever be able to give her a nickname!” my mom delighted.  (She was wrong.  Of the eight of us, I believe I have the most and the most annoying nicknames.)

“True. And ‘Isabel’ is a nice name,” my father mused.

“I’ll send the baby back if we name her Mary Isabel,” My mother fumed. “’Elizabeth’ is good. The Queen is Elizabeth….”

And so, Princess Charlotte, you and I share a second name, and may you never have a nickname.

Years ago, when his mother was very ill, my husband went to spend time with her in Spain. He called me daily.  I knew he was torn between his mother on the one hand, the children and me on the other. He could work remotely, so he stayed another two weeks until his mother was fully recovered.

He came home bearing gifts: a fancy Lego set for our son, beautiful European clothes for our young daughter, and three very on-trend dresses for me. Maybe I had grown in stature in his mind, because these three dresses were clearly for a tall woman.

The first was a tunic-type affair to be worn over leggings. It was okay, but the pockets were below my knees. The second was a bold print wrap dress – the cross-over made JLo’s Versace dress look demure. The third dress was a sleek charcoal gray number with about a ten-inch black stripe at the hem. The darts at the bust hit my hips. I could not even imagine the type of tailoring that would have to take place to make the dresses wearable.

Our daughter, who was only seven, told her father that these were not dresses for her mother to wear, at least not in public.

There is nothing like sitting next to your childhood friend in church and having the priest say, mid-homily, “I am going to try something different today, I’d like you to talk quietly among yourselves and think of what your talents are…” My friend and I needed no prodding; we had both had pretty rotten weeks.

“I am in such a b*tchy mood!” my friend started as our quiet talk began.

“Don’t even start!” I countered.

“There are pieces of paper and pencils in each pew. Please write down your talents on the paper, encourage your neighbors….” I handed a pencil and paper to a friend of my parents, a well-known plein-air painter, who was sitting farther down the same pew.

“You can put ‘painting’ down!” I smiled at him and then handed a piece of paper to my friend, “You put ‘b*tching’….” I laughed, “I make great dog food….that is what I am putting down. “ I glanced at the artist down the pew and looked at my friend, “Hey – you just painted your living room and it looks great – put ‘painting’!”

She obliged. I wrote a few more things: “walk the dog”, “play cat’s cradle”, “pluck eyebrows”. We were having a blast; we almost forgot we were in church, until the priest said:

“Now the ushers will come and collect your papers…”

My friend and I panicked, but before we could hide our papers, an usher appeared faster than a specter and held his hand out for our papers. I grabbed my friend’s, gallantly put it on top of mine, and demurely handed it to the usher.

“Doomed.” My friend said.

“What are they going to do with those…?” The ushers mixed the papers in a basket.

 “God, no! Are they going to have a drawing?”

The priest raised the basket over his head, said a blessing, and informed us that the staff would be reading and praying for our talents during the week.

My friend was between tears and laughter, but I reassured her: “It’s okay, they’ll think the painter wrote yours! I mean you both wrote ‘painting’….”

“Yeah, but do you really think that an 86 year old man wrote down ‘b*tching’ for a talent?”

Thirty minutes in the waiting room, twenty more in the little consult room, and it finally occurs to me that I should get up and leave. “It’s just an ingrown toenail – and it feels so much better.” I rationalize.

The podiatrist finally walks into the room and says, “…These things re-occur.” My eyes flit to the open window, “Would I fit through there….?”

“Now I am just going to numb your foot a bit….Oooooo! That’s cold! I got my thumb!”

God help me. Now, I can only go back and forth between thoughts of escape and memories of Tim Conway’s portrayal of a dentist who injects himself with Novocain before a tooth extraction.

“Inhale through your mouth, exhale through your mouth – just like you were in labor!” he coaches.

“Is this going to take thirty hours, too? Because if so, I would like the epidural….”

“Ha! You’re funny! Yep, that’s right! Now, it will buuurnnn a bit. Yep! That’s right! Right on schedule!” as my skin cringes away from the injection and rolls into my inhale. “I hear it really burns before becoming numb. I’ll leave it to take hold and then I’ll come right back for that nail!”

My stomach is churning. At least there was a baby at the end of labor; this recurring ingrown toe nail is just annoying the heck out of me. I start texting to share my pain.

“There’s an open window – should I jump?” I write to my brother-in-law.

“Head-first,” he suggests, “Your foot’s numb, you wouldn’t want to hurt it.”

A breeze moves the blinds in the open window. Five minutes pass. I pick up a magazine and read about Brittney Spears’ new-found happiness. Ten minutes. I read about an elite boarding school in Gstaad, I wonder how long it would take me to get there with a numbed-up, swelled-up foot….and the count is twenty minutes.

“I should just slip out the window….” rolls through my mind for the one hundred and first time but then the podiatrist rolls in, snapping latex gloves on his hands.

“Let’s DO this!”

“Yeah!” I respond, raising the Town and Country to cover the view of my feet.

To the podiatrist’s credit, the section of nail was out in less than thirty seconds. I wish the waiting time had been so short.

By the time I had Town and Country on my lap; my toe was bound in gauze and covered with a bright green bandage.

“Well, I’ll see you back here in six weeks then….”

“Right,” I said and thought, “if you can catch me.”