Sunday Dinners At My Mother’s House

After I was grown up, after I had a house and a family
of my own, my mother cooked and served dinner for all
of us, her children and grandchildren--at least sixteen people
each Sunday in her basement kitchen. My mother was an artist
of food, and we gathered around three tables lined up end
to end, the tables piled with food—macaroni and meatballs,
braciola, then salad and roasted chicken and potatoes
and stuffed artichokes and fruit and nuts with their own silvery
nutcracker, apple pies and turnovers and finally espresso and anisette. 

Every Sunday the courses emerged from that kitchen and arrived
at the table as if by magic, my mother’s little solid body moving
like a dervish between the kitchen and the finished room
that was our cellar dining room in that tiny house that wouldn’t hold
all of us in the upstairs dining room. The upstairs kitchen was always
clean and untouched almost never used except to serve coffee
to guests we didn’t know well, while the family and friends all
gathered in the cellar to eat and talk politics and baseball
and to be together, the cousins whispering and giggling
at the end table and the rest of us as excited and loud
as a convention of truck drivers, except for my brother,
the doctor, who was always soft spoken. My father and I,
the political radicals, loudest of all in our convictions.

My father at 92 asked me to take him in his wheelchair
to  march on Washington. The people are asleep, he said. 
We have to try to wake them up.  My mother didn’t care
about politics at all; she only cared about us, her family,
about keeping us all close to her and together.

When you have trouble, she said, only your family will help
you, and we all came back to be near her, back to that blue-
collar town where she lived, my sister’s house across
the street from mine, my brother’s on top of the hill,
my mother’s not five minutes away.  I’d see her smiling,
my self-contained mother, happy that we were all together,
and willing to cook for all of us week after week
until she was seventy five to make sure we’d stay that way.

In my mother’s kitchen, there  were always stories and laughter,
arguments and excitement.  When I was nineteen I went
to a friend’s house for dinner. It was the first time I ever had
hamburgers and the first time I sat at a table where no one spoke. 
We ate in silence, no stories or conversation or laughter, only pass
the potatoes please, the mother sitting stiff as a post at one end
of the table, her face closed as a door and the father at the other end,
his mouth a thin line in his somber face.  I was glad to go home.
Now it is ten years since my mother died; four since my father’s death.
Two since my sister died.  My son and his family in North Carolina;
my daughter in Cambridge; my brother’s son in Chicago.
 
I remember my father saying when my son moved away
not a year after my mother’s death, without your mother the chain
is broken, but those memories of my mother and those years
when all of us were together, are still as comforting
as the sweet smell of my mother’s baking bread, and nothing
able to steal from us those hours we shared.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan