I don’t know if you can anticipate the way you will feel at the final leave taking of someone who you love. I can only imagine how Aunt Meggie felt when Uncle Saul passed away… a person who had been part of her life since she was sixteen or seventeen. But Meggie never betrayed the void that entered her life… at least to me.
That’s Meggie. Nothing could slow her down. The “Unsinkable Mollie Brown.” On a day that you were seated at table #5 at so-and-so’s Bar Mitzvah or Wedding, there Meggie would be… smiling. And she would be up for every dance. She danced with men. She danced with women. She danced by herself. She even danced with me!
“Your Father was a great dancer,” she told me as we slow stepped to some nondescript number. This I knew.
“Yes, Dad was amazingly light on his feet for a heavy-set man. Jackie Gleason, Zero Mostel, Lou Costello … and Dad.” I didn’t like to be reminded of this. I didn’t hold it against Dad… it just made me feel clumsy in contrast. I was tempted to tell her that Adolph Hitler was known to be a great dancer, too. Which may have been true; but it seemed a misplaced observation since two dances earlier we had the obligatory group hora, and besides, it would have sounded like I was rejecting a compliment of Dad.
Meggie just danced, and danced. She would take brief pauses at our table. And each time I glanced across the table in her direction I saw one thing, and one thing only. Meggie smiling and mid-flight in some story. If there was a lull in all the activity, looking at Meggie, I would be reminded of Saul and his absence. He would have enjoyed this day, too.
Saul. Now there was a dancer! Everyone said it.
I am reviewing this… and other times and occasions: weddings, family picnics, Thanksgivings & etc. as Meggie and I join the locals one morning to drink fancy coffee and feast on the incredible jelly donuts from the Chatham Bakery on Crowell Rd. Saul and Meggie had purchased a clapboard cottage in Chatham years ago. It was their July and sometime weekend retreat from their Woodbury home. Woodbury was quiet enough; but they sought further distance from Saul’s law practice and Meggie’s 8th grade science class in Bridgeport.
They loved Chatham for its simplicity, removed from the hectic pace of mid-Cape Cod. And yes, today it was more developed; but it was where Meggie settled after retiring from teaching and after Saul had passed away. She sold the house in Woodbury, consolidated the key belongings and moved fully to their vacation retreat. Retired from teaching, yes; but not from living. Meggie volunteered at the Hospital in Hyannis three days a week and once a week she helped at the Chatham Library’s teaching adults to read program.
I loved coming to visit. I loved sharing in the old stories. Many involved my parents, many involved Saul. Those stories soothed my spirit.
Between sips of hazelnut cream I mentioned, “As much as I love visiting you here at the Cape, when I was a kid I loved going up to see you in Woodbury. In the winter you had better snow and in the summer I loved it when Uncle Saul took me on nature walks.”
I smiled at the memory.
“You know, at first I didn’t want to go on them. And then he told me that he knew a place where we might be able to find the living descendants of dinosaurs! That caught my attention; but I told him that I thought they were extinct. And he said that’s what everyone thinks. But they just didn’t know where to look for them. He took out two butterfly nets from the work shed and handed one to me… ‘Gee Uncle Saul, are these big enough? Or are we going to just steal their eggs?'”
Meggie laughed, “I just can imagine Saul taking you on a ‘dinosaur hunt’ with two butterfly nets!” Then she shook her head, got quiet and stared away for a moment as if the memory of Saul touched her on the shoulder. She looked back at me, slapped her lap, “Time to go!” She said that she wanted to pick something up from the market.
“Dinosaur eggs?”
“No,” she laughed, “Mangoes. I want to put up some mango chutney. It’s a recipe that I learned from your Mother… and I saw that the Chatham Village Market had them on special.”
“I don’t remember Mom making it. But as a kid I was a pretty fussy eater. It might have been something that I thought was an adult food. Although I have always been keen on eating mangoes just plain.”
When we got to the market Meggie wasted no time and went straight to the produce side of the store. Displayed prominently was good sized table filled with mangoes sold by the mini-crate. I was grateful that this was going to be a quick in-and-out. But was I ever wrong. Meggie picked up one mango from one of the crates and carefully inspected it. Smelled it, and felt the skin, “I want them to be nearly ripe… you have to be able to smell the fruit. The texture of the skin is critical. There has to be a little give… if it is purely taut, then it has to be kept for a week and I want to make the chutney today or tomorrow. This one is good.”
She picked up another from the crate, “This one isn’t ready yet.” And she put it in different crate. Then she found another she liked, discarded another, discarded another… one was deemed a maybe and this she kept in her hand as a just in case. I am not sure if the other shoppers appreciated Meggie’s diligence. But that was not her concern. She inspected each and everyone of the original dozen or so mangoes in the crate… and by my count only 4 were considered worthy… and 8 mangoes from the other crates had to be located and the various crates had to be adjusted accordingly.
I even got caught up in this pursuit. “How ’bout this one Aunt Meggie? It smells OK to me.”
She shook her head, “I don’t like the colour. There has to be some red or yellow. Those straight green ones don’t make good chutney.”
I think she felt obligated to take one of my selections… which she did. I think she would have been just as happy if I had remained outside the market grabbing some sun. When she said that she had to pick up some Granny Smiths for the recipe, I nearly fainted. The thought of another detailed examination of fruit derailed me. She was quick to notice my pained expression, “Don’t worry Jimmy, the apples aren’t all that important. I am just going to pick up this bag.” What a relief.
When we got back to the cottage it was quickly apparent that I was going to be dragooned into helping to make this chutney. My suggestion was that we just eat them… I even offered to take some home with me.
That was met with a wave of the hand, “if we were just going to eat them then I would have had to make an entirely different selection… mangoes reaching ripeness over a ten day period. That would have taken more time. Here, put on this apron.” Aprons aren’t a favorite of mine. This one had one of those clever captions: Give the Chef a Beer. “It was Saul’s apron… I don’t know why… for some reason I have kept it.”
She set me to peeling, coring and chopping of the apples while she handled the messier task of the mango prep, “So did you ever find dinosaurs with Saul.”
“No. Try as we might. Even though I was a little kid, I knew that we weren’t about to find an undiscovered dinosaur colony in Woodbury. But I pretended that I thought it was a possibility… and Saul pretended it was a possibility, too. So even when we were finding other great stuff, we behaved like it was secondary to our real purpose… finding evidence of living dinosaurs, their descendants… or eggs. One time Uncle Saul asked me, ‘Jimmy, when we find stegosaurus eggs, we’ll take them home and make an omelet. I think one egg should do for the both of us. What do you think?’ I told him that I thought that an omelet was an adult food, and that I like my eggs from chickens and scrambled with a little bit of salt and pepper.”
“Were you scared looking for all the strange stuff?”
“Uncle Saul had a confident tone and it made me feel safe. The first time we went into this field that led to a pond… Saul knew there would be oodles of things of interest… but I was taken by the noise. The sounds of the cicadas and the crickets? It was a noisy racket that I found vaguely scary. I mean you heard these loud sounds, where the hell was it coming from?“
Meggie, done with the mango prep turned her attention to the spice cabinet… granulated sugar, dark brown sugar, black pepper, salt, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, ground cloves, allspice and ground mustard seed were moved to the staging area on the counter. I was given a large onion to peel and chop.
“Uncle Saul looked on the ground near us… left and right. He got real quiet and prepared to drop his butterfly net on something, he motioned me to be still. Still? I was scared shitless! I thought that he had just found a diamondback rattler or something! He pounced, and when he was sure that he had his quarry, he looked at me and smiled.”
Meggie brought her eyes up from the counter, “Dinosaur eggs?”
“I only wish. No, it turned out to be my introduction to the cricket. Not counting Jiminy Cricket, I had never seen one before. This one certainly didn’t look like Jiminy! But Uncle Saul carefully took it out of the net, and held it in his palm so I could have a better look. A black thing… no vest or top hat!”
I peeled and cut three carrots.
“Uncle Saul showed me the cricket, ‘See. It has rear legs that are big like a grasshopper. They can jump, too. Now they don’t sting or bite or bother us at all. But they make that wonderful chirping sound you hear. It’s their song.‘ And he returned the cricket to an open patch of ground so I could see it hop. And the thing stood stock still. I asked how they made that chirp. Uncle Saul smiled and pointed to its big hind legs, ‘He uses those legs for more than jumping… he rubs those legs together to make the chirp!’ Well, I thought that was impressive!”
Meggie brought out her brewing pot, put in all the ingredients, spices… added a cup of raisins and dumped in a quart of apple cider vinegar.
“So I asked Saul, ‘Why do they chirp Uncle Saul?’ And he told me, ‘First you got to know it’s only a guy thing. Lady crickets can’t sing. The males use two different songs. One is to tell the other guys, I’m here! I’m working this block, shove off! And that song also puts the ladies on notice, I’m here! Let me take you home to meet Mom! And then there is the other song they sing… and to the lady crickets it sounds like Frank Sinatra singing I Only Have Eyes For You. See?'”
“Let me take you home to meet Mom? Yeah, that’s pure Saul!” And Meggie laughed and laughed.
“I was hoping to see our cricket give a demonstration of his song, at this point he didn’t even show off his jumping skills, ‘This one doesn’t look like he’s interested in singing?’ Uncle Saul looked at our quiet cricket and told me, ‘If they have a tushie rash they can’t sing… no matter how much they want to take a lady back to meet Mom!”
“Tushie rash? And you believed this?”
“Well, it seemed reasonable given the explanation on how they made their songs. And I knew what a tushie rash felt like, and I knew I would be in no mood to sing either. Besides I was a little kid and thought that Uncle Saul was our family’s designated naturalist. He told me, ‘You know Jimmy, whether a cricket is singing his song to other guys or to the ladies, he sings because he is happy. And it’s a sad day when a cricket stops singing.'”
Meggie finished the preparations for the chutney, covered the pot and put it into the fridge. “There. That should be fine. It develops its full flavours over night, tomorrow I’ll cook it, and put them up into jars. You will have to come back for yours. But here, this is a mango I didn’t use… eat it in three days.”
It might have been Mom’s recipe; but Meggie took possession of it… and anything else that might have pertained to mangoes. I took off the apron and handed it back to Meggie.
“You know… I was watching a program on the Animal Channel and it was about crickets! The part about the chirping coming from the legs is a common misconception. The chirping is actually generated under its forewings. So if they didn’t sing it wasn’t because of a tushie rash… it was more like an underarm rash… which I also know about. Something else, the Emperor of China would keep crickets in bamboo cages for pets. They knew about their songs, too. They knew their songs made for a happy home.”
Meggie smiled at me, looked at the apron, paused for a moment, folded it and put it back in the pantry. “Uncle Saul used to sing I Only Have Eyes For You to me. Uncle Saul could hold a tune… and my, what a dancer he was!”