The Lick of a Spoon

it needs to cook a little longer

The Lick of a Spoon (650 Words)

     When I think of wooden spoons, I think of meatballs and sauce, family gatherings and funerals. Our minds are weird and wonderful things, animate and inanimate objects become more than what they are. Some objects can elicit memories, events, tastes and smells our mind can still see and savor. Wooden Spoons are one such object that does that and a little more.

     One of my first lucid memories is me, as a newly minted six year old, watching my father stirring a large pot filled with sauce and meatballs with a big wooden spoon. I remember family members laughing and eating, especially my father, but those same people were crying and wailing just minutes earlier, when they were upstairs, visiting my grandmother for the last time. My little mind was quite perplexed by this.

     Fifty seven years ago, funeral homes in Brooklyn were run a little different than they are today. Many of them in Brooklyn, or at least in the Italian neighborhoods, had kitchens and dining facilities, where now there are only sitting rooms. The health laws in those days were quite lax. The funeral home played an important part in the social fabric of the neighborhood, being that it was a home for the living, as well as the dead.

     I vaguely remember my grandmother when she was alive but I remember her quite well when she was dead. The image of her lying peacefully in the casket is forever etched in my mind.  This was the first time that I was allowed upstairs to visit and view the dead( in this case my grandmother), rather than being regulated downstairs  where the aroma of sauce and meatballs filled the air, happily oblivious to what lay in the upper chambers.

It was my father who led me upstairs. This was the first time he spoke to me like a person, rather than as a little baby. He told me Grandma was dead, that I needed to say my last goodbyes. He led me to the casket and told me to kiss her on the forehead. I did, it was cold and hard, but it felt right. We both cried. He told me that is was alright to cry and laugh as well, that death was a beginning of a new life. I remember him kissing me on the cheek and leading me back downstairs into the loving arms of my mother. The last memory I have of that day is my mother letting me lick the sauce off that big wooden spoon.

     Every time I see my wife stir a pot of sauce, I insist it be with a wooden spoon, it makes the sauce taste better and makes me fell once again like a six year old.  It’s one of the most cherished memories I have of my father, and believe it or not, my grandmother as well.

     My father was an imposing and quiet man. To the outside world he was a forbidding presence. But to me, he was always that man who led me upstairs to kiss the face of death. He opened up to me that day, as a father to a son, explaining to me in a way that a six year old could understand, about the meaning of life and death, not to be afraid to kiss the dead and to enjoy the living, in all its beauty and ugliness.

     The only image that sticks with me of my grandmother is her lying in that casket. I remember she looked peaceful and was quite beautiful. She looked like a statue made by a master sculptor. I remember kissing her on her forehead and hearing her sigh with pleasure, or at least that’s what I hope she did.

The wooden spoon will always have a place in my heart; it taught me that sauce is delicious and that the dead can speak…