My earliest memories of childhood begin in the kitchen, for that was my mother’s headquarters, where she cooked, barked out orders, shared her deepest feelings and, finally, where she presided--over us and her kitchen machinery: a gas stove, with accent on the broiler, a small twin-sink affair, along with a “drainer,” which remained full of drying dishes or wet dishes waiting to dry. No dishwasher. It was the 50s, and we would always linger behind the rest of the world we saw in places like Life Magazine and our crummy little black and white Mentor television. Our storage cupboards were narrow and shallow, but we owned a little country market, so we simply ate “out of the store.” I remember, in fact, the night in 1954 [think of the date!] when Dad announced that in one month we had eaten $350 worth of food OUT of our little store—not counting mom’s frequent “other store” visits for “fresh,” food, one of her several food fetishes.
When I began bringing Carolyn home after sacrament meeting Sunday evenings, we always convened in the less than spacious kitchen. Dad sat at one end of grandpa’s butcher-block table, while mom sat at the other. Ambient odors of a variety of Mediterranean blends of food swirled around us, while we talked, something my folks loved to do, usually in near darkness. “Turn off that ball of fire,” Dad would say.
Mom, Margaret Marie, but “Dollie” to everyone, sprang out of rich fertile soil in Del Mar, California, a mile from the ocean. Fiery, sporting short coal black hair that never greyed, her Basque blood boiled easily, so she was quick with tongue and hand. She owed her disposition to two earlier generations of Basques who had left the Pyrennes Mountains in the late1900s to settle in Santa Barbara and then later in Del Mar. Her mother, Lucy Jauregui, was bilingual; my great grandmother, Maria, who lived 92 years, never learned English. When we went for candy to her cottage next door, mom or Grandma Lucy translated.
So, when Carolyn entered our kitchen, she smelled food she’d never heard of, cooked in ways she had never imagined. Chili rellenos, artichokes, black-eyed peas, navy bean soup, stuffed flank steak, twice-baked potatoes, lamb chops, calves’ tongue, liver, and always a lovingly yet vigorously, no, loudly tossed salad. And I mean tossed. Fold in Dad’s standard Oaky diet, and you have biscuits every morning, hash browns, eggs, grits, sausage, orange juice, and any other red meat mom had not cooked sometime that week. Mom cooked rich, she cooked loud, she cooked fast, and she cooked a lot.
Unfortunately, most of the exotic smells (mostly garlic) have left me. Carolyn could follow me only so far into my mom’s Mediterranean cuisine. No more lamb, artichokes, tongue, etc. You get the point. Add graduate school and a child...all three of us on a shaky budget, and you have a recipe which consisted solely of casseroles, powdered milk and stew. However, my favorite Dollie food survived---lentils. Only Heather and I ever partook of that sacred “porridge” for which a hungry Esau had sold his birthright.
Now a quick note on the sounds of our kitchen. Only three. The daily slamming of the broiler drawer, in which quietly burning toasts awaited the rigorous scraping of a butter knife. No one ever thought of buying a toaster. I think they had those by 1954, didn’t they? The third sound? Mom would passionately deal plates of all colors and sizes, like a deck of cards. It was Vegas, so we chipped a lot of dishes. About every six weeks, Mom would send Michael and Carol down to Funk’s, an all-purpose junk yard, where they would, with the uncontrolled glee of 8 year olds, buy up a menagerie of "dinnerware" that looked like it came right out of one of those tents at the Barnum & Bailey Circus. An elated Dollie would come into the kitchen, smiling, “Oh, good, kids. What the hell--they’re only dishes, and they are cheap, and there's a lot of them for now."
There were two cardinal rules in the inner sanctum: Don’t enter the kitchen before Dad had eaten his breakfast and never—never—ask, “what’s for dinner, mom?” These were the days before CPS [Child Protective Services], an agency I praise. But I lived in a time when a child could be spanked and the parents would not be jailed. I agree with Brigham, who, contrary to the crazy notion that he might have had a temper with his children, probably, according to Eliza R. Snow at least “spared the rod too often.” I received two half-hearted swats from my dad’s belt, while Mom contributed maybe a dozen or so slaps, pretty firm taps, with whatever might be handy. My brother, Gene, ended up on the end of a broom once. She had a vicious swing, so I guess there was no “wrong” end. My sister, Carol, who for some strange reason began “throwing fits” and holding her breath when she didn’t get her way [a typical four year old’s reaction] got a wash basin full of “dirty” water, full in the face. That ended the swooning. My youngest brother was never spanked by anyone at any time in any place. What does this mean?
I do not do justice to my mother. Complex, plagued by what the 50s called “bad nerves,” she was often a victim of a “nerve-changing” experiment: thyroidectomy and Miltown. Taking Miltown in those days was akin to carpet bombing all of Vietnam, except Vietnam was all your nerve receptors. One pill, and it was “so-long, baby,” for at least 10 hours of numbing sleep.
Here, I leave Dollie unfinished, my portrait incomplete. Any bitterness in such a family? None. We started teasing her inconsistencies as soon as we were in high school. She laughed harder, grew sweeter, found some medical help. She slowly drifted from her Catholic, Basque roots, took Mormonism head-on, and experienced what Alma called “being begotten of God.”
She was the woman in the nursing home, suffering mini-strokes from time to time, who knew everyone and wept at their often painful departures. She was the one who kept a list of those who needed prayers. She wrote their maladies in detail in a large notebook and then sat for an hour every morning and “worked through her list,” as she would say.
There were a few times, as a young teenager, however, when she totally confused me. But by the time I was 17, I realized she was becoming a saint.
