My Grandparents and their daughter that was my mother

A family story…

I can’t eat pizza without thinking about my Nonna, my grandmother. I never knew my real grandmother because she was dead long before I was born. This other woman--my mother’s stepmother--ran my grandfather’s house on a backroad in the small town where I grew up. There was a sign in their bathroom: if it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. I thought they were tree-hugging conservationists, but it was really that they were just poor and strange. They saved everything: aluminum foil, reused for my grandfather’s sandwiches, baggies, rinsed and hung above the sink on a string between the window sashes.

Nonna composted scraps; they canned tomatoes. There was one thing they splurged on, chocolate bars. She had a drawer full of Skor bars, Hershey’s, Peppermint Patties, and Skybars. Before leaving the house, I was always allowed to “take one for the road.” 

The first summer my mom and I were on our own, Nonna was tasked with picking me up from swim lessons at our local pool. She’d keep me busy until my mother finished work at the district courthouse where she worked as a clerk. 

Once a week we’d drive the seemingly endless ride for pizza at Papa Gino’s. It was like a sea of trees for miles, until they broke for a small plaza. She showed me the art of Italian pizza love. She ordered a cheese pizza to share. She grabbed extra napkins, salt, red and black pepper, and cheese. We sat by the window so she could look at her car. Something I now do. I picked up my slice by the thick crust and held the floppy end with my other hand. 

“Oh, don’t do that,” she said, pushing my elbow back onto the Formica table. “You got to dab off that grease.” 

And she began blotting her pizza. I imagined that all the cheese would stick to the paper, but it didn’t. She crumpled the tan napkin now translucent orange in circles, and she dusted the pizza with parmesan cheese--known in our house only as shaky cheese--then added salt and pepper, and speckled the top with red pepper flakes. I had chewed on a sample pepper, and I thought it set my hair on fire. It was delicious but so, so, hot. 

When she was done, her pizza looked like it had a streusel topping.  I followed suit with a little more salt and a little less red pepper than her. She taught me other things that summer. 

She let me tinker beside her when I was tired of reading my Nancy Drews. 

“What’s this for?” I asked, examining a plump, red, stuffed tomato from her sewing box. A thin string attached a strawberry to its top. 

“A pincushion; it holds the pins for easy access.” 

“And this?” I asked squeezing the strawberry.

“What’s it feel like?” 

I fiddled with it some more. “Grit.”

“It’s filled with sand to sharpen and clean the needles and pins.”

“Huh, neat.” 

“And this?” This time I held up a small white rectangle. 

“What’s it smell like?” 

And it smelled like soap, so I asked, “Is it for cleaning the clothes?”

“I rub the thread on it so it passes through the fabric easy.”

“Huh.” And this continued times infinity.

I learned how to sew buttons onto a dishcloth, double-knotting the end with my spit and twirling the end of the thread. 

One night as I practiced my math facts, my grandfather taught me that 8+6 and 6+8 always came to the same answer. I. could. not. believe. it. Seriously. 

“No, sir!” I said and slapped the table indignantly. I was thinking about the time my cousin told me the spoonful of white cream was frosting as I took a mouthful of Crisco. So we examined the phenomenon with pennies from a jar under the sink.

That scene comes to mind when I balance my checkbook or when I’m adding numbers on a rubric for my students. I thought of it when I showed my own children. Almost any time the answer is 14, I think of my grandpa.

He and I went through that pack of flashcards over and over putting the correct ones face down on the table. Leaving me all the hard ones to continue to try. He gave me a tip about the nines table. It’s all ten minus one. I still use that trick because I never really got math and absolutely never got algebra, but at least I can add thanks to him. And soon after I could play cribbage with my father since points are earned by fifteens. Fifteen two; fifteen four, and whatever double runs. 

When my mother came to pick me up, she never stayed long, but she occasionally sat across from my grandpa while Nonna cleaned up the dishes. And then we’d leave with me carrying my candy bar melting in my hand. 

My mother got word that her dad was dying while celebrating my daughter’s third birthday. She and my aunt rushed to the hospital hoping to dissolve the bad blood between them. According to my mother, Nonna had stolen her dad from her and her sisters when he started a new family and had another daughter and a son. I didn’t feel that pain.

I know my grandfather planted vegetables and harvested extra tomatoes for his wife to can and store. Her sauce was delicious. I know they still composted all their scraps, pulled ticks off their dogs nightly during Wheel of Fortune and put them in a jar of alcohol they left on the windowsill in the kitchen. I know Nonna taught me to play Scrabble and Triominoes--two games I currently have in our game closet. 

I know that when my mother needed to crawl home from hundreds of miles away beaten and broken by her third husband they said it was her fault. 

“That’s what you get for marrying a black man,” they’d told her. I don’t think that’s the word they used, but that’s a story for another time.

I know Nonna hugged me at my mother’s wake. I know she told me she loved my mother very much as she squeezed me. I don’t remember her smell. I know that day was a blur. 

But as I eat my favorite pizza--Papa Gino’s plain cheese--I think of my Nonna who lived in the tiny house where she composted scraps and savored her chocolate bars until she passed at the age of 91. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in twelve years since my mother’s wake but in her house on that dirt road, she kept an acrostic poem I wrote about grandparents. My aunt gave it to me when I stood awkwardly near Nonna’s coffin trying to talk with her and my uncle long enough to be polite.

My poem “Walking the Ware River and Wondering Where We Are” relays another view of these family members.

Shadow Eater: A Recollection 

Estimated Release: Spring 2023